Crunch Time! During a Crisp November, Cold Cash From Frenzied Football Action Matches Season Temps
By John Wilbert
Come November, football is in full swing, and teams are
battling their rivals for postseason births. What better time for a
local sports bar to entice customers and exponentially increase sales?
Whether through creative promotions, opening up the parking lot for
tailgating, or simply loading up the orders of beer and Buffalo wings,
gear up and actively heighten the excitement that’s already in the air.
Your guests will love your bar for it, and your tip jars and registers
will be as full as the NFL and NCAA play schedules at this very moment.
Outside In
At the Varsity Club in Columbus, Ohio, guests find themselves smack dab
in the middle of the gridiron excitement each year. The Varsity Club is
a two-floor indoor and outdoor venue located just a couple blocks away
from the horseshoe known as Ohio Stadium, home to Buckeye football and
mere minutes away from downtown Columbus.
The Varsity Club, in a sense, is just as big as Ohio State football.
The bar expands itself down a side street called Tuttle Park, where
refrigerated beer trucks are brought in to serve as vendors to
customers in the street. The bar also has special permits to close down
the side street to give way to beer stands.
While the Varsity Club does not offer any specials or promotions during
the football season, operators there don’t need to because their
biggest sell is Ohio State football.
“Ohio State has such a history of football that everybody knows where
the Varsity Club is,” says Varsity Club Day Manager Laurie Watkins.
Watkins says thousands of people show up at the Varsity Club whenever
there is a home game for Ohio State. She says at times there have been
up to a few thousand fans at the bar that Buckeye and other football
fans have flocked to since 1959.
Part of the reason for attracting many people throughout a Saturday is
the fact that the Varsity Club is willing to open its doors early and
stay open until late. Before one noon Ohio State kickoff, patrons lined
up outside begin filing into the Varsity Club at 8:30 a.m. If Ohio
State is playing Michigan, the doors open as early as 8 a.m. For 3:30
p.m. games, the bar opens at 9 a.m., and don’t count on the crowd dying
out until 2 a.m., closing time for the Varsity Club. The early bar
reaps the revenue, it appears.
With huge crowds such as the ones the Varsity Club gets, controlling
the scene does becomes a big concern, however. Managers of the Varsity
Club monitor the crowd closely to see whether or not they need to close
the outside.
The Varsity Club staff also does not serve drafts on Ohio State game
days because it creates a mess, Watkins says. The club serves all its
drinks in plastic cups and does not serve bottled beer, but only beer
in cans.
Maintain Momentum
Successful teams in the NFL and college ranks are the ones that gain
momentum from the beginning and maintain that momentum each week of the
season. The same thing applies to sports bars during the fall. In order
to increase sales in the late fall, it is important you get off to a
good start at the beginning of the season so you can carry that success
from week to week. In other words, it is crucial to have everything run
smoothly the first weekend of the season or otherwise customers will
not come back.
Shannon Jarrell, director of sales, marketing and catering at Yankee
Doodles in Santa Monica, Calif., recommends overstaffing for the first
NFL Sunday and nailing down sponsors before the start of any season.
Jarrell also suggests limiting the menu for fall weekends to take
pressure off the kitchen during football games.
“If you are under-prepared/under-staffed and screw up your first Sunday
of NFL (regular season) or Saturday NCAA, you will spend the REST of
the season trying to get that business back,” Jarrell says. “Rule of
thumb — over-staff and over-prepare for your first big game of the
season.”
It is no wonder why bars such as Yankee Doodles spend so much money on
state-of-the-art entertainment to provide the clearest pictures
possible for viewing sporting events. Jarrell says Yankee Doodles
owners spent $50,000 on updating its sound and television systems for
its 48 televisions. The big-screen projectors now are in HD, and the
Yankee Doodles team has invested in eight new plasma televisions.
Jarrell says she’s proud Yankee Doodles offers plenty of places to sit
down in its establishment (900 to 1,000-person capacity), since many
places in the Los Angeles area have very limited seating. Yankee
Doodles even offers its own parking structure for patrons to park
directly behind the venue.
Most important, the treatment of customers is what keeps customers
coming back each week. “Once guests love the way they are treated and
get great food and drink, they will keep coming back and back again to
see their favorite team play,” says Chris Fuselier, owner of the Blake
Street Tavern in Denver. “Plus, as the owner, I make it a point to meet
many of our guests and will do my best to personally find the game they
are looking for. My job is the satellite game day engineer!”
Not Everyone is a Hometown Fan
Just because you are in Denver doesn’t automatically mean you are a
Bronco fan. You may be living in Los Angeles, but that doesn’t mean you
root for the USC Trojans on Saturday afternoons. The same thing goes
for just about anywhere else in the country where not everyone is a fan
of the local team.
“Most of our business comes from our guests who love the NFL DirecTV
package and watch the team from the city where they are from,” Fuselier
says. “We are also known as a Boston bar and average 50 to 100 Patriots
fans for every game.
“It’s the Patriot fans who miss Boston and love to drink with their
buddies from home that increase our business by 50 percent when the
Patriots play.”
Yankee Doodles staff is well aware of the number of football fans who
are dying to watch their team play but cannot because they are living
in an entirely different region of the country, and the bar operators
take advantage of being located in a diverse metropolitan area by
attracting alumni from schools throughout the country. Yankee Doodles
also is the official USC alumni bar for Trojan away games as well as
the official L.A. area alumni spot for the University of Pittsburgh,
Oklahoma, Texas, and UCLA, where groups ranging from 50 to 300 people
congregate watch their alma maters.
“Anyone can order the sports packages from their home, so you got to
give them a reason to leave their leather chair and go to a bar,”
Fuselier says. “Make it a fun atmosphere, and get to know your guests
on a first-name basis. Everyone loves talking about their teams!” NCB
Come November, football is in full swing, and teams are
battling their rivals for postseason births. What better time for a
local sports bar to entice customers and exponentially increase sales?
Whether through creative promotions, opening up the parking lot for
tailgating, or simply loading up the orders of beer and Buffalo wings,
gear up and actively heighten the excitement that’s already in the air.
Your guests will love your bar for it, and your tip jars and registers
will be as full as the NFL and NCAA play schedules at this very moment.
