[Wpg_Guy]

^ They did add some viewing decks last season

Bombers brass stand and deliver to the young'uns
Paul Wiecek By: Paul Wiecek
Posted: 06/16/2017

It’s the question marketers for sports teams have been puzzling about most in recent years:

How do you convince a generation raised by smartphones to have an attention span of 140 characters to sit still for three hours to watch a live sporting event?

The answer — or at least part of it — is to take away their seats and tell them they don’t have to sit at all.

Fans attending Thursday night’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers pre-season game at Investors Group Field were greeted with a new sight this season: The team has ripped out five rows of seats at the top of four sections in the stadium’s north end zone and erected signs promising "Viewing Deck Coming Soon."

Those four viewing decks will join four other new viewing decks the team installed elsewhere on the main concourse over the winter that were fully operational Thursday.

Why would the Bombers rip out more than 800 perfectly good seats from a stadium that's barely four years old and replace them with standing room only?

"There are some people who just want to socialize at games... That’s what the new fan wants in entertainment," Bombers CEO Wade Miller told me Friday morning.

Indeed, it’s all part of the same reason Miller installed five phone-charging stations a couple years ago: because younger people don’t watch sporting events the same way we all used to and teams in desperate need of their dollars will either change with the times or be left with nothing but people with grey hair in the stands (more on that in a moment).

Right now, the unfinished viewing decks in the north end zone consist of nothing more than concrete risers where the seats used to be. The team expects to have railings installed in time for fans to take a stand at the July 7 home-opener.

The eight viewing decks are a solution to a couple of problems that have been self-evident since IGF opened in 2013:

With seating for more than 33,000, the stadium is overbuilt for the Bombers' needs. As well, the concourse generally, but in particular near the Rum Hut in the stadium’s north end, is not nearly big enough to accommodate the crush of fans who would rather stand and socialize during games.

It’s all an acknowledgment of the reality that standing room-only spaces that were once the cheapest and least desirable way to watch a game are now the preferred option for many in a demographic that treats the event more like a social where you meet and mingle with friends than a movie where you’re expected to take your seat and keep it until the final credits run.

Brand-new Mosaic Stadium in Regina has gone all-in on the idea, sectioning off terraces in one end zone that are strictly standing room-only, with capacity for about 1,500.

Think about that for a second: roughly five per cent of the seats in the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ new stadium aren’t seats at all, but just places where people can hang out. If you’d pitched that idea a decade ago — when all the emphasis in stadium building was on creature comforts such as bigger, cushier seats with leather cushions, cherry-wood armrests and cupholders, you’d have been laughed at.

But today, just about every new stadium in baseball and football has sectioned off places to stand for fans who have tickets for a designated seat but in many cases never bother to find it, much less sit in it.

The Bombers, unfortunately, don’t have a stadium built for that reality, as anyone who has ever tried to make their way through the crush of people on the IGF concourses during a game can attest.

If they were building that stadium again today, the concourses would be several metres wider. And, also, surround a playing field built at a different location.

But full credit to the club’s current management — who, it’s worth remembering, had nothing to do with the myriad flaws in the original stadium design; they’re at least trying to be creative in finding ways to make a game-day experience that works for everyone.

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sp...428961203.html

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek