Is the Dallas Stars organization BULLYING locals over ice time!? A new report says so!

Is the Dallas Stars organization BULLYING locals over ice time!? A new report says so!

Hey David, there’s an article that came out recently about an NHL team dominating youth sports in their area. I was curious to know if there are any examples of that in other major sports leagues and what the Marlins ever did with youth sports as well. Thanks. Youth sports, thank you for that question. I know people who work over there with Dallas, so I want to be very careful here because I know they listen to this show. But I want to just get this straight. Are you saying, Koka, is that what this caller is saying right now? That the Dallas Stars now own ice rinks, which is good because you’re trying to promote youth hockey because when you’ve got youth hockey, that means players are either going to become professionals or they’re going to become fans and ticket buyers. That is why you get soccermies. That’s why Major League Baseball does playball.org. You That is why there’s little league involvement and you just are trying to fill your pipeline with customers. Yes. normal, need it. But did I just hear that what the Dallas Stars are being accused of is actually taking those rinks, taking what they’re doing in the community and then trying to build the community and make the rinks way too expensive by jacking up the prices? Have they been accused of bullying local associations and increasing prices of ice time and making just things generally harder on everyone? Is that what I heard? We all know that youth hockey is hugely expensive. Who amongst us has not been to a hockey rink at 2 am because that’s the best way you could get ice time in the cheapest. I certainly was. In high school, we would play hockey and have fun doing it. And yes, it would be the middle of the night because that’s all we could afford. We’d get there and then afterwards go to Mickey D’s. I’ve got to give the Dallas Stars credit here because if that’s a business plan that hey, we’re going to improve youth hockey, we’re gonna get ownership in all the ranks and then we’re gonna make it exclusive and we’re going to make it costly. H what do I think is actually happening? What I think is actually happening is the Dallas Stars are on to something and they’re on to something smart, which is what people are trying to do, and this is companies, including many of your companies, you’re trying to buy a concept all the way from start to finish. Meaning, you’re trying to cut out as many middlemen as possible. If you’re trying to get more people to play youth hockey, you can do equipment drives, you can do equipment giveaways, you can own equipment companies, you can provide equipment, you can sell equipment, you can have websites, you can have leagues, but what’s the next step of that? You have to have places for the leagues to play. Therefore, wouldn’t it be great instead of renting rink time as a league, you own the rink, so you’re then paying yourself, charging yourself, and all of a sudden you’re controlling the supply chain. And if you can control the supply chain and the demand chain, woohoo. You know what that’s called? That’s called regulatory approval problems. That’s called a monopoly. You really shant everything but youth hockey. You think someone’s going to get in the way of that? That is one nothing Dallas Stars or any other team that is able to take over the chain that deeply. Now, do I think it’s nice? Do I think it’s fair? Do I think it’s happening? I’m not positive. But what I do know is the opportunity for financial manipulation, the opportunity for abuse. I’m talking financial obviously, the opportunity for margin creation. That’s done when you own a bigger piece of the pie that goes from A to Z. Why do you think content companies not only want to own content, produce content, but they want to have the talent who’s doing the content? They want to have in-house production. When you outsource things, you are having to give margin to the company that you’re outsourcing to, which increases the price of the underlying job. If you could yourself do something, you get to allocate your overhead over a greater number of things. If you’ve got two employees for the Dallas Stars who in charge are in charge of youth community initiatives and you’re trying to fill the pipeline and you’re trying to help kids because you’re trying to bolster your PR and all the different things you’re trying to do, it is way smarter to be able to do it with rinks. So the article that came out, I admit it. Haven’t seen it. If it is true that they are doing this, it doesn’t make me happy. I understand why they think they can do it because everyone will charge you as much as they can until you stop until you stop paying for it. Do you think that the charge for the rink would continue to go up if the rinks were empty? Now, you may say that’s elitism and that’s only the rich people can play hockey and now that’s terrible. You’re gonna have rich white people only playing hockey. It can’t be that what we want. Well, I got to tell you, when you are an organization trying to figure out how to make money and how to fill your pipeline, you’re far less interested in demographics. Now, me on the other hand, I was in Miami. When you’re in Miami and you know that your demographic is Cuban, your demographic demographic is Latin and you have no choice but to and you want to and I’ll explain why. We loved refurbishing fields. We loved being involved in little league little leagues in South Florida. We loved sending players. We love sending Bidley the Marlin. love sending money, support, all the things to little leagues in South Florida because what we felt is we weren’t sure about where we were drawing from because we had no good attendance whether it’s from Miami or Broward or Palm Beach. But we were sure of one thing that to be a good community partner, we had to and it was critical show the public that we were willing to do all of these things. Why did we think that they grow up to be big leaguers? What are the odds? Did we think they’d grow up to be season ticket holders? We hope so. But given our attendance, what were the odds? The reason why we had to do these things and I enjoyed it. I loved what we did in the community. We did amazing things in the community with amazing people. But when you ask us to spend money, which we did to build fields, to maintain fields, and we gave you the public word, which was, hey, we are doing this out of the goodness of our heart. There was another side to it, and I didn’t talk about it back then, but I can talk about it now. The other side to that is that we were trying to get public money for a ballpark, and we had to agree as part of that ballpark deal to get public money that we would build and refurbish more fields. That’s actually in our deal that each year the Marlins for 38 years of the lease each year the Marlins will refurbish a field in a different district in Miami date. Was I happy to agree to that? Yeah. Were we going to do it anyway? Yeah. But did we have to say at the bargaining table that we weren’t going to do it in order to get something in return for doing it? Yes. That’s just the business side of it. But it doesn’t mean that we charge the public two times the cost when we refurbish a field. It doesn’t mean that we charge the little league two times the cost to play on that field. So I’m not buying into what Dallas did. I don’t know that it’s true because we would never do that. As much as we needed to do things to get public money and to be looked at as a good community partner, there is no chance that we would have done something that would have been so easily discovered that would have made us look so bad when the object was to look good. Even I wouldn’t have gotten in the way of that positive PR by doing something that insane.

#dallas #hockey #nhl

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