Hoopfest proves to be draw – for pros

Hoopfest may not be the center of the basketball universe, but obviously it’s developed gravitational pull.

Now an entire professional league has succumbed to its inexplicable magnetism.

In a rather astonishing precedent, the Seattle Storm of the Women’s National Basketball Association is taking its Saturday home game out of KeyArena and trucking it across the state, where the Storm will meet the New York Liberty at 7 p.m. in the Spokane Arena.

It is, according to Storm chief operating officer Karen Bryant, the first time in the WNBA’s eight-year history that one of its teams has played a regular-season game outside its immediate market.

“And there’s a simple reason we’re doing it,” Bryant said. “In a word, it’s Hoopfest.”

Hey, sounds like the slogan for next year’s poster – for which we assume Storm center Lauren Jackson will be posing on Saturday.

Yes, in a uniform. Sheesh.

It is Bryant’s theory/hope/gamble that a capture-able, if not captive, audience for the WNBA product is comprised by the 23,700-odd players who will bump and grind downtown on Saturday, a significant portion of them female, and the thousands more who stroll the streets to watch. If it seems a little weird to wager that after a full day of basketball, the City of Hoopfest will want to pay anywhere from $10 to $35 to indulge in more basketball, well, there’s a reason fast food restaurants all wind up in three-block clusters, too.

And this is major league basketball, after all, whatever the gender. How often is major league anything in our midst?

Besides, Bryant isn’t looking for a sellout since the Storm isn’t abandoning one in Seattle. She’s just looking for another way to create one somewhere down the line.

“We are, as always, trying to continue to build awareness for women’s professional basketball,” she said. “When you have a captive audience of 100,000 enthusiasts, it makes a compelling case for getting in front of that.”

Well, again, they aren’t captive until they’re actually in the building, but you catch her drift.

Certainly this is the right time for such an experiment. With league MVP Jackson and United States Olympian Sue Bird leading the way and coach Anne Donovan’s system taking root in her second year, the Storm are off to a league-best 8-3 start and couldn’t be any more marketable to even the most chauvinist basketball tastes. Average attendance at the Key is up more than 700 to 7,851, almost 2,000 a game better than they were drawing in the middle of the Lin Dunn Drearfest a few years ago.

Which, of course, also makes it the worst time to get out of Seattle.

The Storm have about 2,500 season-ticket holders who were somewhere between annoyed and irate to learn that their package was one game light this summer.

“We did our best to present the decision in the fall and lay it out as a unique opportunity,” Bryant said. “Certainly we tried to calm their anxieties – you know, this doesn’t mean the team is moving to Spokane.”

But?

“But nobody could have predicted that the Storm would be on the roll they’re on and that we’d be leading the West, and that New York would be (one of the leading teams) in the East,” she admitted. “The criticism has grown over the last couple of weeks. I guess the silver lining in that is that our fans are really loyal in their support of the team. But the phone continues to ring and I imagine it will ring more on Monday morning.”

No doubt the part of the Storm-Liberty box score those callers will eye most eagerly come Sunday morning is not Jackson’s line or Bird’s, but the attendance figure. A Saturday night game featuring the division leaders might have pulled more than 10,000 into the Key – the Storm drew 9,686 for its other Saturday home game this season.

In Spokane, Bryant is “optimistic we’ll hit the 5,000 mark.”

Optimism is OK. Promotion is better.

Bryant said advance ticket sales topped 1,000 as of Wednesday, and noted that “everybody in the market” had assured her that Spokane is the Walk-Up Capital of the World, and will be especially so among those so-called Hoopfest “captives” who will not know – given the vagaries of their knees, jump shots and willpower – whether they’ll have a loser-out game to play about the same time the Storm are tipping it off.

“But we had a big spike this week,” Bryant said, “and moved several hundred tickets (Tuesday).”

This despite an advertising campaign that amounted to some limited radio spots until this week.

“Trying to build awareness and intrigue in a market that’s 300 miles away definitely represents a challenge,” Bryant said. “We have limited resources, and obviously those resources have been focused in getting our season off the ground in the Puget Sound area.”

So the Storm will try the personal touch in Spokane. When the team arrives Friday, it’s planning player appearances at three different places – at Hoopfest registration in the park, at River Park Square and that evening at a Spokane Indians game. On Saturday, Storm staff members will fan out over the City of Hoopfest in logo gear, doing everything short of wearing sandwich boards.

The mission, of course, is as it forever is for the WNBA – converting skeptics. Bryant, like all the league’s proselytizers, is convinced that all she needs is to get the women’s game in front of a doubters eyes and she’ll make a fan. And if that doesn’t work, she’ll go all pragmatic on you.

“Say what you will about the women’s game,” Bryant said, “but these women are the best in the world at what they do. These are women you’ll see in the Olympics – Sue Bird is on our team and Lauren Jackson is on Australia’s, and Anne Donovan is on the Olympic staff. These are world-class athletes – and coaches – coming to Spokane and people can see them for as little as 10 bucks.”

Yeah, you’d think Spokane would watch. And you’d think the rest of the WNBA would be watching to see what happens here, too.

“Well, frankly, I’m not sure how many teams are really aware of what we’re doing – other than the Liberty, of course,” she said. “But I know the WNBA itself is looking at it closely. I think when you’re trying to grow a league, you’ve got to be willing to take some risks – and this is a risk, no question.”