How do you get a community on board with a team? That’s the challenge that the Yorkton Cardinals have with the upcoming season, but it’s the challenge they’ve had for the past several seasons. They need to get the city to care, and they have to figure out how to do that.
But this editorial won’t be pessimistic, because there are plenty of examples of teams, sports and activities getting pulled back from the brink, whether in Yorkton or elsewhere.
Moreover, the Cardinals seem to know their weakness in Yorkton, and are endeavoring to fix it.
The weakness has been community involvement, and has been for a while. In effect, the community isn’t invested in the Cardinals. To their credit, they are planning to reverse that trend, and get Cardinals as part of the community. They want to get people to see the players, not just at games, but at work, at the store, while enjoying other activities in town. In effect, they want to get their players as part of the community in a way they haven’t been before.
It’s a smart move, the easiest way to get people invested in a team is to get them acquainted with the players. Someone might not necessarily be a huge baseball fan, or they might have not even been to the ball diamond before, but they have met a player or two and they like those people, and they want to cheer on those players and see what they do. It’s the doorway to being a fan, the person who gets you into the ball park and cheering.
The die-hard baseball fans have been there from the beginning, and always will be there, but getting the casual fans to the ball park, that’s what the Cardinals need to do. Getting the players out in the community, in force, is a great way to convince people to get to the ball park. People aren’t invested in a team as an abstract concept, they’re invested in players, they have their favorites and the person they cheer for every game. Forging a personal connection with players makes it easier to get people to the ball park.
That’s not their only plan, they have ideas for special promotions, new ideas and other ways to get people out and interested in local baseball. It’s difficult to say what they’re going to do at this point – they have until May, and they have to convince volunteers to help them with a few of these ideas – but there is reason to have hope.
Which isn’t to say that the Cardinals have an easy time this year, they are in a bit of a hole and have to dig themselves out of it, and the team knows it. But beyond that, they also seem to be invigorated by it. Their annual general meeting had double the attendance this year as opposed to last, and the ideas for how to make money, promote the team and get people to Jubilee Park were flying around the room. This is a group that wants to save the Western Major Baseball League in Yorkton, and it’s easy to be optimistic that they’ll accomplish it.
A group of enthusiastic people draw others to them. Enthusiastic coaches and teachers have made Yorkton Minor Football a force to be reckoned with, for example. The Yorkton Cardinals has a tough road ahead, but one can easily see that the enthusiastic people behind the club are what’s going to allow them to travel it.
