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HFX Wanderers launch/2019 offseason thread


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10 hours ago, BringBackTheBlizzard said:

Is it safe to assume the other 40% would break in the same 95:5 ratio? There was also the suggestion (I think on Reddit, and which may explain why l interpret this differently) that they were doing a significantly better job of establishing contact through follow-up phone calls than had been happening elsewhere with people who had failed to pick up the phone at the time when their season ticket call had been arranged via email.

It’s never safe to assume, but we aren’t betting the farm on this stuff, just speculating about numbers. I think what O was saying provides a rough and likely conservative estimate, since it was based on known conversion rates on a number of members that had signed up a month ago or so. Presumably between the time that membership number was posted and the start of the season they will entice a few more people to buy. 

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 From what I remember they were said to be aiming for 2000 members at one point, so although they should be very happy and highly encouraged with what they have in season ticket sales from memberships so far it may not be what they were originally hoping for. It's been a while since somebody like David Clanachan has talked about crowds of 6000 to 8000 being the norm and the salary cap is alleged to be lower than initially expected, so I think there has probably been a general downscaling of expectations over the last year or so. What they really need to focus on now is getting the on field quality high enough to attract back single game ticket purchasers. It's easy to get a lot of curious people out to an inaugural home opener. The difficult part is turning them into regular spectators.

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17 hours ago, BringBackTheBlizzard said:

 From what I remember they were said to be aiming for 2000 members at one point, so although they should be very happy and highly encouraged with what they have in season ticket sales from memberships so far it may not be what they were originally hoping for. It's been a while since somebody like David Clanachan has talked about crowds of 6000 to 8000 being the norm and the salary cap is alleged to be lower than initially expected, so I think there has probably been a general downscaling of expectations over the last year or so. What they really need to focus on now is getting the on field quality high enough to attract back single game ticket purchasers. It's easy to get a lot of curious people out to an inaugural home opener. The difficult part is turning them into regular spectators.

@garmc just reported that on Tuesday Derek Martin was saying they are expecting 6000 fans per game. Then you immediately say plans have probably been down scaled from crowds of 6000 because nobody is talking about it. You usually try a bit harder than that BBTB.

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What I was pointing out was that it's a lot easier to reach close to a 6000 capacity consistently on tickets paid, if you have 4000+ season ticket sales already in place from 2000 or so memberships, because single game sales are a lot less dependable.

You only need to look at how FCE and the Fury's crowds fluctuated in recent years based on the time of the year, game time, weather etc to see that. Sometimes there has been almost nobody there and other times the stands are relatively full.

They have no cover so good luck with a weeknight game in the pouring rain in September, if you haven't already made the sale through season tickets. The soccer needs to be very good to motivate people under those sorts of circumstances and it's not even fully clear yet whether they have playoffs to keep most end of season games interesting from a competitive standpoint.

One of the factors that will have helped to shape the cap will have been the membership numbers, which were reasonable in most markets, but lower than they needed to be confident of easily achieving the 6000 to 8000 thing.

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BBTB stressing the soccer needs to be really good angle again?

He is missing the point time and time again. This is about supporter's culture and giving people a local club to call their own. This is about watching local kids fulfill their dreams and play professionally. The soccer needs to serve a purpose for people to come out in the pouring rain. Yes, the quality does matter but if that was the main factor to come and watch, which it won't be, people would just sit at home and watch the EPL. If the quality of soccer was as important as he's making it out to be, TFC would have died after that first home game against the Kansas City Wizards.

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How the crowds will be when the weather is poor is something that concerns me. We get pretty much the same average rainfall (in both volume and total rainy days) as Vancouver does, so it rains here a hell of a lot.

With no roof on the stands, it does make me wonder if people will show up if the weather isn't great.

Edited by garmc
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43 minutes ago, garmc said:

How the crowds will be when the weather is poor is something that concerns me. We get pretty much the same average rainfall (in both volume and total rainy days) as Vancouver does, so it rains here a hell of a lot.

With no roof on the stands, it does make me wonder if people will show up if the weather isn't great.

Does it tend to rain more on Saturdays or Sundays in Halifax? 

I actually do agree that rain is a factor, but also the type of stand the quality of seats. You don't take your kids out to sit in the rain, nor your elderly father.

Just yesterday I was in a small stadium with a stand for a thousand and no rain coverage, thinking of ways you could put up a temporary roof, like a sort of folding awning structure. I have never seen anything like that in a soccer stadium, though I have seen such solutions for sun in tennis stadiums. 

Edited by Unnamed Trialist
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True, but how many people actually do that for this sort of level of soccer in Canada, if there is no cover provided? Reality starts from April onwards, so we will soon have the answers to questions like that.

Having a look at an old CSL programme from a North York Rockets vs Nova Scotia Clippers game I was at in 1991, the Rockets regular season ran from May 26 to September 6 that year and 28 games were squeezed into not much more than three months when the weather tends to be at its most reliable.

Trying to use April, May, September and October is going to push the envelope a bit on what fair weather types will tolerate especially in Alberta, but helps keep most games on weekends which usually works a lot better than weeknights.

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One of The big challenges is how the travel and time zones will affect the training patterns for each team. If Halifax are playing Pacific on a Saturday, then surely they would have to travel on the Thursday at the latest. They will Need a day at least to adjust to the time difference, somewhere to train and do match prep, transport and hotels for 2/3 nights. Quite an expensive road trip. 

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What CSL teams did was play multiple games on road trips with some on weeknights and bus travel between games. That helps keep the expenses down and also takes care of the time adjustment issue. Will be interesting to see how this is handled. I suspect CanPL has high enough budgets to do it one game at a time and try to keep to weekends as much as possible. We'll soon find out.

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14 hours ago, Chris 1976 said:

If you are a true fan of football you come and watch your favourite club every game you can regardless of weather you might get cold, wet or not! 

But if you want a lot of people to come out to games you need more than just “true fans of football” (whatever that means. Probably involves being between 18 and 35 and likely a man). You need fans of other sports that are going to give a game or two a try. Or as has been mentioned the young and the older. I can handle being out in the rain for a game, my wife is less likely to put up with it depending on the degree of rain, and I don’t want to bring my young kids to games in the rain. So on a rainy day my 4 potential tickets sold will go down to 2 or 1, or quite honestly perhaps 0 so that I don’t abandon my family for the afternoon or evening.

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14 hours ago, BringBackTheBlizzard said:

What CSL teams did was play multiple games on road trips with some on weeknights and bus travel between games. That helps keep the expenses down and also takes care of the time adjustment issue. Will be interesting to see how this is handled. I suspect CanPL has high enough budgets to do it one game at a time and try to keep to weekends as much as possible. We'll soon find out.

I'm hoping for some Friday-Sunday matches;  Hamilton-York, Calgary-Edmonton.  Will make for some great road trips, easy for fans.

 

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On 12/21/2018 at 1:01 PM, BringBackTheBlizzard said:

Is it safe to assume the other 40% would break in the same 95:5 ratio? There was also the suggestion (I think on Reddit, and which may explain why l interpret this differently) that they were doing a significantly better job of establishing contact through follow-up phone calls than had been happening elsewhere with people who had failed to pick up the phone at the time when their season ticket call had been arranged via email.

Absolutely. Statistically 672 respondents is an valid sample size to establish a significant result. 

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I suspect you didn't make it past the first sentence before hitting reply, because the rest explained why the remaining 40% may not be directly comparable to the first 60%.

Bottom line is they probably need about 5000 full season ticket equivalents sold to create the demand on single tickets that will make consistent sell outs probable regardless of climate related challenges.

I suspect they may have a capacity in place that is too high for the level of demand in their market to successfully create ongoing ticket scarcity like that, but there are still over three months left to sell more season tickets so time will tell.

Edited by BringBackTheBlizzard
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On 12/24/2018 at 10:52 PM, Winnipeg Fury said:

I'm hoping for some Friday-Sunday matches;  Hamilton-York, Calgary-Edmonton.  Will make for some great road trips, easy for fans.

Always seemed to work better in the CSL era. The only issue at that point is how to handle long weekends. Better to be late on the Monday than middle of the Saturday.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I hope this is true.  We need some sort of scouting department.

The CanPL Hub @thecanplhub 6m6 minutes ago

HFX Wanderers FC have named Victor Mendes as head scout. A former video analyst for the Canadian national team from 2004 to 2012, he will also continue in his role as head coach of the @RMCPaladins. (via @WhigStandard, h/t @edwardhswong) #HFXWanderersFC | #CanPL

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https://www.thewhig.com/sports/local-sports/local-soccer-coach-part-on-new-national-soccer-league

A local soccer coach, with connections to Canada’s national teams, has been hired as the head scout of the Halifax Wanderers of the fledgling Canadian Premier League.

Victor Mendes, the Royal Military College Paladins men’s soccer head coach, will continue his duties at RMC while scouting Canadian players for the Halifax team, one of seven teams from across Canada playing in the league’s inaugural year this spring.

Teams will also be located in Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Victoria, Winnipeg and the York region, north of Toronto.

“It’s a proper league with proper budgets,” Mendes said in an interview on Monday.

One fact about the league that Mendes likes is the league will allow U Sports players to play in the league as long as it doesn’t interfere with classes and the athletes’ U Sports commitment.

“If you sign a developmental contract, you can play during the season,” he said. “They are allowed to sign and play in the professional league under the condition, but come Aug. 15, which is when all [U Sports] training camps start, will be released back to the university and be allowed to play in that fall season.”

The CPL will start with training camps in March and run until late October.

Unlike Major League Soccer, in which Toronto FC, the Vancouver Whitecaps FC and Montreal Impact play and which is run by Americans, the CPL is 100 per cent Canadian-run, Mendes, who has also been a scout for the L.A. Galaxy and Chicago Fire of the MLS, said.

“We need our own professional league to develop players, and the ultimate goal is to make sure we have players playing in Canada that can play for [Team] Canada.”

With Canada being a co-host of the 2026 World Cup and having a participating team, it’s important to develop players who could possibly be on the team, Mendes said.

Each team in the CPL will be allowed seven international players, but the majority of players on each team will be Canadian.

Mendes is looking forward to being part of the growth of the league.

“For me personally, it’s great to be on the ground level of pioneering something that’s new and will hopefully be around for the next 50 years,” he said. “I’m really excited about the league itself because of the young players in Canada.”

Mendes was a standout soccer player at Regiopolis-Notre Dame Catholic High School while growing up in Kingston and went on to play for the St. Lawrence Vikings. He was named a college all-Canadian in 1993 and 1994.

He also played soccer in the second and third divisions in Portugal from 1994 to 1996 and finished up playing with the Ottawa Wizards of the Canadian Professional Soccer League in 2000.

He joined RMC as an assistant coach in 1999 and became head coach in 2003.

As well, he’s been a video analyst for Canada’s men’s and women’s teams from 2004 to 2012 watching more than 150 matches. He also performed the same duties for all of Canada’s youth national teams from 2012 to 2016.

Mendes said he tries to bring back his international experiences to his RMC players.

“I’m in a room all the time with the top coaches in the country or the world and my development is better and my knowledge of the game gets better,” he said.

Mendes is hoping that one day Kingston will get a CPL team.

“Obviously your owner has to have deep pockets, but at the end of the day, Kingston would be perfect for a team like that,” he said.

Kingston had a team, Kingston FC, in the professional Canadian Soccer League from 2012 to 2014. It lost the First Division league final in 2013.

Mendes said that with the thousands of registered soccer players from youth to senior men and women in the area, a fan base for the team is already here.

“That would be a goal over the next five years, to bring a team here,” he said.

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8 hours ago, DigzTFC said:

Mendes is hoping that one day Kingston will get a CPL team.

“Obviously your owner has to have deep pockets, but at the end of the day, Kingston would be perfect for a team like that,” he said.

Kingston had a team, Kingston FC, in the professional Canadian Soccer League from 2012 to 2014. It lost the First Division league final in 2013.

Mendes said that with the thousands of registered soccer players from youth to senior men and women in the area, a fan base for the team is already here.

“That would be a goal over the next five years, to bring a team here,” he said.

Well, as much as I love Halifax I am officially switching allegiance to Fort Cataraqui FC or whatever the Hell they pick as a name (Please God, not Kingston FC - ANYTHING but that)

But honestly, given his track record he's going to dig up some real gems of players for Halifax. 

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