Page 43 - BusinessWest Sept. 29, 2021

Nate Costa has high hopes for the season based on robust season-ticket sales and loyalty among corporate sponsors.
find you don’t have a lot of bad habits that come with those indi- viduals — a lot of them have really good energy, and that’s what’s hap- pened. They’ve energized me and the entire staff.”
As he’s noted in the past, he can look to 2016, the year he and his ownership group brought the team to Springfield a month after the departure of the Falcons, for a blue- print of sorts. While the team has
a new NHL affiliate in the St. Louis Blues, the core front-office group, including all of last year’s depart- ment heads, are back.
“That’s huge because you’re
not really starting from scratch,” he said. “You’ve got institutional knowledge, people who know how to do this. So we’ve got a lot of con- fidence there.”
The team leadership has drawn on that confidence while facing a series of roadblocks and unknowns since shutting down the 2019-20 season early and making the deci- sion to ride out the following sea- son without any gameplay. Even
now, the Delta surge that has brought back mask mandates is one more unexpected wrench in a long line of them.
“It seems like we get hit with something dif- ferent every day,” Costa told BusinessWest. “And you just have to be able to be nimble and pivot. It is what it is. Everyone’s dealing with it — not just us, not just our industry.
“But we’re kind of in the public eye,” he went on, “and our industry is obviously reliant on peo- ple coming together in large groups, and that’s the hardest thing. Even in the summer, [COVID] was moving in a different direction. So we’ve had to pivot and change things even since the sum- mertime. But at the end of the day, we want to get back to doing what we do.”
“Our industry is obviously reliant on people coming together in large groups, and that’s the hardest thing.
One piece of good news is that public sup- port hasn’t wavered. In March 2020, the team had 1,109 full season-ticket holders, the first Springfield hockey team to reach that milestone, he noted; the Falcons had been at 325 before they left town. Right now, the number is 989, and Costa expects that number to easily surpass 1,019 and set a new franchise high. He hopes to set a new attendance mark, too, after the AHL sched- uled 29 of the team’s 38 home games on Friday and Saturday nights.
“People are supporting us, and I think people are ready to come back out and do things and get back to some normalcy,” he said. “And hopefully, we won’t need to wear masks all season.”
Costa supports the city’s mask mandate and said the most visceral opposition to it on social media comes from people who don’t have tickets
dent. “We did our best to get through the year, but we had limited staff on reduced hours, and a lot of our staff had opportunities to get jobs elsewhere.”
With eight newcomers on this year’s front- office staff of 17 — about half the crew — “it’s both challenging and exciting,” he went on. “But I tend to hire young because we like to bring people in and teach them how we do things. We
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