ALEXANDRIA BAY, N.Y. ”“ From the ice arena off the state highway that is home to her startup business, Nicole Kirnan Hall can see the southern Ontario shore across the St. Lawrence River. The Canadian province is “a hockey hotbed,” she said, a source of potential fans and smooth-skating players.
It”™s one of four regional markets she identified in a business plan conceived in Westchester County and applied this winter to her risky enterprise on New York”™s northern border.
At 31, Hall is sole owner of the Thousand Islands Privateers, one of six teams in the new Federal Hockey League, an independent professional league whose level of play and regional customer base Hall compares to the class-A New York-Penn League of minor league baseball. Hall, a former winning head coach of women”™s hockey at Manhattanville College in Purchase, employs an office staff of seven and pays salaries and seasonal lodging for 17 players in Alexandria Bay, a summer tourist village, on a $300,000 team budget.
The league”™s player salary cap is $6,000 ”“ with a $3,000 minimum ”“ for a 60-game regular season that takes the Privateers on bus trips to games against the Danbury Whalers in Connecticut and New York Aviators in Brooklyn. The closest opponent, the Akwesasne Warriors team, plays on the Mohawk Nation reservation that straddles the U.S.-Canada border near Massena on the St. Lawrence.
Hall brings education, background
Hall brings both passion for the sport and academically honed marketing and management science to a business that has her working 16 to 18 hours a day. She commutes 90 miles from her suburban Syracuse home to an office in a riverside resort”™s barnlike recreation center, where the team rents ”“ and has not yet come close to filling – an ice rink that can seat 3,500 spectators.
Raised in a family of hockey players, coaches and team owners, Hall is the daughter of the Federal Hockey League”™s founding commissioner, Donald Kirnan, president of Kirnan Management Inc., a commercial office real estate company in Syracuse, and owner of the Syracuse Stars, a junior-league hockey team. Hall began playing hockey at 3, competed on boys”™ teams until she was 16 and was part of her sport”™s and gender”™s first scholarship class at St. Lawrence University, where she played in the first NCAA Division I women”™s hockey championship in 2001.
“I”™ve always wanted to be in the hockey business and follow in my dad”™s footsteps,” said Hall, as her team, all Canadians but for three Americans, dressed behind closed office doors for a Sunday afternoon game. “I saw what he did. I saw how he helped people” get playing time in hockey feeder programs and win college scholarships. I wanted to create a niche in sports business so that we could do the same thing and not only give people one of the few opportunities to play, but also to fill a void in an area that has very few entertainment options.”
Attendance above 600 per game
Competing against one of those few options, a mall cinema complex 25 miles south in Watertown, Hall has set ticket prices for bleacher seats at $9, about the price of a local movie ticket. Despite extensive marketing on radio, television, social networking sites, highway billboards and Watertown city buses and serial promotions oriented toward youth groups, families and soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Drum, recent home games had reported paid attendance of only 635 and 675 people. Hall and her marketing staff have lined up more than 30 corporate sponsors, which account for 30 percent of the team”™s income.
“It is a very unique niche business,” said Hall. “A lot of people are good in business, but not in sports business. It”™s a unique animal. There”™s a lot of moving parts ”“ like fan development.”
Hall learned to look at those moving parts more scientifically as a graduate student in the sport business management program at Manhattanville College. She was one of 15 students in the master”™s-degree program”™s first graduating class in 2008.
The Privateers owner applies those lessons in her business: “The value of a win to an organization,” she said as an example. “The value of a win at home to an organization. Being able to look at things scientifically.”
Hall maintains Westchester business
In Westchester, Hall started a private-lesson skating business and ran hockey camps and clinics here and around the state. With a $16,000 equipment purchase, she started Sani Gear L.L.C., a sports equipment dry-cleaning service she runs in cooperation with the Westchester Skating Academy in Elmsford. “That is a part-time business” in this demanding debut year for the hockey league, she said.
Dave Torromeo, director of the Manhattanville sport business management program, said Hall developed her marketing plan for a hockey team in a sports entrepreneurship class. Another woman in the class that year started a cheerleading camp business, he recalled.
“Not everyone comes into the program looking to start a sports business,” said Torromeo. “Most guys say, ”˜I want to be the next Brian Cashman.”™” He advises them there are plenty of other jobs besides that of Yankees general manager in the $410 billion U.S. sports industry. And networking, a big part of the Manhattanville program, helped Cashman get his foot in the Yankee Stadium gate, Torromeo further advises.
Master”™s program based on practicality
A 36-credit program in which graduates are awarded a master of science degree, the sport business management program “is extremely practical,” said Torromeo, and taught entirely by adjunct instructors who work in professional and collegiate sports and sports journalism.
He said about 100 students currently are enrolled in the program. About 30 percent already are in the sport industry, he said, and often have course fees paid by their employers, such as the U.S. Tennis Association, which has its national headquarters in Harrison. “There are a ton of individuals in sports organizations who want to make the next step” on the executive ladder, he said.
Torromeo said another 30 percent of program students are “career-changers,” including some former Wall Street players who have soured on the finance game. “They may have always had an interest in being in sports,” he said. “They don”™t know how to bridge their current job to the industry.”
About 40 percent of students in the program are recent college graduates. “There is a big interest, especially among the younger guys, in the baseball business,” said Torromeo. The program”™s Manhattanville Sports Analytic Institute, started in 2009, is headed by adjunct instructor Vince Gennaro, a former PepsiCo Inc. division president and author of “Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball.”
Torromeo said women make up about half of the program”™s current enrollment. “We think there”™s a lot of opportunity for women in the industry,” he said.
For the female owner of a start-up hockey team on the frozen border, “It is all coming together,” said Hall. Her team that day created added value with an impressive win at home.
“Obviously, you want things to come together more quickly.”
Nicole Kirnan’s drive and business savvy is matched by her beauty! Very impressive bio.