Growing Pains

Lets be blunt here - the Match Night Crew are looking at that schedule in March of 17 games in 29 days with horror. I've likened working the match nights to being in a band on tour, with adrenalin rushes getting you through on some nights when outside influences like travelling and working our proper jobs threaten to overwhelm. But the schedule next month is relentless. Richard and I have talked a bit about it on the phone, especially as he was down after the disappointments of the weekend and the solution is simple.

Get focused and professional and realise that we cannot continue to do things as we have so far this season.

The Phoenix has largely been staffed by volunteers, not only for the time away from the ice but for this season. This has kind of worked to our advantage when forced to play on the road, as volunteers doing things as volunteers are prepared to go that extra mile to get stuff done - to perhaps make sacrifices that someone who saw things as "just a job" wouldn't. This has a million benefits, one of which is that we are open and reactive and available to the fans, which helps build the Faithful. The Match Night Crew have worked on a similar basis, take what is thrown at us, do what we have to do to firefight the problem and continue.

That "whatever" attitude has to be reigned back, if not stop altogether. Because, to be blunt, if we keep going like that during the madness of the next month, then we will go absolutely stir crazy. Mistakes must be fixed, absolutely, but right now, the level of "service" off the ice and away from games that has been given to the fans cannot be upheld by myself, Richard, Carl and Fishcake.

To take an average home game, played on Sunday. Sunday consists of arriving two hours before doors open, setup, working the game for 3 and a bit hours, takedown, home. Call it a six hour day. Then Carl or I get home and update the website with press releases, league tables and so on. That is Sunday night or Monday morning. Monday evening, probably another PR, and I get the game sheet and update the stats. Meanwhile, Richard is reviewing game tapes and creating the highlights package. That generally arrives Monday evening, so I try to do them, but it could be Tuesday. Wednesday is another PR, plus the juniors. Wednesday night/Thursday is spent on the Gallery. Friday - probably another PR.

That is a set schedule for just one game, so add in more PRs, bug fixes, info, merchandise and so on and you can see the sort of workload we have.

Now look at the schedule for March. We have home games on the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 7th and 8th. Thats five highlights packages (approx 23 hours of work for Richard minimum) plus website and game night duties for the rest of us. It is, to be brutally frank, an impossible schedule to keep up. Because if we are not careful, then we are working on the Phoenix for all of every day, and by the middle of March we will be burned out. And that is before you consider the fallout with friends, family and career.

There are a couple of threads on the forum about music and so on - while it is nice to have the suggestions, I doubt any of them, no matter how appropriate they are, will make it into the playlist. We don't have time to listen to the tracks, decide the bits we like, edit down and add to the playlist. That doesn't mean we don't want to, it just means we shouldn't. Next year, yes.

But looking at the wider picture - this is a transitional time for the club off the ice. I strongly feel that the happy go lucky volunteer attitude that has been so absolutely vital to keeping things together so far will have to change for next season. As a club, we are very responsive, very ad hoc in the way that we deal with fan requests. The thing is - I am not a fan any more. Richard isn't. Others aren't. We're over that line between club and customer. And looking back over the respite of the past month with the advantage of distance, I feel the backroom people are too responsive and too open and still sometimes acting like fans.

To put it this way. I think Jon Hammond was the perfect hockey announcer. I want to aim to take as much of that on board as possible. But did he post on forums? Did he constantly make himself available to fans away from the ice?

So I think that we need to start acting less as fans, and more as professionals. That doesn't mean some sort of holier than thou "I'm better than you". It definitely doesn't mean crapping on all those members of the Faithful who have got us this far ("We're in the Ice Dome at last. Thanks. Now piss off.") But what it does mean is that we stop being quite as open, quite as willing to join in. Because the club and the job being done for the club comes first.

Carl was rightly angry that the picture went out earlier in the week. Because a professional club would never have let that out. What there should have been, if the club wanted it, was a proper photographer passing images on to the club for its own purposes. If the club didn't want it, it doesn't go out. Part of the frustration was that people were asked not to post images, yet stuff was freely being passed around. Hopefully a lesson has been learned.

I don't know if this sounds harsh. I hope it doesn't, and I hope no-one reads this and goes to the Forum saying that I'm being offensive to the Faithful. Having poured so much in over the last few years, it is a hard thing to begin the process of pulling back and receding into the background. My post count has dropped on the Forum, I know Richard has done the same. When I have posted, it's been less of the happy go lucky stuff. We've got a good group of people looking after it, with Carl, Ben, Tambo and Mags dealing with fans on and off line.

But I do feel that over the next month at the very least, for the good of the quality of our job at the Ice Dome and for the good of our health and sanity, we've got a job to do and we're gonna do it and some people might say "Mike's got a scowl on his face, and he won't do X for me when he would have done before" and all in all, that is the way it has to be.