Off-Season & Events Playbooks

Most clubs at this level go quiet the week after the last home game and wake up again at training camp. The playbooks in this family are about the months in between, which are not dead time. They are the cheapest audience building you will ever do, and the only stretch of the year when your building is free.

What to Do in the Off-Season is the overview: what to keep running, what to build, and how to reach September with a larger and better understood list than the one you finished the season with. The Junior Hockey Revenue Calendar is the same argument laid out month by month, September through August, including the months everyone treats as empty. Read the two together and the shape of the year stops looking like a season with a gap after it.

Two of these are about the building itself. Your Building Is a Business makes the case that your club is the best tenant of an asset that sits idle most of the calendar, and that concerts, camps, markets, watch parties and corporate rentals are a second season rather than a favour to the community. The Ballpark Is the Best Corporate Event Venue in Town takes the sharpest version of that: company picnics, client nights and team outings are already being booked somewhere in your market every summer, usually at a banquet hall with worse sightlines and no atmosphere, and almost nobody at your club is selling against it in a systematic way.

Merchandise belongs here for a reason that annoys people the first time they hear it. Your Merch Table Is Only Open 40 Nights a Year is about the fact that the shop is treated as a game night side table while your fans shop every day of the week, and that the people most likely to buy a jersey in July are the ones who already held a ticket in March. Merchandise is one of the five revenue lines for exactly that reason. It is not a separate business, it is a follow up.

What ties this family together is the audience. Group organizers, event bookers, camp parents and shop customers are all people your club can identify, keep and speak to again, which is what makes the off-season worth working. The Sports Hive engine treats them as one list rather than four: households in your market who buy live events, past ticket holders and lapsed accounts brought back up to date, shop customers, and the local businesses that book rooms and buy sponsorship. One audience, one CRM, one dashboard, running all five revenue lines together: single game tickets, season tickets, group sales including corporate events and parties, merchandise, and corporate sponsorship from local to national.

If your building goes dark in April and your marketing goes with it, the diagnosis is where to start. Thirty minutes on your real market and all five lines, before you have paid us anything.