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| David Andrews has played and coached hockey, which he says has helped him establish a trust with players and coaches in the league. |
David Andrews stepped into his role as president and CEO of the American Hockey League in 1994 with firsthand experience at various levels of the sport. An all-star goaltender in college, he later played four years professionally. He then moved behind the bench in the Western Hockey League and with Canadian national and Olympic teams before joining the front office as the Edmonton Oilers’ director of AHL operations. Andrews has presided over the league’s expansion across North America, leading to widespread exposure and record levels of attendance. In June, he signed a new five-year contract that will extend his term through the 2009-10 season. Andrews spoke with New York bureau chief Jerry
Kavanagh.
Education: Bachelor of arts, political science, Dalhousie University
Best hockey movie: “Slap Shot”
Favorite musicians: Norah Jones and Jack Johnson
Favorite business book: “Good to Great”
Favorite vacation spot: Nova Scotia
Athlete you most enjoy watching: Wayne Gretzky. He was so entertaining and so far ahead of every other athlete in the sport during his time.
Greatest competitor: Kevin Lowe. He played through pain, played with great skill and was a tremendous leader.
Management philosophy: I look for people with a passion for our product who are performance-driven and performance-oriented. It’s important to be yourself and to show outstanding ethics in business. I think proper governance is what’s expected from our athletes, our fans and our owners.
What’s the biggest challenge in your position?
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| A record AHL playoff crowd of 20,103 saw Philadelphia win the 2005 Calder Cup. |
Andrews: Managing and inspiring a collective group of people who essentially are acting independently in their businesses. The other challenge we face is that there is a certain stigma about being a minor league sport and there are folks in a lot of cities who don’t feel motivated to attend an AHL [game] because it’s perceived as, and in fact is, minor league. But if you compare our athletes, our attendance, our results, our revenue and our footprint to almost any other league outside of major league sports, we have a real presence. The minor league tag is a challenge from a marketing point of view.
You are a former player, coach and front-office team executive. How have the different points of view or insights helped you as president and CEO?
Andrews: I think my background generally has prepared me very well. … On the hockey side, my experience as a player and coach helped me establish a very good trust level with our players, our coaches and management. I understand the game and have a passion for it. I understand what players go through and the pressure on coaches; I understand the management needs and the skills required to successfully operate a team at our level.
The AHL has its own players association and collective-bargaining agreement. Have there been any labor problems?
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| Andrews’ favorite team on film was the ragtag Chiefs in “Slap Shot.” |
Andrews: Nothing significant. In my first year or two, we operated without a CBA and we ended up in front of the National Labor Relations Board in terms of issues and grievances between the players association and management. But once we completed our first CBA under my tenure, we have had an agreement that worked well and established a mutual respect between the players and management and we’ve managed to not have any labor disruptions.
Having said that, it’s important to know that our CBA is not quite as challenging an agreement to deal with as what the NHL’s agreement would be in that 95 percent of our players are under NHL contracts. So we’re not really negotiating very much that’s related to salary at all. We’re negotiating benefits, working conditions, licensing issues — that sort of thing. … They’re a lot easier to do than what my major league counterparts face.
About the NHL lockout: Last September you said, “We would be rooting for it not to begin, but now that it’s here, we’ll take advantage of it as best we can.” How did you turn a loss by the NHL into a gain for the AHL?
Andrews: We drew extremely well and increased our attendance substantially in areas where we have teams that are either in or close to NHL markets. Obviously, there are strong fan bases in those cities that were unable to attend NHL games, and our clubs benefited from that without doing any real direct marketing toward NHL fans. … We also played 24 games this year in NHL buildings. Those games drew somewhere in the range of 290,000 fans, so that was a tremendous boost to our attendance and a real increase in exposure to NHL fans of what the quality of our product is. It really helped to build our brand.
You attribute the attendance bump, at least in the beginning of the season, to being the only game in town, so to speak?
Andrews: Yeah, being candid, though, there were a number of cities in our league that did not see an increase in attendance. Our overall increase was somewhere between 6 and 7 percent during the regular season. But a lot of our cities are nowhere near NHL markets, and frankly I don’t think there was any reason to anticipate that their attendance would increase when the overall exposure of the game decreased because of the NHL not playing. Some of our teams in some of those markets that are distant from NHL cities suffered from the lack of exposure that the game normally gets when the NHL is playing.
Any other serendipitous results?
Andrews: Where we really benefited this year [was in] taking advantage of the opportunity to maximize our exposure. We had coverage in the major media in North America, [which] paid attention to what impact the lockout has had on our league, what our league is about. We had a lot of great young players who came to our league having played in the NHL last year. They gave tremendous testimonials to the quality of play in our league and how excited they were to be playing and improving and developing their career while the NHL is out.
How do you build on that momentum?
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| Andrews hopes rule changes will help skill players like Gretzky rule the game again. |
Andrews: We had somewhere in the area of 100 players playing in the league this year who had been full-time NHL entry-level rookies the year before. Those players will all be back in the NHL, and I expect we’ll move another 50 to 60 players, which is kind of our normal graduation rate each year, into the NHL on a full-time basis. So, we go back to branding ourselves the way we have for a long time: based upon our graduation rate into the NHL and upon the quality of play in the league that is demonstrated by the fact that these players have moved on to the NHL. We’ll talk about our rich history. But the exposure we’ve gained with national media — we had 300 games on TV this year — all of those people who have become exposed to the AHL for the first time generally go away feeling pretty impressed about what it is. Those relationships will stick with us in the future.
The AHL implemented a number of rules changes this past season. What’s been the best new idea in hockey?
Andrews: Everything we have done over the last few years is designed to increase the speed in the game, and most important to me is to give the edge to the offense. We need to get away from the holding and restraining of the skill players. People are driven to sport by the excellence that athletes show them, and in our sport over the last decade or two, we have gravitated toward giving the advantage to the defender. The defender now, the less-skilled player in many cases, is able to negate the very skilled player essentially through illegal tactics. … I think the NHL as part of the new CBA will probably institute a number of changes that will give the advantage back to the skill player and allow our sport again to begin to have players like Gretzky and [Mario] Lemieux who can become nationally recognized superstars.
Denis Leary, actor and avid hockey fan, said, “Changing [hockey] for television, and changing it to make it more popular, is insanity. … Television just can’t capture a game that is that fast.”
Andrews: I think it can if you understand the game. I better be careful here about getting on my soapbox about televised hockey, but … I certainly believe that for the knowledgeable fan, the way hockey has been presented in the United States over the last number of years has been almost a dumbed-down version that is somewhat insulting to the hard-core fan. I’m not so certain that a lot of real hard-core fans appreciate the approach that’s been taken.
Look for more of this conversation in our sister publication, SportsBusiness Daily, located at www.sportsbusinessdaily.com.
