Raise the Hammer

Has anybody really sat down and taken a look at what it would take to get Ivor Wynne up to the standards needed to make the TiCats profitable, if that's possible at all? I keep coming back to the fact that it's really the only location that is

1) in the lower city and accessible to transit, which seems to be the city's big must-have.

2) has parking (assuming Scott Park is expendable in its current semi-abandoned state) and accessibility to the expressways and other major thoroughfares.

I mean yes, we know the problems with Ivor Wynne. It has uncomfortable seats, it's crammed in the middle of a residential area, and has no parking.

But a hundred million dollars is a lot of money. It can buy a lot of seats. It can build a lot of parking on an old school grounds. In a pinch, it can buy up a city block of houses in a depressed area.

Has Ivor Wynne really been measured? Is it entirely an emotional problem? After all, the cats obviously need to re-invent themselves to be profitable... a renovated stadium isn't enough of a "reinvention" to get new fans since old no-shows will still think of them as "the Cats at IW"?

@Brandon

I think Young has always been diplomatic when he discards the WH parking, because he doesn't want to say the actual problem: he needs to get more suburbanites into his stadium, he needs to charge more money.

Suburbanites want a stadium that looks and works like a trip to a theme park - you drive along the expressway, get off at the offramp that says "Nabsico Stadium" drive into the parking lot, pay your parking, and walk into the stadium that looms over the lot. They want it work like going to Costco, but with paid parking. Just like it works back home in Burlington, Mississauga, Stoney Creek mountain, etc.

They're not going to stand for driving through Hamilton, hunting for a parking lot staffed by a sketchy guy with a pricing system that you can't figure out (wait, if it's $6 maximum for all day, and $3 for evenings, and I parked for 3 hours, how are you charging me $7.50? Just because I crossed the 6pm threshold?) and so on. He wants to just offer them a nice, safe package.

Because he needs them. They pay more. And his team will go broke if they can't find a way to get people to pay more.

Young can provide the needed experience at EM. He can provide it at Longwood, but he'll have to charge through the nose for parking because it'll be a small lot and he's got to tweak the supply/demand curve to keep the lot getting sold out too fast and scaring off the folks who'd rather just pay for parking than go hunting for it.

He could probably provide it at Ivor Wynne, but I think that IW's image problem might make that unacceptable.

He can't do it at WH.

Comment edited by Pxtl on 2010-10-13 14:48:12