Big Thanksgiving crowds boost budgets
There was a point Wednesday night when Newtown athletic director Matt Memoli looked around Blue and Gold Stadium, then at his principal, who like him was working crowd control for the Thanksgiving Eve football game against Masuk.
“We’ve both been there about five years, and we said to ourselves we’d never seen this many people in the stands,” Memoli said.
Having football players back on the field after a year off, having their family and friends and the community back in the stands: That’s what’s most important to athletic directors around the region, obviously, reclaiming a little bit of normal.
When those crowds pay admissions and provide money for athletic departments to operate, it’s a nice bonus. A good Thanksgiving crowd helps pay for officials, security, those working the gate and other expenses.
And it’s a crowd that didn’t happen last year, when the CIAC didn’t sanction a tackle football season.
“It’s tough in a sense. The money, you’d hope to be able to earmark toward certain capital products, ‘big-ticket’ items,” Norwalk
athletic director Doug Marchetti said. “We weren’t able to use that.
“So to have some revenue coming in this year is a plus.”
Revenue also helps keep subvarsity teams on the field, he said; varsity games have to happen one way or another, but if there’s more money coming in, it’s a little easier to add an extra junior-varsity game.
“We’ve been thrilled with the crowds we’ve had this year at all our contests,” Marchetti said. The Bears hosted Thursday morning’s win over McMahon and also hosted the FCIAC boys soccer championship game, which Norwalk
won.
“We sold over 2,000 tickets for the Thanksgiving game,” Marchetti said. “We had roughly the same number at the FCIAC game, though we don’t get the money for the FCIAC game.
“Our parents club runs the concessions. It’s a windfall for them,” supporting scholarships and other efforts, Marchetti said.
Last fall and winter, schools played shorter schedules than usual in sports other than football with no state tournaments and limited conference tournaments. Crowds weren’t allowed in many cases or were sharply lim
ited.
“The FCIAC, it really affected us losing the gate. We were still running championships, which cost us money, but we didn’t have the gates,” Fairfield Warde athletic director and FCIAC commissioner Dave Schulz said last week.
“From a school standpoint, we lost the gate, but we didn’t have as many contests: no officials, no buses to pay for. It’s a great thing to have crowds again.”
For Fairfield Ludlowe’s victory at Warde on Thursday morning, admission was $5 for everyone; keep it simple, Schulz said, no making change with singles at the gate.
For a similar reason, Marchetti said Norwalk charged $5 for adults, whether online or at the gate, while students were $3 online in advance or $5 cash at the gate. Marchetti said Norwalk sold 1,150 tickets online.
Like many local rivalries, Hand and Guilford split the receipts for their annual finale, Hand athletic director Craig Semple said last week before his school’s Tigers won.
“Thanksgiving is usually one of our biggest gates,” Semple said. “Not having football of course hurt our bottom line for the little extras. But we also did not have the bigger expenses we normally have that are associated with the costs of running events.”
The Green Bowl is held annually at Hamden High School. It drew over 2,000 this year.
“It’s great to have the facility to be able to do so,” Hamden athletic director Tom Dyer said last week before his team defeated Notre Dame-West Haven, earning a Class LL playoff spot for the first time in 13 years.
“I think any time you have a big game, it’s like a community event. It draws a lot of attention. At the
same time, it increases the staff you need when you have an event like that so everything is covered. That’s why you see some schools increase their (admission) prices (for Thanksgiving Day games).”
Memoli estimated the crowd at Newtown around 3,500 for Masuk’s lastseconds, playoff-clinching victory. Tickets were $5 with senior citizens free of charge; the school had some online sales, but not as much as Memoli hoped. The admissions line snaked so long at one point that he had to help out at the gate and break the line in two: those paying cash and those who’d bought online.
There was no charge Thursday morning at Boyle Stadium for the StamfordWesthill game, which drew a nice crowd despite both teams coming in winless; Stamford earned the victory. Stamford athletic director Chris Passamano said last week that any gate receipts go straight to the city.
West Haven charged $6 for adults and $3 for students for Wednesday night’s game against Fairfield Prep, won by the Jesuits to help them earn the top seed in Class LL. About 75 percent of the sale was online, West Haven athletic director Joe Morrell said.
“The Thanksgiving game helps pay a lot of bills,” Morrell said. “It definitely helps. Again, it was nice to have the kids back. That’s what everybody missed.”
Favorable weather helped this year: Wednesday night was cold but clear, and Thursday turned into a sunny 50-degree fall day by afternoon. Crowds roared again. And the state made it through the football regular season.
“The gate is important, and the gate is nice,” Schulz said, “but the game is what matters.”