Thanks for sharing the review, that was an interesting take on your experience watching the ICE.
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Originally Posted by DavefromSt.Vital
A far bigger problem is brand recognition. My teenaged son and I were asked by numerous people around town why we were there for the weekend. I always said a Winnipeg Ice game. Every single person responded with with some version of you mean the Jets or their arena. I would respond, no the Winnipeg Ice. Every single person said oh you mean the Moose, and I would say no, the junior hockey team the Winnipeg Ice. The only time I would get through to people was if I mentioned the Brandon Wheat Kings were in the same league. I realize with limited seating capacity there is little upside to going all out in promoting the team, but the word needs to get out to the average person in Winnipeg that there is an actual WHL team in town.
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On the team recognition thing, I feel like the team has wrongly assumed that everyone knows that they are in the WHL, or even what the WHL is. The WHL was gone from Winnipeg for nearly 40 years... people know the Brandon Wheat Kings, but not everyone knows ICE are part of the same league. I feel like they should have started there. So much of their advertising is simply a gameday ad in the Free Press or on an electronic billboard with an ICE logo, a Medicine Hat Tigers logo, "GAME TONIGHT!" and a QR code. That's it. A lot of people will have no idea what any of that is.
I honestly think the assumption was that with Wayne Fleming Arena being so small, they could just open the doors and it would fill right up with hockey fans. It hasn't worked that way. I've been to most of the home games the team has played and it is only a handful that have been truly full houses. It's funny because when the team first moved to Winnipeg, they tried to hype the demand levels by claiming that all the seats were snapped up by season ticket holders... I assumed that I wouldn't be able to get single-game tickets so I pretty well tuned out the team until my kid's team went to a game in November of 2019 and I realized it was not a tough ticket, so I kept going back. Now I'm a season ticket holder. I do see some of the same faces in the stands game after game, but the trouble for the team is that there aren't that many regulars.
In some respects the timing of the move back to Winnipeg was not great. It coincided with a period of extended Jets-mania when the Jets were just a year off of their conference finals run and they still seemed like contenders, and of course the Moose are a well-known brand that appeals to both families and hard-core Jets fans who want to see the prospects. It's a crowded market. Any other time in the 20 years prior to that would have been a better time to move the team here, and that's not even getting into the unfortunate timing of covid. I kind of thought that this current playoff run might get the city into it, but I haven't seen any signs of that happening. The playoff games have just barely sold out, with many tickets available right up until game day. It shouldn't be a struggle to sell 2,000 tickets to a playoff game for a highly successful team, but it is.
It does feel like this team has a very low ceiling in terms of ticket sales and brand recognition in their current venue. I am curious to see what will happen... do they find a way to get an arena built and become a permanent fixture on the local sports scene, or do the owners simply give up and move the team yet again? It's hard to see how they continue to exist for the long term in their current venue.