Edmonton sports newcomers thrive at gate while established Elks crowd numbers dive

While football fans might be avoiding Commonwealth Stadium like the plague these days, two other Edmonton summer sports venues are enjoying relatively robust crowds.

And the secret sauce behind what’s attracting spectators to watch a pair of relative newcomers to the city’s sports scene has a tried-and-tested recipe.

Good, old-fashioned promotional efforts are what executives from both baseball’s Edmonton Riverhawks and basketball’s Edmonton Stingers say are helping draw thousands of people to their games this year.

The Riverhawks, who play in baseball’s West Coast League, have been averaging almost 4,000 spectators to their games at ReMax Field, the city’s picturesque river valley venue. Meanwhile, the Stingers, the fifth-year franchise that plays locally in the 5,000-seat indoor arena at the Edmonton Expo Centre, sold out their final three home games of the Canadian Elite Basketball League season after seeing close-to-capacity crowds for many of their dates.

“We really have a hyper focus on the event, and it's not about the game: the last thing that we promote is baseball,” said Steve Hogle, general manager of the Riverhawks, who joined their collegiate summer circuit last year. “We talk about our Bollywood and Bhangra night coming up. We've got a country night coming up … things like that that speak to people on the periphery because it's two-and-a-half hours of baseball. They're not going to sit there and watch baseball the whole time, so we've got things woven in between batters between innings, pre-game and post-game.”

Prior to the 2023 CEBL campaign, a local ownership group took control of the Stingers, who have been pulling out a number of stops as well on the marketing front promoting affordable family fun.

"We just want to make sure we have the best fan experience possible,” said Reed Clarke, president, chief executive officer and one of three owners of the club in the 10-team league. “The free parking, the $5 food menu, the $5 beers, the $20 tickets. We're trying to remove every barrier so people just come and see this amazing professional basketball.”

Baseball fans at RE/MAX Field in Edmonton. (Source: Edmonton Riverhawks)The approach the two teams are taking to attract fans is “completely textbook,” says Dr. Brian Soebbing, a professor at the University of Alberta whose main research interest focuses on strategic behavior of sports and recreational organizations.

“It's great because if you think about their marketing or communications, those people can't control the on-field product. They're not the ones signing players or making the moves in-game, things like that,” Soebbing said. “But their job in a nutshell is to identify their target markets, identify factors to help people get people in the door and have a good, in essence, entertainment product along with the element of sport … The hope is you get people to keep coming back, and it seems like there is something there that's working right."

In the case of the Edmonton Elks, the long-established Canadian Football League club that’s made Commonwealth Stadium its home for 46 years and hasn’t won on its turf in 20 games, Soebbing says the league as a whole has seen its overall attendance trending downward over the last decade.

While the Elks are winless so far this season and drew a noticeably small crowd for Thursday night’s loss to the visiting Hamilton Tiger-Cats – the announced crowd was 21,173 but social-media reports pegged it closer to 10,000 – Soebbing said it’s not necessarily the team’s poor performance that’s keeping fans away.

“If we look at attendance in the CFL, it’s been going down the entire decade since 2012,” he said. “By the best public data we’ve got, it’s a little over (a decline of) 10 per cent across the league. This isn’t necessarily just an Elks problem. This has been the trend in the CFL now for a while.”

Toronto Argonauts Jamal Peters (3) misses the tackle as Edmonton Elks Kevin Brown (4) dives in for the touchdown during first half CFL action in Edmonton, Alta., on Sunday June 25, 2023. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson)It’s not to say the prognosis for the Elks’ future fortunes drawing fans are kaput. Soebbing points to the team’s first home game of the season against the Saskatchewan Roughriders that drew a reported 32,233 fans as a positive sign. Still, the overall attendance trend for professional sports leagues across the continent has been sliding, he said.

"As a whole, even if we move back before the pandemic, it's not just a CFL issue. It is an issue in many North American professional sports: NBA, NHL, MLB, leagues like that,” Soebbing said. “Part of it – and this is probably where the CFL is going to differ from the NHL, MLB – is ticket prices, certainly. Part of it's just other amenities or other things.”

Then there’s the size of the stadium itself. Commonwealth Stadium can hold 55,000 people, more than five times the size of ReMax Field and 10 times the size of the Expo Centre’s arena. That empty feeling in the venue built for the 1978 athletic spectacle Commonwealth Games that was subsequently occupied by the football team takes away from the fan experience, Soebbing said. Having a full-looking house “visually … looks good.”

“When people report that, looking at word of mouth, that’s going to spread, too,” he said “(People will say) ‘Hey, we went to a Stingers game or a Riverhawks game, there were a lot of people there,’ whereas it’s visually a little bit different in Commonwealth just because of the scale.”

with files from CTV News Edmonton's Amanda Anderson, Katie Chamberlain and Galen McDougall