Mark Coyle had a pretty easy time selling the men’s hockey team during his first run with the University of Minnesota as an associate AD for external relations. His responsibilities from 2001 to 2005 included marketing a program that won back-to-back NCAA championships that maxed out its public season-ticket base at 7,765 with a waiting list of over 2,000 fans to take their place.

The footing hasn’t been as easy for the Waterloo, Iowa, native since his return in 2016 to Minneapolis as Minnesota’s athletic director. In addition to far more acute issues that have popped up around his athletic programs, the declining interest around the men’s hockey program is becoming a chronic problem. And the fix isn’t straightforward.

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The hockey program has enjoyed a healthy fanbase for decades, and with it, the athletic department budget benefitted, with men’s hockey leading all NCAA hockey programs in revenue. Announced attendance at Mariucci Arena has historically hovered near its capacity of 10,000 and men’s hockey revenues peaked at $7.683 million in 2013-14. The Gophers brought in $6.230 million in 2015-16 and the second highest revenue producer in college hockey that year was Wisconsin at $4.796 million.

It’s obvious this season that attendance at 3M Arena at Mariucci has declined, as empty seats stand out in the bright bowl of the arena on television and marketing staff deal with a season-ticket-holder base that’s declined by 30 percent from 7,765 to 5,474, with ticketing staff routinely seeing 30 percent of distributed tickets go unused.

The actual attendance for this season’s Oct. 15 game against Penn State was 4,917, the lowest number in the building for any regular-season game in the last four years. The scanned number for Wisconsin on Dec. 2 was 6,407, the lowest it has been for a rivalry game in the last four years. This is also the first season since moving into their new arena that there have been announced attendance numbers under 9,000.

“It’s not other people’s problems that people aren’t coming to our games,” Coyle said. “It’s on us to figure out how to get people to come to our games, and there’s no doubt that it’s a concern for us that we’ve got to figure out.”

The phrase tossed around the new Athlete Village offices in 2018 was coined by Gophers football coach P.J. Fleck. It states you can’t give anyone a reason to cut you. There were certainly a couple reasons to cut Gopher hockey handed out over the past couple seasons, including reseating their ticket holders based on donation history priority and increased ticket costs tied to mandatory scholarship seating donations.

The biggest complaint maroon and gold fans voice is the loss of their rivals after a conference move from the WCHA to the Big Ten. The realignment of college hockey not only meant Minnesota wouldn’t get to play Minnesota Duluth, North Dakota and Minnesota State as often, but they’d be forced to add four conference games each with Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State. The Gophers won league titles during the last two years of the WCHA and the first four years of the Big Ten, but that couldn’t stop a decline in ticket usage from 7,827 attending games in 2014-15 to 7,139 in 2015-16 to 7,063 in 2016-17 and 6,106 this season, which is up from under 6,000 after a late-January visit from No. 1 Notre Dame brought easily the largest two-game crowd of the season.

Gophers head coach Don Lucia often gets fans coming up to him to gripe about missing the old WCHA, but to him the old WCHA he played in actually included many of the teams that now make up the new conference — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Michigan State, and Notre Dame. He remembers that league as the one that Minnesota battled through towards its first three NCAA championships in 1974, 1976 and 1979.

“For me, the narrative has to change because from Day 1 it’s been the negative of the Big Ten,” Lucia said. “Hey, we can go back and say Minnesota was not a proponent of Big Ten hockey — we were perfectly fine in our little world. It would have been great if Penn State would’ve joined the CCHA, they had 12, we had 12 and life moved on, but that’s not what happened. We are a member of the Big Ten, and so the change happened.”

Lucia said there has been so much negative focus on the Big Ten that all fans saw and believed was “the Big Ten stinks,” even if the league is one of the toughest in college hockey this year, with future NHL players on every roster. And while the league weathered some down years by its members to start, it now boasts six schools in the top 20 of the PairWise Ranking headed into the weekend (No. 1 Notre Dame, No. 6 Ohio State, No. 9 Minnesota, No. 15 Penn State, No. 16 Michigan and No. 18 Wisconsin).

Coyle understands that the fans who walked away are dealing with the loss of 30 years of rivalries. But the reality is that the Big Ten is not going away.

“We’re a legacy member of the Big Ten conference as an institution, which is awesome, there are a lot of benefits,” Coyle said. “We’ve got to figure out collectively as Minnesota how we can earn those people back.”

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While former athletic director Norwood Teague might not have known how to get to the press box at Mariucci, Coyle has made it one of his priorities to specifically improve the atmosphere surrounding the hockey program. He has formed a fan advisory board to collaborate on initiatives across athletics, has put together a men’s hockey attendance committee to specifically look at issues affecting crowds at Mariucci, and he is pushing his team to collect actionable data from fans to improve the game-day experience.

Coyle said they’re looking at their non-conference scheduling, their ticketing system, their concessions, even the experience of parking, and he is challenging his staff to take a fresh look at what they have to offer. One thing he hasn’t heard from fans is a desire for alcohol outside the club room and suites, but if he does hear it, he’ll discuss it with the president’s office and the board of regents.

“I think it’s incredibly important that I hope fans feel that we are listening,” Coyle said. “I get comments from people all the time, and I tell people very openly we don’t have all the answers. I wish I could sit here and tell you, ‘Trust me, for the Army series it’s going to be sold out, this is what we’re going to do.’ But we need input and I don’t think we’ve asked our fans for a long time to tell us what you think. … We do recognize what they see.”

The biggest crowds of the season were games when visiting fans filled up sections of the arena. The Notre Dame game on Jan. 27 had a season-high 7,890 scanned tickets with enough fans in green and gold to get a ‘Let’s Go Irish’ chant going during play. The next largest crowd was for Army West Point on Dec. 29, with 6,788 fans — many of them supporting the Black Knights after taking advantage of available seats left by students on winter break.

Chelsea Breza-Berndt is one of the 25 members on the fan advisory board and says she’s noticed the new administration has been very receptive to the back-and-forth discussions they’ve had during their quarterly meetings and follow-up forums. Breza-Berndt says they’ve made quick impacts to game-day communications, student engagement, season ticket-holder engagement, the loyalty rewards system and board members have been able to continue discussions within their own networks.

“Everybody has a different idea of what the ideal game-day experience is for them,” Breza-Berndt said. “Some people are really passionate about their security experience and wait times to get in the door, some people want a butt in every seat and that’s what’s important to them, and some are passionate about their individual experience on game day and perks they receive.”

Assistant AD of marketing Mike Wierzbicki is one of the people trying to take the feedback and put it into action to provide the best atmosphere possible. He acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges is creating an experience to meet the needs for anyone from a five-year-old to an 85-year-old.

“So how do you achieve success?” said Wierzbicki. “You won’t find a venue in the country where the student section is sold out and rocking and having an amazing time and the rest of the venue is empty. … That doesn’t exist. That’s not saying there isn’t value in making that cohesiveness work, but our students will drive the energy in any venue, no matter the sport.”

Some of the programs underway include an unused ticket exchange that allows season ticket holders to get extra seats for $4 if they missed an earlier game; Gophers Insiders, which allows pre-game interaction with coaches and alums; and incentives for perfect attendance for season ticket-holders. The marketing team also has turned to group sales involving youth hockey associations, first responders, military groups and Greek groups to try and provide unique experiences with discounted tickets.

Wierzbicki said they’ll continue to refine the fan experience mixing together the band, video board content, lights, music, and concessions, but that at the end of the day the arena needs butts in the seats to create energy and atmosphere.

The renewal process for the 2018-19 season will start sooner than in years past. The athletic department recognizes the days of mailing out an invoice and waiting for a check are long gone, and they’re working to create value to earn the trust back they might have lost.

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And then there’s the play on the ice. At just 7-10-1-1 in conference, there will be no fifth straight Big Ten regular-season title, and they are in a battle just to get home ice for the first round of the conference playoffs.

“We have high expectations. You look back and we’ve won a league six times in a row and now we’re struggling, that adds to the burden,” Lucia said. “There’s more of that ‘Hey, we’re not living up to what we expect of ourselves,’ and that just adds to it. All of a sudden your legs get heavier, decision-making gets worse, sometimes it compounds itself too.”

The high expectations extend to Lucia, whose contract was extended just prior to the 2016-17 season, and unlike the lengthy five-year extensions offered by Coyle and signed by Fleck and men’s basketball coach Richard Pitino through 2022, the hockey coach’s contract extension was only for two years through the 2018-19 season.

Lucia’s base pay mirrors Michigan coach Mel Pearson’s at $350,000 and is near the top among NCAA head coaches behind Wisconsin coach Tony Granato’s $400,000 per season, Denver coach Jim Montgomery $375,000, and UMass-Lowell coach Norm Bazin’s $365,000. Minnesota Duluth coach Scott Sandelin receives $330,000, Minnesota State coach Mike Hastings’ $298,000, North Dakota coach Brad Berry $297,000, and St. Cloud State coach Bob Motzko $296,000.

Despite the down year, the Gophers — who close the regular-season with two games each against Wisconsin and Penn State on the road, sandwiched around two at home against Ohio State — are still in a fine position to qualify for an NCAA tournament bid this season based on a terrific 9-3 non-conference performance.

No. 11 #Gophers (16-13-1) split with Notre Dame means they can probably hold their PairWise Ranking if they split the rest of the season. Graphic via @chranked pic.twitter.com/kHzAJKALuq — Eric Vegoe (@evegoe) January 31, 2018

Still, it’s what happens in the postseason that could impact what happens beyond the season for the coaching staff. The buyout section of Lucia’s contract was unchanged from his previous deal, and if the university terminates the agreement at any time without just cause, the coach receives one-half of the base salary and one-half of the supplemental retirement payable for the remainder of the term of employment.

“I think Don would say that he and I have a really good relationship. … We’ve talked about (how) we need to win in the NCAA tournament,” Coyle said. “He gets that Big Ten championships are awesome, but it’s also what you do later in March and early April.”

The Frozen Four is in St. Paul this year at Xcel Energy Center, and the goal for the program is to figure out how to get there.

“Obviously we all want the same thing, we want to win at the end of the game,” Lucia said. “I’ve always felt it’s really important for our program to play at a high level, I’ve always felt it’s important to hang banners, we’ve hung a lot of banners over the course of time, and that’s ultimately to me what we try to do each and every year.”

“You get in the NCAA tournament, one team is going to be happy at the end. You get in there, you have to play a good first game, I always liken it to the Stanley Cup Playoffs, that if you played it in four games you’d have a different champion every year, but that’s the way it’s done in our sport, but if we haven’t done well at the end of the year, then it is our responsibility to change it.”

(Top image of Don Lucia: Fred Kfoury III/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)