HAMPTON ROADS BUSINESSES SUFFERING WITHOUT FOOTBALL
Locals feel impact after colleges cancel sports
NORFOLK — When Old Dominion’s football team is home on a typical fall Saturday, Perfectly Frank on Monarch Way is teeming with blue-and-white-clad fans eager to get their bellies full and root on the Monarchs.
Energetic patrons crowd the counter and fill the dining room tables as others wait to take their places. Tarah Morris and her staff sling hot dogs, burgers, breakfast sandwiches and other items from the restaurant’s diverse menu as pregame excitement builds.
Without a football season this year, Saturday business at Perfectly Frank, opened by Morris and a partner in 2005, is down about 50%. The “pep rally-type spirit” Morris describes for game days is gone, replaced by reduced-capacity seating in light of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
“We usually skyrocket the end of August, and it just isn’t skyrocketing,” said Morris, a former ODU student who became sole owner of Perfectly Frank five years ago when she bought out her partner. “It’s a little bit better than the summer, but we’re definitely not reaching the numbers that we need to.”
As the pandemic continues to hamstring most retail businesses,
Morris isn’t alone. And with ODU, Norfolk State, Hampton University and William & Mary dark for fall football, Saturdays in Hampton Roads aren’t the same for many.
ODU announced in August that, unlike almost every other Football Bowl Subdivision program in the country, it would not have a fall football season. Additionally, athletic director Wood Selig announced late last month that the Monarchs would not play a season in the spring, a notion originally on the table when the fall season was postponed.
Anecdotally, Hampton Roads businesses like Morris’ are suffering as a result. Statistically, though, it’s a little harder to prove. But using a computer program specifically designed to estimate such things, VisitNorfolk president and CEO Kurt Krause tried.
Using factors such as projected attendance and potential parking, foodand-beverage and hotel revenues during an ODU home football weekend, Krause’s program surmised that the Monarchs’ absence alone would have an economic impact of between $100,000 and $300,000 per game week.
For six scheduled home games, at an average of $200,000 per weekend, that’s an impact of $1.2 million on the area.
Krause admits his “economic impact calculator,” previously used only for gatherings like conventions and athletic tournaments, might be inaccurate; it had never been used for a single sporting event.
Thanks to steady leisure travel in recent months, hotel occupancy and revenue has barely been affected in South Hampton Roads, Krause said. Restaurants are the wild card.
“Without having tax revenue knowledge, or some kind of revenue knowledge from the restaurants, you
really don’t know,” Krause said.
Peninsula problems
Across the water, businesses near Hampton University and William & Mary are feeling the pinch.
At the Grey Goose restaurant, whose website touts “the best brunch in downtown Hampton,” manager Caty Hampton no longer sees scores of fans in Pirates gear file in for sweet potato pecan pancakes and mimosa flights.
Business on Saturdays this fall, Hampton said, has been down 15-20% without football.
“We just miss them,” she said, referring to game days. “All the way across the board, downtown Hampton’s just been hit hard.”
So has Williamsburg, where manager Amanda Duche has watched a sea of green-and-gold excitedly shuffle in and out of the Paul’s Deli location near William & Mary’s Zable
Stadium for the past four years.
The restaurant and its sister businesses have maintained steady takeout service since the pandemic hit in March, and they’re operating at half capacity now.
On football Saturdays, the restaurants buzz with hungry anticipation. Now, not so much.
“It has definitely, certainly been different,” Duche said.
According to a Williamsburg City Council document, city hotel occupancy in August was 24.6%, a significant drop from 53% in August 2019. Total room sales took their biggest hit in May, with a drop of more than 90% over last year. They’ve rebounded somewhat, down 63% over last year in August 2020, the most recent month for which statistics are available.
Those numbers, of course, are far more pandemic-related than football-related, but Williamsburg economic development director Michele Mixner DeWitt expects the absence of events like William & Mary’s homecoming and family weekend to have adverse effects.
“There’s no way for us to quantify that impact exactly in our tax revenue,” she said. “But we know there will be an impact with the decline in meals tax and sales tax and room tax for overnight visitors.”
The social effects
Selig disagrees with the numbers generated by Krause’s calculator.
Now in his 35th year as a college athletics administrator, Selig believes the theorized economic impact falls well short of reality.
“That seems ridiculously low, because you can walk around our tailgates and count up $200,000 in food and beverages, just on backs of SUVs and tables and tents,” he said. “So I’d be very dubious of the accuracy of that number. I would say it’s grossly understated.”
At the Springhill Suites, a Marriott property that sits across from S.B. Ballard Stadium on Hampton Boulevard, general manager Lindsey Janssen’s experience this fall has been consistent with VisitNorfolk’s occupancy numbers.
The hotel, Janssen said, starts getting reservations each year as soon as ODU’s football schedule is released. This year was no different; many of those reservations were canceled, only to be gobbled up by visitors to the area for reasons other than football.
Janssen and her staff take rigorous measures to ensure that the property is clean and safe, including the use of virus-killing chemicals, a special sprayer dispatched on all public areas and guest rooms, limited use of the pool and graband-go breakfasts.
Weekend occupancy has maintained a near-normal rate.
“Leisure travelers are still out there,” Janssen said.
At Perfectly Frank, though, football weekends have been the busiest of each year. Morris would open at 8 a.m. and serve breakfast and beers to a full house all day.
The current phantom Saturdays in the area are perhaps at their cruelest on Monarch Way, where a cherished slice of Americana usually is on full display this time of year.
The economic impact is one thing. The social and psychological effects are just as real.
“It’s odd,” said first-year ODU football coach Ricky Rahne, who was hired from Penn State in December but has yet to coach anything but drills and weightlifting. “In my short time being here, I’ve fallen in love with this area and this university, and all of a sudden you go down Monarch Way and there’s really no one there. And when they are there, they kind of grab their food and go on their merry way. There’s not a whole lot of lingering right now, and it’s the same way on campus.”
Selig, whose fall weekends have consisted of attending various sporting events since the mid-1980s, agreed.
“It’s been extremely unusual,” he said. “I’ve never had a fall weekend open in 35 years. I’ve never had a week as unstructured with regard to athletic competition, so it’s been very unusual. It’s been challenging.”
For Morris, the lively crowds at Perfectly Frank on fall Saturdays have been a staple of life.
It’s just one more aspect of normalcy taken by the pandemic.
“It’s usually just a bunch of happy people going to a game,” Morris said. “Sometimes they don’t even make it to the game, and they just stay and continue drinking at Frank’s. So yeah, we’re pretty bummed. We’re pretty devastated.
“We’re missing it. It brings a really cool vibe to the area, and we’re just not getting it this year.”
“We usually skyrocket the end of August, and it just isn’t skyrocketing. It’s a little bit better than the summer, but we’re definitely not reaching the numbers that we need to.”
— Tarah Morris, owner of Perfectly Frank