BleedGopher
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per The Athletic:
The hockey program has enjoyed a healthy fanbase for decades, and with it, the athletic department budget benefitted, with men’s hockey leading all NCAA hockey programs in revenue. Announced attendance at Mariucci Arena has historically hovered near its capacity of 10,000 and men’s hockey revenues peaked at $7.683 million in 2013-14. The Gophers brought in $6.230 million in 2015-16 and the second highest revenue producer in college hockey that year was Wisconsin at $4.796 million.
It’s obvious this season that attendance at 3M Arena at Mariucci has declined, as empty seats stand out in the bright bowl of the arena on television and marketing staff deal with a season-ticket-holder base that’s declined by 30 percent from 7,765 to 5,474, with ticketing staff routinely seeing 30 percent of distributed tickets go unused.
The actual attendance for this season's Oct. 15 game against Penn State was 4,917, the lowest number in the building for any regular-season game in the last four years. The scanned number for Wisconsin on Dec. 2 was 6,407, the lowest it has been for a rivalry game in the last four years. This is also the first season since moving into their new arena that there have been announced attendance numbers under 9,000.
“It’s not other people’s problems that people aren’t coming to our games,” Coyle said. “It’s on us to figure out how to get people to come to our games, and there’s no doubt that it’s a concern for us that we’ve got to figure out.”
The phrase tossed around the new Athlete Village offices in 2018 was coined by Gophers football coach P.J. Fleck. It states you can’t give anyone a reason to cut you. There were certainly a couple reasons to cut Gopher hockey handed out over the past couple seasons, including reseating their ticket holders based on donation history priority and increased ticket costs tied to mandatory scholarship seating donations.
The biggest complaint maroon and gold fans voice is the loss of their rivals after a conference move from the WCHA to the Big Ten. The realignment of college hockey not only meant Minnesota wouldn’t get to play Minnesota Duluth, North Dakota and Minnesota State as often, but they’d be forced to add four conference games each with Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State. The Gophers won league titles during the last two years of the WCHA and the first four years of the Big Ten, but that couldn’t stop a decline in ticket usage from 7,827 attending games in 2014-15 to 7,139 in 2015-16 to 7,063 in 2016-17 and 6,106 this season, which is up from under 6,000 after a late-January visit from No. 1 Notre Dame brought easily the largest two-game crowd of the season.
Gophers head coach Don Lucia often gets fans coming up to him to gripe about missing the old WCHA, but to him the old WCHA he played in actually included many of the teams that now make up the new conference — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Michigan State, and Notre Dame. He remembers that league as the one that Minnesota battled through towards its first three NCAA championships in 1974, 1976 and 1979.
“For me, the narrative has to change because from Day 1 it’s been the negative of the Big Ten,” Lucia said. “Hey, we can go back and say Minnesota was not a proponent of Big Ten hockey — we were perfectly fine in our little world. It would have been great if Penn State would’ve joined the CCHA, they had 12, we had 12 and life moved on, but that’s not what happened. We are a member of the Big Ten, and so the change happened.”
https://theathletic.com/222834/2018...on-lucia-ncaa-tournament-mariucci-mark-coyle/
Go Gophers!!
The hockey program has enjoyed a healthy fanbase for decades, and with it, the athletic department budget benefitted, with men’s hockey leading all NCAA hockey programs in revenue. Announced attendance at Mariucci Arena has historically hovered near its capacity of 10,000 and men’s hockey revenues peaked at $7.683 million in 2013-14. The Gophers brought in $6.230 million in 2015-16 and the second highest revenue producer in college hockey that year was Wisconsin at $4.796 million.
It’s obvious this season that attendance at 3M Arena at Mariucci has declined, as empty seats stand out in the bright bowl of the arena on television and marketing staff deal with a season-ticket-holder base that’s declined by 30 percent from 7,765 to 5,474, with ticketing staff routinely seeing 30 percent of distributed tickets go unused.
The actual attendance for this season's Oct. 15 game against Penn State was 4,917, the lowest number in the building for any regular-season game in the last four years. The scanned number for Wisconsin on Dec. 2 was 6,407, the lowest it has been for a rivalry game in the last four years. This is also the first season since moving into their new arena that there have been announced attendance numbers under 9,000.
“It’s not other people’s problems that people aren’t coming to our games,” Coyle said. “It’s on us to figure out how to get people to come to our games, and there’s no doubt that it’s a concern for us that we’ve got to figure out.”
The phrase tossed around the new Athlete Village offices in 2018 was coined by Gophers football coach P.J. Fleck. It states you can’t give anyone a reason to cut you. There were certainly a couple reasons to cut Gopher hockey handed out over the past couple seasons, including reseating their ticket holders based on donation history priority and increased ticket costs tied to mandatory scholarship seating donations.
The biggest complaint maroon and gold fans voice is the loss of their rivals after a conference move from the WCHA to the Big Ten. The realignment of college hockey not only meant Minnesota wouldn’t get to play Minnesota Duluth, North Dakota and Minnesota State as often, but they’d be forced to add four conference games each with Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State. The Gophers won league titles during the last two years of the WCHA and the first four years of the Big Ten, but that couldn’t stop a decline in ticket usage from 7,827 attending games in 2014-15 to 7,139 in 2015-16 to 7,063 in 2016-17 and 6,106 this season, which is up from under 6,000 after a late-January visit from No. 1 Notre Dame brought easily the largest two-game crowd of the season.
Gophers head coach Don Lucia often gets fans coming up to him to gripe about missing the old WCHA, but to him the old WCHA he played in actually included many of the teams that now make up the new conference — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Michigan State, and Notre Dame. He remembers that league as the one that Minnesota battled through towards its first three NCAA championships in 1974, 1976 and 1979.
“For me, the narrative has to change because from Day 1 it’s been the negative of the Big Ten,” Lucia said. “Hey, we can go back and say Minnesota was not a proponent of Big Ten hockey — we were perfectly fine in our little world. It would have been great if Penn State would’ve joined the CCHA, they had 12, we had 12 and life moved on, but that’s not what happened. We are a member of the Big Ten, and so the change happened.”
https://theathletic.com/222834/2018...on-lucia-ncaa-tournament-mariucci-mark-coyle/
Go Gophers!!
