Advosports

Playoff football is big business, and business is booming in Victoria.

Memorial Stadium hosted eight playoff games over the past severa weeks, making Victoria a highly-desirable destination for both players, fans and school districts, many of which are in a financial pinch right now.

While the games serve as the epicenter, generating revenue for the Victoria Independent School District and its schools' extracurricular activities, the city as a whole benefits from the influx.

The most significant example occurred two weeks ago, with the Class 2A, Division II regional matchup between No. 1 Refugio and Poth. The game packed the stands with more than 11,000 people and long lines of fans waiting to get in early on.

"If you stay in town, you are there by yourself," Will Toliver, a Refugio fan who lives in Woodsboro, said.

The situation had VISD Athletic Director Ralph Escalona seeing only one color: Green.

"It was standing room only," he said. "It was actually the most-attended game of the year for the stadium."

And the timing could not have been better.

Played the day after Thanksgiving, the game coincided with Black Friday, which is traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year.

"How many of those people do you think went to the mall before the game?" Escalona said.

While an exact dollar amount cannot be attributed specifically to out-of-town football fans, Victoria Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Randy Vivian knows the revenue is significant.

"Each one of those teams bring fans in, and those fans need to eat, they need to gas up their cars and some of them may actually spend the night," Vivian said. "So, we are going to see a great econmic benefit from that.

"I'm sure folks are shopping here too and spending time in our community, and anytime people are spending their money, from out of town, in the city of Victoria, it is just great for us."

Centrally located for many Class 1A, Class 2A and Class 3A schools, Memorial Stadium with its Astroturf field provides an attractive facility for competition, while Victoria offers visitors luxuries not found in the lesser populated surrounding cities.

"They are coming from smaller communities that don't have the malls or the stores that we have in Victoria, so I'm sure they take advantage of it and get here early to visit those stores," Escalona said.

Vivian can attest.

"We had a pretty significant Black Friday this year," Vivian said. "The numbers were significantly up, and, in talking to some of the retailers that are members of the chamber, they had a really good weekend where sales were really up over years in the past."

Although Memorial Stadium is the catalyst for the visitors, the city itself yields most of the rewards as the district's earnings are fairly minimal.

Despite having a packed house for the Refugio-Poth game, VISD collected just $3,200 - the rental fee for using the building - plus 15 percent of the revenue generated at the gate. Ticket prices are exclusively controlled by the two teams involved in each particular contest.

According to Escalona, the money basically covers just the cost of staffing the event, such as paying the police officers, ticket takers, gatekeepers and custodians.

"We basically do it as a hospitality because we are a neutral site for the teams playing here," he said.

VISD also charges $2 per vehicle to park with about 1,500 spots available. The income is then placed into a general fund to be used by the athletic department as it sees fit.

The band programs for Victoria East and Victoria West split all concession-generated revenue.

Memorial Stadium has most likely hosted its final playoff game of the year as the number of teams remaining in contention for a state championship dwindle. There was a strong possibility Refugio and East Bernard would have used the stadium, but Sonora defeated the Brahmas causing San Antonio to become a more ideal meeting point.

In the end, Escalona believes it comes down to the individual teams playing and where they are located in relation to Victoria as to why Memorial Stadium's was so popular this year.

"It is in-between a lot of places," he said. "If you are coming from San Antonio and Corpus Christi, you can meet here and it is going to be about an equal distance from both places. It just happens to be a halfway point.

"And to find a facility as big as this with the turf and with the quality announcers that we have and the amount of people we have to support whatever size crowd may come, it just makes for a perfect place to meet."

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