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NBL Canada: London Lightning still the league’s model franchise

The Lightning have made an impact both on the court and in the community. (KMontgomery 2014)
The Lightning have made an impact both on the court and in the community. (KMontgomery 2014)

Jamie Clark still remembers the feeling of excitement.

He says there were rumours for years about professional basketball coming to London, Ont., a city that’s sporting landscape has always centred around its junior hockey team, in some capacity.

So when the National Basketball League of Canada and, more specially, the London Lightning actually arrived in 2011 it was a special moment.

And over the last three-plus years, Clark, a teacher and boy’s basketball coach at Saunders Secondary School, feels the Lightning have given the city’s “tight basketball community” something to support together.

“You walk down the streets of London and you see people wearing Lightning toques and all the guys on my team have Lightning gear,” Clark, who says he’s been to just about every one of the team’s home games the last three years, told Yahoo Sports Canada.

“I also have a four-year-old boy and I help coach his team and these kids love the Lightning. It’s really something special for London.”

The idea of a community embracing a minor pro basketball team – earlier this season the Lightning broke the NBL Canada record for the largest single-game crowd with 8,500 fans filing into the Budweiser Gardens – may be difficult to explain to someone from the Greater Toronto Area, where pro teams like the Argos struggle to draw and a junior hockey team recently packed up and headed north due to lack of fan interest.

But in London, where there’s really no major sports show in town other than the Knights, it’s worked.

The Lightning have become the measuring stick for success in the NBL not only because they’ve captured two championships in the league’s first three seasons, but they’re the only franchise in the eight-team league that averages upwards of 3,000-plus fans at home games on a consistent basis.

While those numbers may not seem all that impressive, consider that this is a league where some teams struggle to attract even a few hundred people to games.

So how have the Lightning done it?

According to Morris Dalla Costa, a sports columnist with the London Free Press who’s covered the team and the league since its inception, success on the court has been vital in building up the Lightning fan base.

“I think you can build on success and you can say, ‘hey we’re a championship team’ especially in London,” said Dalla Costa, who made headlines last season when he was ejected from a league playoff game. “Success legitimized the product; it showed people that this team was for real.”

There’s a lot more to it than that, though and both Dalla Costa and Clark give a huge amount of credit to Lightning owner Vito Frijia,

Frijia, a major land developer in London who also has deep roots in the city that include leading the Fanshawe College men’s basketball team to back-to-back Canadian College Athletics Association titles in 1980 and 1981 used his connections within the community to help get the franchise off the ground early on.

“I had a huge advantage because I’ve been in the city for the majority of my life and I’ve done a lot of business here so we had a lot of business connections,” Frijia said. “That’s really the majority of our sales is the business community in our town. So a lot of the people in the business community supported the team and bought tickets for themselves, their staff and their families.

“The first year, before our first game we spent $200,000 on marketing. We were on every radio station, on television and in the newspapers talking about the Lightning. We were visiting schools; everybody in town knew who the Lightning was. You’ve got to create that buzz so that people want to come.”

Frijia says the franchise sold about 600 seasons tickets the first season and each year they’ve increased their average attendance at home by over 1,000 people a game.

“I think this thing all goes south if [the Lightning] don’t have an owner who’s well known in the community, and not just that, but someone who’s a really big business guy in the community” Dalla Costa said. “

“A lot of these guys [who bought tickets] weren’t basketball fans, but once they tried the product they loved it. You could speak to a number of guys who would tell you, ‘I would never have watched a basketball game before,’ but they came to London Lightning games and enjoyed it. Word spread that way.”

Frijia also made it his mandate to not only make sure the product was something people around the city knew about, but to get the players themselves out into the community as well.

“Every morning they were somewhere whether it was a school or a business or a charity event,” Dalla Costa said.

It’s something that as a teacher, Clark has experienced first hand.

He remembers the entire team coming into his school a few weeks ago and talking to the students about issues that are bigger than basketball.

“The whole team sat on a bench in front of the school and the coach talked about being positive role models, about doing well in school, about being a good person and the students and staff got to ask the players questions,” Clark said.

“They learned about these guys without any barriers. And afterwards a lot of the kids got t-shirts and they got to meet them and [get] autographs. You don’t get that with most sports teams.”

Still, even with how much success the team has found in London and the positive influence they’ve had on the community, there are no guarantees it’s a product that will be around in the long-term.

There’s no shying away from the fact that the league itself is struggling. With many franchises having a hard time filling buildings, a lack of major corporate sponsors and a ‘historic’ TV deal that has yet to actually produce a game, it's worth questioning whether the league itself is sustainable.

That said, while Clark says  he’s worried about the future of the NBL, he’s not concerned about what the league folding would mean for basketball in London.

“I’m pretty sure Vito would find a way to bring basketball back to London in a different league,” he said. “I watched a little bit of the D-League on the NBA channel here and the teams I was watching don’t have the same fan base the Lightning have and that’s the NBA D-League. Some of those guys are going to or already have been in the NBA.

“It would surprise me if there wasn’t basketball in London for years and years to come and if Vito wasn’t part of it.