W
hen Megan Harman joined the Charlotte Checkers as an intern five years ago, she wasn’t sure what to expect from her new boss, Tera Black.
Tera Black
CHARLOTTE CHECKERS,
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
“Knowing that she was the only female COO in the entire American Hockey League, that in itself was kind of intimidating,” Harman said. “I didn’t expect her to be so friendly and so open. She’s the ultimate woman. She’s a great motherly figure; she’s a great colleague to look up to.”
Black channels her experience as a mom to two daughters into marketing hockey to families in a market more accustomed to checkered flags than body checks. Family-friendly scheduling was one of the reasons Black and the Checkers took the bold step of moving the team back to its original home, the 61-year-old Bojangles’ Coliseum, after a decade as the third tenant in line for dates at Time Warner Cable Arena.
“We were playing on a lot of Mondays, Halloween at noon, just sort of counterintuitive to good business,” Black said. “Our first year back [at the coliseum], we had 26 weekend dates.”
In addition to negotiating an additional $4 million in public money to modernize the arena, Black led the building overhaul process and the team’s move into the venue, doing so in 90 days between seasons. For that work and for the work in the season that followed, Black was named the AHL’s James C. Hendy Memorial Award winner as the league’s outstanding executive for the 2015-16 season — becoming the first woman to earn the honor since it was first awarded following the 1961-62 season.
But Black is far from done. She’s now turning some of her attention to the team’s burgeoning creative-services business. For the past two years, the team has been providing full-service creative work to both team sponsors and unaffiliated properties like Richard Childress Racing and the Joey Logano Foundation. By the end of the year, Black plans to launch an entirely independent marketing banner, leveraging the team’s resources to create a new revenue stream.
“I have phenomenal creative staff, and now we can keep them here because they have unlimited opportunities to do creative work outside of just hockey.”
— Alex Silverman
