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A True Team Effort
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BNH
6/1/2000
By: BNH
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Being the right-thinking, red-blooded Americans we are, we love sports. We like to play them, and we like to watch them.
With professional baseball, a new minor-league hockey team, top-flight women's professional tennis and mid-major collegiate sports offerings, New Haven today has more to offer the sports buff than at any time in its recent history.
Yet the Elm City's hold on its sports offerings is tenuous. Lacking the prospect of a new ballpark, the Ravens seek greener pastures, and might already be in Springfield, Mass. had that city mustered the political will to build its own field of dreams. The American Hockey League Beast of New Haven couldn't make a sufficient go of it here to meet the financial demands of prospective NHL affiliates. And don't forget that the Pilot Pen tennis event is but the vestigial remains of the ambitious ATP men's event that failed here.
What seems to be the problem here, and how is it that Bridgeport is able to craft such success with its three-year-old ballpark and non-Major League-affiliated baseball club?
Part of the answer is facilities - including the long-unloved New Haven Coliseum and the apparently revenue-unfriendly Yale Field - and part of it is in marketing, as in the failure of the Pilot Pen folks to forge regional "ownership" of the tennis events.
A major step toward improving the latter took place earlier in May when the baseball, hockey and tennis entities joined forces with Yale football in a joint marketing effort - the first of many, they say.
The initial effort involves selling a single pass entitling the holder to admission to all four attractions. A more significant component of the alliance is sharing mailing lists so that, for instance, the hockey team can talk to tennis fans.
Nominally, at least, these entities are competing for the relatively inelastic pool of discretionary entertainment dollars in the market. But they have come to recognize - wisely, in our view - that the sum of the whole of the sports/entertainment marketplace in greater New Haven may indeed exceed the sum of the parts. And if the region is to grow this industry, fledgling alliances such as Team New Haven are a welcome and wise initial step.
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