Fiserv hockey event can build on success
The inaugural Kwik Trip Holiday Face-Off – the first real hockey at Fiserv Forum and return of the Division I game to Milwaukee – has been a success.*
Note the asterisk. Its importance can't be overstated.
“We feel like given the environment and what we've seen around the rest of the country recently, with bowl games and basketball games and NFL games, it was really important to feel like we got started,” Rick Giles, president of event organizer The Gazelle Group, said before the third-place game Wednesday.
“As we're trying to attract and recruit teams, we have to be able to point to something. Now we can do that. Two days ago we couldn't do that, and another cancellation would have been hard, a postponement would have been hard.
“We feel really good about our results, given the circumstances.”
The event originally was scheduled for 2020 but postponed a year due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Attendance for the semifinals Tuesday and the two games Wednesday lagged well below the heyday of the Badger Hockey Showdown in the early 1990s, but that event at the Bradley Center ran its course in 2002. Overall, FaceOff turnout presumably was hurt by the uncertainty surrounding the current wave of COVID-19, and on Tuesday the forecast of nasty weather kept some Wisconsin fans – including friends of Wisconsin coach Tony Granato – in Madison.
But those who turned out were appreciative and engaged. The teams – Wisconsin and Providence, which met in the final, and their semifinal opponents Bowling Green and Yale – seemed to enjoy the experience. Kwik-Trip and other sponsors seemed happy, Giles said. And television coverage reached such unlikely places as Arizona and Louisiana via Bally's regional sports networks.
“In order for this to be successful long term, we need more fans in the building, we need more sponsorship support, because we're in the business of this,” Giles said. “But in order to get to that second step, you've got to get through that first step, and now we've got something to point to for sponsors, people that we were talking to who were maybe scared by COVID or how's this thing going to go, hockey in Milwaukee? They don't remember the Badger Showdown or Wisconsin winning the national championship.”
Gazelle, a New Jersey-based marketing firm that puts on a handful of college basketball showcases, has a three-year contract with Fiserv Forum for the FaceOff. Wisconsin is committed for all three years.
The dates – which conflict with the Junior World Hockey Championships and some college football bowl games – could change in the future, Giles said. Tweaks to the seating arrangements and ticket price options are possible, too.
Although events of this type have waned in number and popularity, as the Badger Showdown did, participating programs find them useful. Wisconsin had the opportunity to play teams from the ECAC and Hockey East, for example, and Providence played opponents from the Big Ten and CCHA.
“It also puts you in a setting where there's a championship on the line,” Providence associate head coach Ron Rolston said after his team's semifinal victory. “So you're playing one-game scenarios, just like you would later in the playoffs in your league or if you make it to the NCAA tournament. The NCAA tournament you're playing one-game shots against teams from other conferences. So these tournaments allow you to do that, a one-game scenario, an opportunity to win a championship.
“The downside of it if there is one, the travel portion of it and having the team play like they normally do in the first half of the season coming off a break like that.”
But that would happen somewhere, somehow after the finals and holiday break, whether a team was in a showcase on limited practice or in a weekend series with a conference opponent.
Wisconsin's Granato has been a cheerleader from the time the event was announced.
“We play 40 games, so every one should be special in some way, shape or form,” Granato said. “To be able to come back in this tournament – our guys, I think a few of them were born; I don't think any of them remember the tournament in Milwaukee, so for them it's something new. But … they've heard about it, and knew how important it was to our program, how important it is for this community here, which supports Badger athletics across the board in special ways. They took it upon themselves to get ready to play.
“So it is big. Bigger than just another game. Like I said coming out, we're trying to win a championship. That's how you build confidence in your team, that's how you build momentum in your team, that's how you grow as a player is winning games (that have something) on the line. The games are there; you step up and do the right things.”