The Syracuse Crunch return to the ice this weekend for the first time with fans in the stands since February of 2020. There was a time, though, when the idea of Crunch fans in Upstate Medical University Arena seemed far fetched.
In March of 2020, Vance Lederman, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the Crunch, was traveling to Florida on a team-sponsored trip with arena suite holders.
“It was Thursday the 12th, we had about seven or eight corporate shareholders going down [to Tampa with us], and we had kind of heard some rumblings,” Lederman said of the possibility of COVID shutting down AHL games. “…we had heard the [Crunch] game [the following night] could be possibly be canceled.”
The March 13, 2020 contest versus Rochester was canceled, along with every game after mid-March in the 2019-20 season.
“We all thought when this went down it was going to be short lived,” said Lederman. “Nobody thought it was going to be 19 months and we’re still in this.”
Soon after the shutdown, Lederman and the rest of the executive staff started to prepare for no fans, and potentially no games, for an extended period.
“At one point, we knew it was going to last a lot longer. Then, we kind of went into survival mode,” said Lederman. “We thought about different ways we could create revenue that we had not done before.”
This included a more aggressive online advertising strategy and a new TV deal.
“We really ramped up [online sales] by basically…selling anything that is not nailed to the floor,” Lederman said. “…we sold everything, if it was there we solid it and it’s amazing what people will pay for. It probably increased our revenue in a bunch of months by five or six hundred percent.”
These increases in efficiency and profitability leads Lederman to believe that the Crunch are set up better for the long-term now than they were before the pandemic.
The Syracuse Crunch play the Utica Comets at 5 p.m. on October 9 at Upstate Medical University Arena.
