Culture Change

Culture Change
Just as a refresher to those of you who did not read my blog from a couple few ago, I did my community blog on the Mount Royal Cougars Hockey community, as I am one of the key staff members on game days.
I know we are supposed to discuss the main priorities but we decided there is one pressing issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible and that is fan support. I realise, that in a city of just under a million people, who has three major league sports team (the Flames, Stampeders and Roughnecks) and a Major Junior Hockey team (Hitmen), it can be difficult to entice fans to support college hockey. (Notice how I said difficult and not impossible). As a whole, our staff members believe that there are significant areas that could improve that would bring in more fan support.

Some of these ideas include: sponsorship, advertizing and creating atmosphere. Sponsorship is easy enough to justify. The more sponsors, the more money you bring in. Ticket sales for college hockey are not enough to cover the costs of running the event, and I don’t think that even a spike in attendance would be able to support the costs so turning to sponsorship makes sense. In Grande Prairie, the Junior ‘A’ team has over 1 million dollars in advertizing within their rink and that is solely banners, boards and ice logos. I’m not saying we go that far, because there are some ethical implications since we are a educational institution et cetera et cetera but we live in Corporate Calgary, this place is a sponsorship gold mine of sorts. Game sponsors instead of the regular old sponsorship could bring in fans from companies around Calgary, which would create excitement for Cougar Hockey outside of the existing community.
 Advertizing relates less to students and more to the surrounding community as they are an untapped resource at this point. We believe that sending out e-mail through MRU could help bring students to games because a lot of people forget that Hockey is not on campus. We also think that compared to the major sports teams in town, we are a bargain for the quality of hockey you are able to watch. Make this a family atmosphere and people will come.   

Creating atmosphere is a little harder to do but it ties into the sponsorship idea. If a sponsor decides to associate their name with a game, than intermissions could be used to further promote their company. One of the most creative ways I’ve seen this used is a Marine Sport Company was the game sponsor and they brought 4 big tubes out onto the ice and made four crowd members play musical chairs with the tubes! It was enjoyable to watch and to participate in! Perfect, clean, family fun. The thing about these ideas is that the people who are impacted most, are the game day staff and we are the ones trying to drive the change.  We are willing to commit to extra work to make this community an even bigger success.

Who needs to be involved in this discussion, well, to tell you the truth, I think we need to go even further than our direct boss (Kimmo) and move towards the head of Athletics and that entire department. We need a culture change so that we can development this stagnant community. Current sponsors should be stakeholders as well as students,  members of the community, Booster club members and even alumni.
The process, to me at least, seems simple. Communicate this belief to whoever will listen within the university and don’t be discouraged. From there, our passion for the game and determination to create a stronger community, will get us the rest of the way. I know this sounds idealistic but, a girl can dream right?