arenafootball2 - Cincinnati

Cincinnati Getting New Franchise

Arena football gives Cincinnati another chance

By Dustin Dow, ddow@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Ten years after the Cincinnati Rockers folded, another arena football team will try to succeed in the city, this time in the arenafootball2 league.

The unnamed team will play at U.S. Bank Arena starting in April 2003 and going throughout the summer. Owner and CEO Mark Hamister, of Buffalo, wants Cincinnati fans to choose the team name and colors in an Internet sweepstakes on www.usbankarena.com. The fans who come up with the winning suggestions, to be revealed Aug. 26, will receive $1,000 and four season-ticket packages.

“This is about being Cincinnati's team,” said Hamister, who owns another af2 team, the Rochester Brigade, as well as the Arena Football League's Buffalo Destroyers. “We spent a lot of time looking around Ohio and found a passionate sports town in Cincinnati.”

Hamister also considered Dayton for the af2 franchise. In fact, his biographical information on the Brigade Web site lists him as the CEO of an upcoming af2 franchise in Dayton.

“We did look solidly at Dayton,” Hamister said, “but then we started to look at the whole region and realized that Cincinnati allows this to be a regional franchise. It was nothing that Dayton did wrong.”

Hamister's ownership of two teams in the 36-team league presents a potential conflict of interests, especially if the two teams were to meet in the playoffs. Cincinnati will not be placed into a conference or division until the schedule is made in October, but af2 executive director Jay Marcus said the team will not play in the Northeast Division with Rochester. Marcus said Cincinnati probably will play in the Midwest Division, creating a natural rivalry with the Louisville Fire.

“There are about six teams with multiple owners,” Marcus said. “We would have to meet and restructure the playoffs if there was a chance that two teams with the same ownership were to meet in the semifinals or finals. That's never happened, and we haven't had any problems really, because the teams have separate staffs and separate players.”

Hamister plans to begin a coach/GM search in the next seven to 10 days and said he wants “to conclude the search within a reasonable time period.”

The af2 serves as a developmental league to the AFL, in which the Rockers played during the 1992 and '93 seasons in the same building, then called Riverfront Coliseum. AF2 teams dress 20 players a game, Marcus said, and normally fill rosters with local talent signed as free agents. He declined to give specific salary figures but said all players are paid the same, with bonuses for postseason wins.

Teams play 16-game schedules, and Marcus said the average attendance is about 5,000. The league board of directors will be happy, Marcus said, if the Cincinnati franchise can reach or surpass that mark in its first season. Louisville leads the league in attendance this season, drawing 9,041 fans a game, despite a 2-13 record.

The key to minor-league success in Cincinnati will be to keep attendance numbers up for a continued period of time. The Cincinnati Cyclones of the East Coast Hockey League drew 3,069 fans a game at U.S. Bank Arena last season. In the franchise's inaugural 1990 season at Cincinnati Gardens, the club averaged more than 9,000 fans, Cyclones publicist Greg DeVitto said.

Rockers owner Tom Gregory withdrew the team from the AFL after the 1993 season, when average attendance dropped from 13,883 in 1992 to less than 7,000 the next season. In 2001, the Cincinnati Stuff International Basketball League team also folded after two seasons because of poor attendance. Representatives from Nederlander Entertainment, the ownership company of U.S. Bank Arena, did not have specific attendance figures for the Stuff.

Nederlander Entertainment's Ray Harris said he is confident in Hamister's ability to run a successful franchise. He also said the arena is a good fit for arena football.

“There's no structural changes or anything that needs to be made,” Harris said. “All we need to do is install goal posts and nets and other minor things, and it's ready to go.”

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