I can’t help but notice that the name of this event is “Teal and White,” not “Black and A Touch of Teal.” Ahem.
It’s what they call the annual pre-season shindig for Sharks season ticket holders, held at HP Pavilion. The Sharks do a number of things open to folks who can’t afford season tickets or even many game tickets at all. There are opportunities to meet players or watch them skate, at no cost but your time. So the woman who said that hockey is kind of a “people’s sport” wasn’t far off. You can be a fan and do fan stuff without shelling out a lot of dough.
Teal and White isn’t one of those things.
One of things I learned about business over the years is that you have to balance your marketing expenses between rewarding your good clients/customers/patrons/whatever and finding new ones. Usually you spend a lot more on the latter, but try not to make that obvious to the former. There’s nothing wicked or underhanded about this. It’s the simple reality of growing your business versus going belly-up. I hope, for the sake of the franchise, that the Sharks follow this rule.
Teal and White falls in the column for “reward regular, long-time, or newly committed audience,” aka Season Ticket Holders. And that’s good, those folks do deserve to be rewarded for showing their faith by buying all those tickets. Faith in what? Well, faith that the team will do well, or at least that the watching of whatever they do do will be entertaining on some level.
I’m sure it will be, I think everything they do is entertaining. Maybe I’m weird.
There were a whole bunch of Sharks fans there last night. David Pollak said around 4000. @LadyStanley tweeted that the “…Line to enter tank serpentines through three aisles in parking and around building…That’s up and back 3 aisles!…Make that 4.”
What do they do at this get together? They watch a scrimmage which has some misleading gimmicks to it:
“…each team was awarded a five-minute power play tonight when no penalty was committed — presumably so the coaching staff and fans could get a sampling of special teams play, which has merit as a concept.” -Working the Corners
In a limited sense, it’s a chance for some of the players to impress, the ones still fighting their way through the pre-season for a spot on the roster. Unlike the Training Camp scrimmages, this game had a lot of scoring. I’m trying to ignore that, trying not to read anything into it about our healthy goalies.
Also, fans get to meet players. One starving student thanked his benefactor for a ticket to the event by saying: “You allowed me to stand face to face with patty, thanks so much man.” I like that.
I don’t like the fact that everyone spells Marleau’s nickname with t’s instead of d’s. The correct familiar form of Patrick is “Paddy.” “Patty” or “Patti” is short for Patricia. I feel like spelling it with a “tt” is an insult to the Irish, and some sort of snide barb aimed at Patrick. Calling an Irish person a “paddy” wasn’t the worst sort of racial slur. It just grew out of the fact that so many Irish men were named Patrick. It wasn’t a term of affection, but it could have been worse. You could certainly argue it was less offensive than “limey.”
What do I expect, when Clowe gets called “Clowey?” But they don’t spell it “Chloe.” I know, “Marleau” doesn’t exactly scream Emerald Isle. I don’t think “Paddy” sounds very French either. Oh well. When you start tossing names around in the ethnic salad, spelling goes out the window.
I don’t actually have a problem with girls’ names for boys or boys’ names for girls, if that’s what you mean to do. It can be cute. I just don’t like random spelling confusion.
Spelling quibbles aside, it seems like everyone had a blast. More importantly, no injuries were reported. That is an event cost I don’t think any of us would want to deal with.
petshark 