Rolling Thunder!

By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer

The Adirondack Thunder of the ECHL are rolling. As of Tuesday, the team had won six games in a row and boasted a 22-8 record, good for second in the ECHL Eastern Conference standings.

Near the halfway point of the home schedule, Jeff Mead, general manager of the Cool Insuring Arena and president of business operations for the Thunder, said the team has sold over 1,500 season tickets, “well ahead of where we’ve ever been.”

“That’s about 100 more than last year,” Mr. Mead noted. “It’s trending to be our best season ever in terms of ticket sales.”

Back to back games over New Year’s Eve weekend were sold out.

“Our on-ice play certainly helps,” Mr. Mead said. “But I think it’s a fun place to go to now. I think we do a very good job of entertaining our fans. We do have a very passionate fan base, but we also have what we call a casual fan, who just comes to three, four or five games a year. They like hockey, but they don’t necessarily live and die by our win-loss record. They want to go there for a social event and be entertained. Our production team does a very good job of entertaining our fans, which certainly brings the casual fan back for more each season.”

The list of amusements beyond hockey include fan cams, giveaways, a t-shirt cannon and intermission activities where people can win cash. A lot of the fun is propelled by announcer Dan Miner’s excited oratory. “He has to be the best PA guy in the league, the way he gets the crowd going,” Mr. Mead said.

Downstairs, a $900,000 renovation to Heritage Hall —the 7,335 square foot banquet room with a bar and TV screens — was completed prior to this season and has been a hit among fans.

“With the renovated space and ability to watch and listen to the game, the amount of fans down there has doubled,” Mr. Mead said. “A lot of our fans are starting to come in at 5:30 p.m., when our doors open, just to go down to Heritage Hall to watch whatever sporting event’s on the TVs and enjoy the hour and a half before the game starts.”

And a lot of fans actually watch the second and third period of the game down in Heritage Hall instead of going back to their seats because the game is shown there on big screen TVs with play by play commentary, Mr. Mead added.

The space also hosted holiday events in December, and wedding receptions have already been booked there for 2024.

“The goal is to use the space as much as we possibly can,” Mr. Mead said. He noted that $500,000 of the $900,000 renovation came from Warren County, $200,000 from the City of Glens Falls, about $50,000 from the Glens Falls Civic Center Foundation, and the remaining funds from board members and community donations.

An emphasis was put on contracting local work to complete the project. “Any time we do a project we try to use a partner of the Adirondack Thunder, and we were able to do that again this time,” Mr. Mead said.

Five suites were constructed before last season. “It’s a new revenue source for us, and kind of a higher level experience for some customers,” Mr. Mead said.

Four of the five suites are sold for the entire season. A fifth one, more geared toward all fans rather than a corporate partner or one individual, has sold for 33 of the 36 home dates this year.

In general for the whole arena, Mr. Mead said “The goal is to continue to increase attendance each season, which we’ve been able to do quite successfully the last few seasons.”

Hockey goal: The championship

From a hockey perspective, obviously, Mr. Mead said the goal is to win the championship, something second-year Head Coach Pete MacArthur hopes to accomplish by staying on the offensive.

“We’re a quick team and we’re aggressive,” Coach MacArthur said. “We’re really good skaters, and we want to play on our toes.”

He said goaltending has been the most consistent and best piece of the Thunder’s game this year, with keeper Vinnie Purpura being named the ECHL Rookie of the Month for December.

And a sense of togetherness has been a big asset for the squad. “We’re a team,” Mr. MacArthur said. “It’s cliche, but that’s the biggest takeaway that we see as a staff so far. The guys don’t really care who gets the credit or puts up the points. They all just truly enjoy playing with each other. There’s a good cohesion in our group right now.

“We want to have a winning mentality,” the coach continued. “That’s our daily goal. Every single day, no matter what our schedule calls for, because it gets pretty crazy, especially this time of year in the dog days of the league. We just want to get better every day.”

Arena looked doomed in 2014

Life at the arena hasn’t always looked as rosy as it does this season. In 2015 then-Mayor Jack Diamond realized that the building, at the time named the Glens Falls Civic Center, was a strain on the city’s finances and put it up for bid.

That’s when the Adirondack Civic Center Coalition formed as a group of local business people interested in preserving it. The group won the bid. The city would still own the building but would lease it to the coalition, an arrangement that is still in place today.

“We all sat around and said look, we can’t let this building go,” said Daniel Burke, who has been president of the coalition since its conception. “We’ll never get it back, and it’s an important piece of the quality of life for the region. The next nearest one is Albany.”

At that time the Thunder were the ECHL affiliate of the Calgary Flames, but there was a problem — the team was losing “quite a bit of money,” said Mr. Burke. He said Calgary approached the Adirondack Civic Center Coalition and asked if they wanted to buy the team.

“When we looked at ourselves a couple times in the mirror, we said sure, we need to, this is the main reason the building makes it financially,” Mr. Burke recalls.

The coalition went about raising money in private donations and eventually bought the team, which under the new ownership became the affiliate of the New Jersey Devils in 2017.

“We’ve seen the progression since we started this journey about eight years ago, and it is progressing very positively,” Mr. Burke said. “In-between was the pandemic, and that certainly put a big crimp in the momentum that we were building up, but we’ve been out of the pandemic for two seasons now.

“Hockey is our primary tenant, so it’s very important that we put a good product out there, and apparently the people are appreciating it.”

He said the Thunder play in the smallest market in the ECHL, but described how the town comes alive on game nights.

“We have a very special thing with that arena going for the community. And if you’re downtown on a Friday night when there’s a game, you’ll see it. The restaurants are full. The bars are full. That’s something that to me we couldn’t replace if we ever lost that building.”

Also important are the non-hockey events the arena hosts. Ventriloquist and comedian Jeff Dunham’s upcoming show on Jan. 12 is sold out.

And Mr. Mead expects that over 2,000 people will come out when the Harlem Globetrotters come to town on Feb. 13.

“Having a diverse amount of acts in the building is very important to us,” Mr. Mead said. “Any time you can bring in a diverse event, whether it’s a concert, a comedy show, the Globetrotters, or a WWE-type event, it’s good for our community, it’s good for our local hotels and restaurants, which is a big part of why the Cool Insuring Arena is there.

“I think we’re in a pretty good trajectory now in terms of increased activity at the arena. We’re always just trying to bring in more events for our community.”

Still, he said it’d be a challenge for the building to be viable without the Thunder. “That’s one of the biggest reasons that we bought the team, to make sure professional hockey stayed in Glens Falls and stayed in our building,” he said.

He noted that about 25 people are employed full-time by the arena and Thunder, as well as 100 to 150 part timers.

Mr. Burke said “Financially we’re in pretty good shape. I think one of the reasons it’s worked well is that we know there’s no room for financial error. So we took a very solid approach to managing the finances. The long-term goal is to keep improving the building, because it really didn’t get much improvement over the last 20 years. Financially it didn’t make sense for the city to do that.”

Future improvements he dreams of include a “beautiful” new entrance, some more luxury boxes, and party decks.

As far as improvements go, Mr. Mead noted, “We try to balance it every year by putting in fan-friendly, fan-facing improvements, while also making sure that we’re not forgetting about the actual infrastructure and equipment that operate the building.”

Both Mr. Mead and Mr. Burke expect the Thunder to remain in Glens Falls. “We own them,” Mr. Burke said. “So it’s not like we’re at the whim of a professional organization that’s 3,000 miles away and says ‘we got a better offer.’”

Both men see the ECHL as a good fit and do not foresee the higher level American Hockey League team once again calling Glens Falls home, as was the case with the Adirondack Red Wings from 1979 to 1999, the Phantoms from 2009 to 2014, and the Flames in 2014-15.

“The American Hockey League is kind of in bigger cities nowadays,” Mr. Mead said. “So I don’t see the AHL coming back to Glens Falls.”

But it seems Glens Falls has found its hockey niche, at least for the time-being, with the ECHL Thunder.

“Sometimes we pat ourselves on the backs, but mostly we just look at each other and say get back to work,” Mr. Burke said. “The list never ends, but we’ve come so far and it feels good.”

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