As Nashville reopens, sports of all sizes are still seeking a way off the sidelines – Tennessean
If all goes as Tom Insell envisions, this summer in the Music City will be a little more normal.
There would be basketball. Six days in early July and two youth tournaments on indoor courts. They’d be laid out farther apart than usual at the Music City Center, but they’d be there, and they’d be full with hundreds of girls basketball travel teams — AAU, high schools, you name it.
Insell may not see a green light yet, but it’s no longer red, either. He’s ready. He’s advertising. He has even ordered the infrared thermometers for all foreheads outside the door.
“We’ve picked up more teams than we’ve lost,” said Insell, CEO of National Exposure Basketball in Shelbyville. “I have not had a parent yet that told me they did not want to play, nor a kid. People are wanting to play.”
All this, until recently, was news to Butch Spyridon. The president and CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation, as a matter of fact, saw the NEB’s advertisements on social media. He didn’t quite know what to make of them.
“On one hand, it scared the hell out of me,” Spyridon said. “On the other hand, I hope it’s true and it can happen.”
The city with more to lose
Sports will be back eventually. Of course, they will.
But in the meantime, the absence of sports these past two months have been a painful experience in Nashville. Only two games into the SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament at Bridgestone Arena, the rest of the event was halted, along with the city’s other sports.
Headliners included the NHL’s Nashville Predators and MLS’ Nashville SC, two pro teams still in season (unlike the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, who were not), and athletics programs at Vanderbilt University and other colleges.
All of the teams above can’t be sure yet when they will be able to practice together, much less compete against anyone else or in front of fans. Such overwhelming uncertainty remains a frustrating theme all over the sports world.
For Spyridon, it’s more than just the big leagues. From youth basketball to volleyball to distance running to pickleball, his organization is “looking under every rock and pursuing every opportunity” for Nashville, a major city that — like so many others — is reeling from the loss of event-driven revenue tied to sports.
“I don’t know that we really could put an accurate number (on the cost),” Spyridon said. “It’s just in the tens of millions, when you take SEC Tournament and hockey and soccer and youth tournaments. We could go on and on. … When I say tens of millions, it gets over $100 million, not to mention community morale and the positive influence I think sports has.”
This has been more traumatic here than most places when you’re talking about tourism — Spyridon’s business is where Nashville was thriving. Losing big-league sports events would be disastrous for any city’s bottom line. But it might be worse for Nashville, just because this has all been worse for Nashville, a popular destination spot.
One report had Nashville experiencing the largest decline in consumer spending of any U.S. market.
“We were leading in the country in our industry in performance,” Spyridon said. “So yeah, our fall was farther.”
The big-league costs
Given such widespread economic loss, sports are only part of the discussion in Tennessee. But it’s a large part.
And those costs paint a glum picture for the months ahead, too, only because no one can be sure when games will return with full crowds in attendance.
At Bridgestone Arena, the pandemic wiped out six remaining regular-season home games for the Predators and potential playoff games for a team that was on the cusp of squeaking into the 16-team field.
The team probably lost between $1.5 million and $2 million at the gate from each home game, given the average price of a ticket for a 17,159-seat arena. That doesn’t count merchandise and other income.
But it’s much more than that, given how other businesses were impacted without games or events.
“Our annual economic impact is over $600 million,” said Sean Henry, president and CEO of the Predators and Bridgestone Arena. “What does that mean each game, each broadcast, each event? It’s pretty staggering what happens when we fill our building up. If we didn’t have those events and the world was healthy around us, you’d see a real serious impact.”
In Memphis, the NBA’s Grizzlies had eight regular-season home games remaining. The average ticket price and attendance at games would suggest a loss of close to $1.4 million at the gate for each Grizzlies game.
Meanwhile, Nashville SC had only just started play as an expansion MLS club, opening its season Feb. 29 in what remains its lone MLS home game. To date, a dozen Nashville SC games have been postponed, and seven of those would have been at Nissan Stadium.
“Almost more of an outpouring of sympathy (with Nashville SC),” Spyridon said. “That just stunned them and us.”
Things could get worse, too. The Titans haven’t yet lost game dates, though it would be a costly development if they did this fall, since “every (Titans) game is easily a $15-20 million day for the city and the state,” Spyridon said. “It’s enormous.”
It’s possible — if not likely — that the NFL, NHL, NBA and MLS could all return this year with empty stadiums and arenas, with fans not being allowed to attend because of the risk of spreading the virus.
“It’s not going to help the local economy like we would like,” Spyridon said, “but I think it begins to plant the seed of normalcy.
“And I think that is pretty important in its own right.”
Paul Skrbina, Erik Bacharach and Evan Barnes contributed to this report.
Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.
Published 2:12 PM EDT May 29, 2020
