Ending months of speculation, famed jam band Phish announced its summer tour Wednesday, and will stage the 10th multi-day festival in the band's 30-year history the weekend of Aug. 21-23 in Watkins Glen. It will be called “Magnaball.”

Ready for a Magnaball?

Ending months of speculation, famed jam band Phish announced its summer tour Wednesday, and will stage the 10th multi-day festival in the band’s 30-year history the weekend of Aug. 21-23 in Watkins Glen. It will be called “Magnaball.”

The event had been the subject of Internet rumors since early January.

“Here we are, sitting here after about 10 months of background work getting the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted,” Watkins Glen International President Michael Printup said. “We’re beyond excited. I love this. It’s so neat to have something so different up at the racetrack.”

Phish’s last festival, “Superball IX,” drew more than 30,000 fans from all over the U.S. to WGI on Fourth of July weekend in 2011.

Because the band has scheduled its summer tour much differently this summer, Printup thinks attendance could be much higher for “Magnaball” than for “Superball IX,” reaching 40,000 and possibly topping 50,000.

“I would anticipate this one would be bigger,” Printup said.

In 2011, the band didn’t announce the Watkins Glen festival until well after tickets for the first leg of the band’s tour - which included several other shows in upstate New York, including a three-night run at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and a show at Darien Lake Performing Arts Center - had gone on sale.

The Watkins Glen festival also competed against several other major music festivals around the country on the Fourth of July weekend.

But this year, Phish’s tour is set up much differently.

The band will hit the road in late July, after Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio joins The Grateful Dead for its 50th anniversary concerts in Chicago on Fourth of July weekend.

Most of Phish’s tour is on the West Coast and in the Midwest and the South. There’s no shows in New York and only a few in the Northeast - the band’s biggest fan base - leading up to Watkins Glen.

Also, “Superball IX” drew rave reviews from Phish fans because of its setting in the Finger Lakes, and because there were no major traffic jams that had snarled past Phish festivals, as WGI is set up to handle crowds of 90,000 or more for the annual NASCAR Sprint Cup races.

Schuyler County Administrator Tim O’Hearn estimated that “Superball IX” generated upwards of $10 million for the local economy. He said the county got $500,000 in sales tax revenues alone from the event, and led the state in sales tax growth in 2011. Most hotels in the area have already been booked for this year’s festival, he added.

If “Magnaball” draws 30,000 or more fans, Schuyler County will waive law enforcement costs for the NASCAR race in August. It was an incentive for WGI to bring new events to the area.

The Schuyler County Sheriff’s Office will again coordinate security for the Phish concert.

Although there were 34 arrests, Schuyler County Sheriff Bill Yessman praised the Phish fans’ behavior after the last festival in 2011, noting that they’d cleaned up their campsites and thanked him on the way out.

The 2011 Phish festival and this year’s event are the only major concerts at the historic Schuyler County race track since 1973’s Summer Jam, which drew 600,000 fans for shows by The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers Band and The Band.

Printup said discussions for this year’s Phish concert began almost immediately after the first one ended in 2011.

“Richard Glasgow, one of the executives on the Phish team, and I have stayed in touch since 2011,” Printup said. “He told me when they walked out the door, ‘We’re gonna do this again, the band loved it,’ and I said ‘You got it,’ so we always stayed in touch.”

Over the years, Printup has met with Glasgow in New York City and flown to the Coachella music festival in California to meet with promoter Coran Capshaw, who runs Red Light Management, Phish’s management group.

The scheduling never worked until this year, when a major repaving project at WGI - pegged at $12 million to $14 million - set the stage for Phish’s return. The track itself will be shut down for paving immediately after the NASCAR Sprint Cup race on Aug. 9, but that left the rest of the 1,800-acre venue and its sprawling campgrounds open for non-racing events.

The last time Phish performed at Watkins Glen, fans arrived on a Thursday and set up their campsites, and the band played eight sets of music on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Aside from a towering stage near the track’s outer loop, Phish set up a Ferris wheel and a whimsical “Ball Square” with art installations that served as the festival’s center. Hundreds ran in a 5K race around the track.

Phish has posted some details about this year’s “Magnaball” on its website, phish.com, saying there will be “numerous activities, attractions and art installations, in addition to a series of performances by the band.” A general admission weekend pass will be $225, including parking and camping.

“I just can’t wait to see what they start planning, because you know how creative that team is,” Printup said. “In the last eight months, they’ve probably made four or five trips here, a team of five to 15 people every time. So they’ve been planning very hard, and I can’t wait to see what that final roll-up of the show is, because it’s going to be exciting.”

Phish - which includes Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboard player Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman - has staged nine festivals since 1996 at various sites in upstate New York, Maine, Florida, Vermont and California. Most drew between 60,000 and 80,000 fans, although that was at the height of the band’s popularity in the ‘90’s.