The “mission” has a begun. A project that it is pretty massive. A deep look into the attendance figures of Binghamton hockey. From the Broome Dusters to the Binghamton Black Bears and everything in between. The plan is to find every single home attendance number recorded for the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena. You think this would be easy, that someone would have already collected this information. However you would be wrong, not all the attendance numbers are available. I have gotten everything I could from HockeyDB.com and most of the attendance from the AHL that I could.
To get the rest, I now have a subscription to Newspapers.com. This has allowed me to gather Broome Dusters and Binghamton Whalers attendance numbers reported by the NHAL and AHL teams during the games. During this process I have taken the time to look at articles to better understand the energy of the time. Something certainly struck out to me when I was collecting the Broome Dusters 79-80 attendance numbers and the Binghamton Whalers 80-81 numbers. In that final year of the Dusters AHL team, the attendance was at an all time low in Binghamton N.Y.
When you look at the above snapshot from the data collection, you can certainly see the decrease in attendance. Through the 39 home games for the 79-80 season compared to the season before, over 24,000 less fans walked through the turn styles. By the end of the season the current owner of the Broome Dusters, Andre Veilleux was ready to sell the team. Veilleux sold the team to the Hartford Whalers who were looking for a new team after not being able to come to terms to keep their prospects with the Springfield Indians.
So in May of 1980, the Broome Dusters were sold, local ownership was done and the team was now owned by a NHL team, the Whalers. But how can get the fans coming back to the Broome County Arena? How can you get the Binghamton Hockey Attendance back up? Can you get it back to the peak levels of the Broome Dusters early years? The new owners and some media members thought they knew the answer to this. The answer was in a name change. The Dusters name was stale, hockey was stale in Binghamton and with a new owner, affiliation and new players coming in, a new name was underway.
First, ask the fans if they wanted a name change. Over a span of a week from May 6th, 1980 to May 12th, fans were asked to fill out a simple form: Yes, I would like to see a new nickname. No, keep it the Dusters. Then drop it off to multiple different media outlets across the Southern Tier. The Hartford Whalers were leaving this up to the fans. What did the fans want? A new name or the Dusters to stick around?
When the tally was all added up, the name change votes won, a 707 to 602 victory. However Howard Ducharme, Director of Operations of the team was not satisfied with such a narrow victory for a name change. Instead he then organized an over the phone poll asking the same question and the answer was more definitive, 1,038 to 740 for a name change.
The “Name the Team” contest was underway with the winner of the contest winning two season tickets, one of the team’s new jerseys and a drop of the ceremonial first puck at center ice in the team’s first home game.
On May 29th, 1980 it was announced, the Binghamton Whalers were born. Binghamton’s identity in the hockey world was changed forever. The logo was an adaptation of the Hartford Whaler‘s logo and through out time, it has been considered one of the better logos in the American Hockey League.
But the question is. Did the name change, new logo, new team, new players and new energy change the Binghamton Hockey Attendance fortunes? Not in the first season of the Whalers. A matter of fact, the attendance continued to go down.
In the 39 home games I was able to collect the attendance numbers in the final season of the Broome Dusters, 130,527 fans went through the turn styles. In the Whalers first season in 40 games only 123,179 fans watched hockey in the Arena. That’s one more game yet 7,348 less fans. In the Dusters final season, they averaged 3, 347 fans per game In the Whalers first season, 3,079 fans per game showed their support.
A new team name, a new parent club and new direction made no difference. Also to note, the team actually played better at home with the Whalers prospects with a 22-15-3 record at home. Where the Dusters were 17-19-4 at home in the 79-80 season.
What the fans didn’t know, was that the second season of the Binghamton Whalers the team would make it all the way to the Calder Cup finals. That winning team would also see more fans showing up then the previous two American Hockey League seasons in Binghamton.
This proposes an interesting question. Does a winning team make a bigger impact on the attendance numbers then the name or even the lore of a team. When we revisit the Binghamton Hockey Attendance discussion, we will look at the 1981-82 Binghamton Whalers Calder Cup Finals run and the 2010-11 Binghamton Senators Championship.
That’s it this time, thanks for reading Wrap Around.
Bob
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