Goodbye, 'Gades

Tuesday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch brought the sad news that the Renegades hockey team would be suspending operations, most likely to result in the team permanently closing up shop. The Renegades played here for 13 years, starting when I was in sixth grade. I learned to love hockey from going to these games as a kid, watching players like Kirby Lindal, Scott Gruhl, and Jamie McLennan.

On Wednesday, the RT-D’s Paul Woody piled on with a column doubting the potential success of any future minor-league sports endeavor in Richmond. The column isn’t worthy of a point-by-point fisking, but even though I’m not extremely fond of Richmond myself, I feel like I should step in and defend my hometown against some pretty cheap shots and incorrect conclusions.

Woody argues that the Renegades were essentially done in by Richmond as a whole.

“If you’re not the Richmond Braves or Richmond Kickers, this is one tough place to run a minor-league team. It’s easy to point to the Coliseum as the culprit in the Renegades affair, too easy in fact. … Minor-league sports are a tough sell here. The population base is relatively small, and the competition for a family’s entertainment dollar and time is fierce.”

I can give him some credit on the first point. The R-Braves are an exceptionally well-run organization, and the Kickers’ success is very much intertwined with their development of a Richmond-wide youth soccer organization uniting various local leagues that had spent much of their time and energy sniping at one another. Both organizations are excellent examples of how to run a minor-league franchise.

The Coliseum I’m less inclined to agree with him on, though. The VCU basketball team left the Coliseum three years ago in favor of a new on-campus arena, and ever since, management group SMG has squeezed the ‘Gades out of every buck it could and hosed them on dates when it couldn’t, instead of being more flexible with its only remaining anchor tenant.
For example, the Gades spent almost the entire month of March on the road (until the 29th and 30th) in what became their final season, and, unsurprisingly, finished just out of the playoff race. Sometimes it’s nice to have a home crowd cheering for you.

The Coliseum area is not the nicest place to be, and it isn’t cheap either. 6th Street Marketplace fell apart years ago, and Friday Cheers moved away from Festival Park in 2000, leaving the Coliseum in essentially an urban wasteland backed up to the Jackson Ward ghetto. The parking garages on either side of the Coliseum have more than doubled event parking fees in the past three years, going as high as $7.50/game. Then, just for a final blow, the City Council levied a $1/ticket tax on Coliseum ticket starting last summer; the Renegades lobbied strenuously against the measure, knowing that yet another ticket price increase would further depress attendance, but the City’s cash-grabbers wouldn’t budge.

Woody uses the International Basketball League’s Richmond Rhythm as a counter-example, pointing out that a move to VCU’s Siegel Center didn’t help them. There are three problems with that: the Rhythm was an extremely low-budget operation competing with three different colleges (plus the ACC on TV) for basketball fans, the Siegel Center is not extremely comfortable itself (it’s a multi-purpose gym with bleacher seats that pull out from the walls for spectator events), and the Siegel Center surroundings are almost as bad as those near the Coliseum. He mentions that people will come to the Coliseum area for “major league” events; well, sure. But people don’t like getting financially hosed on a regular basis, and when the incidental costs for attending a Renegades game rival those for attending a Washington Capitals NHL game, the Gades are going to be in trouble.

Richmond isn’t exactly a small market for the ECHL, with about 900,000 people in the Richmond-Petersburg MSA. The teams in Lafayette, Louisiana, Peoria, Illinois, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania would love to have our population base.

I think his biggest fault is that he discounts a couple of fundamental problems with the ECHL that contributed to the Renegades’ death, and that, in my estimation, will probably bring the entire league down within the next five years.

• Geographic overstretch — when the Renegades joined the league, the southernmost teams in the league were Greensboro and Winston-Salem; Louisville was farthest west and Erie, PA was farthest north. This year, the league stretched from Louisiana and Florida to New Jersey and Illinois. Next year, the league will add Beaumont, TX; the year after that, it will fold in 6 teams from the old West Coast Hockey League, including Anchorage, Alaska. Travel costs have gone way up since the Gades joined, and they won’t be dropping any time soon.
• Unionization — the Professional Hockey Players Association began representing ECHL players in 1995 or 1996, and salary costs immediately shot up. The Renegades started losing money about this time. Coincidence? You make the call. Of course, since lots of journalists are unionized…

I hope we get another hockey team, whether at the Coliseum or the proposed new 7,500-seat arena near Brandermill in Chesterfield County. (Next season, I’ll probably have to go to Washington or Raleigh if I want to see a game.) What bothers me most about Woody’s column is that he goes past analysis and tries to convince anyone optimistic about minor-league sports here not to bother with us.