Why Treat Lacrosse Like The Circus?

This past Saturday, Major League Lacrosse took its talents…well, its All Star Game to Palm Beach, Florida, a market where the eleven year old pro lacrosse league doesn’t have a franchise. The Old School square edged the Young Guns, 18-17, in front of a crowd several thousand less than the last three All Star Games. The league’s official box score announces a crowd of 4,841 for Saturday night’s tilt, while Inside Lacrosse’s Quint Kessenich claims that the game had a crowd of 7,800.

Both attendances are less than the last three MLL All-Star Games, which were held in cities with established teams: Boston and Denver. The Mile High City’s 2009 game had a reported attendance of 10,123. Boston’s two consecutive All-Star Games in 2010 and 2011 both drew crowds over 11,000 (2010 had 11,771 and 2011 had 11,186.)

Kessenich wrote a post-All Star Game column for IL (which, in full disclosure, I freelance for on occasion) in which he recommends that the MLL take the faltering Hamilton Nationals franchise and make it a traveling team for 2013, playing its games throughout the country. This traveling lacrosse show would include a stop in Florida, since Saturday’s All Star Game “showed” that the area is ready for a team.

Major League Lacrosse has done this before: once in the league’s first year, and in 2010 with the traveling “Machine,” the former Chicago franchise that competed without a home field. Add to those two experiments this year’s All Star Game, and you’ll see that the league continues to fall back on “the traveling circus” approach. They believe showcasing their product in potential markets is a good way to evaluate if a city is viable for eventual expansion. To a point, it is: you get to try out a venue and start community awareness, thus minimizing the risk of just setting up shop in an untested area.

But traveling around the country to hold one-off lacrosse events will never appeal to one of the biggest reasons why sports fans are sports fans: having a team to root for. That will put the league behind the curve in terms of creating brand loyalty not just to their league, but to the sport.

You buy a ticket for the circus when it comes to town once a year, but you don’t root for any particular clown. You aren’t brand loyal to the circus. If the Big Apple Circus has a better ticket deal than Ringing Brothers, you probably are going to go to the less expensive event. You aren’t performer loyal. You aren’t buying jerseys of a ringmaster and tracking their every performance online. And once the circus is gone, that’s it – you won’t go to the event’s online store to buy more merchandise, and there are no more events to buy tickets for until next year.

If Major League Lacrosse keeps experimenting with one off events in cities with no allegiance to the league, lacrosse becomes more of an annual event instead of a habit, which is not an outlook that will make the league more consistent money. Trying on potential cities for size will not create brand loyalty. Picking a city and taking a chance will, because it creates more touchpoints for fans to interact with the league in a more concentrated amount of time. In that same vein, rewarding current league cities with an All-Star event will enhance brand loyalty. Treating lacrosse like a circus won’t.