What are the family activities that will be going on?
We have Thursday, June 13 as our open practice day. All eight teams will be here at some point during the day, starting at nine o’clock and they will have some time on the field and be around. Fan Fest will be open and there’s some new exciting stuff that will be in Fan Fest.
That’ll be good, and then we have team days.
Obviously, Sunday is Father’s Day, so that’s usually a big day at the park.
Monday, game eight, is Kid’s Day, a lot of kids’ activities, mascots. The kids will hit or run the bases at the end, 12 and under because it gets a little crazy with the big kids get involved.
And then Tuesday, June 18 is our Hero’s Night that we do usually annually. There will be different recognitions for police, fire military, you know, medical folks. That’s one that’s pretty popular.
Wednesday, June 19th is Teacher Appreciation. We do gift cards for the first 250 teachers. We had an honorary captain submission where you could submit you or someone else could submit a teacher and say “why”. We randomly picked from those submissions, so four of them will be captains and they’ll get to be in the dugout and just those kinds of things.
Wednesday, June 19 is Country Night. It’s just really, there’s not a concert or anything, but it’s just wear your cowboy hat, country music, just something to just kind of change it up a little bit.
I think I came to that one year, and I had my cowboy boots on.
Yeah, that’s what we want.
…but I always have my cowboy boots on. I got lucky.
(laughter) Then we have two planned fly overs planes, so that the first one will be actually Game Three which is Saturday. It’s kind of weird. Usually, we do Game One and Finals One. But we had some aircraft availability issues and, of course, when you’re doing the military and million-trillion dollar aircraft, it’s, “We’ll take whenever you can do it …
Game Three will be two EA-18 Growlers from US Navy’s attack squadron from Whidbey Island Washington. Finals One will be F-16s from the Colorado Air National Guard out of Buckley Space Force Base in Denver. Our staff member that does all of our military stuff, she puts paperwork in through the Pentagon and then people volunteer. Anyway, that’s what’s going on that’s a little different [or] special: otherwise, just games as usual. And yeah, like I said, some potentially different teams for people to set their eyes on. It’s kind of fun.
Are there any changes to things like one year we had the clear bag policy and then we had no cash …?
No, those all remain, but there should not be any new security things.
We’ll still have the walk-through metal detectors at the gates which have increased the availability of getting people in you do not need to take things out of your pockets. Their technology allows people to just pass through.
Those are nothing nLLSU and their fan base, setting attendance records. We continue just to have a demand for this. It’s a good problem to have.
We increased season ticket prices a little bit this year and still saw 98% renewal. That’s pretty unheard of. The traditions, people wanting to come to this, is still there, if not greater and definitely rebounded from COVID and I think we see you know, it took off. It took us a couple of years to get the corporate base back. People still weren’t gathering or doing employee-client outings and now they’re back.
It was a hard time for a lot of companies and a lot of other organizations not knowing how things were going to go and what to do.
Yeah, and we have two fairly large youth tournaments that pop up around this. The kids play during the day and come at night to a CWS game. Without the GA (general admission) ticket, it became a little more challenging to fulfill some of those needs, but we did that. We increased our group ticket allotment last year. We wanted to make it a really concentrated effort to get priority to those kids to get them in here. Because that’s, I mean, those are our future fans. So, the outfield will be full of little league teams most likely.
It’s great when you’re around town and you see them and you’re seeing them have fun and the love for the sport.
Yes, I think there’s over 700 teams that are enrolled. They come in different waves, so that’s a lot of room nights and a lot of people in restaurants, so it’s pretty exciting.
We did work with Visit Omaha on a new economic impact number. They have a calculator that we worked with them on and inputted numbers. The last time we had done an official study was 2019. We were at $88.3 million in economic impact then and then this year, the 2023 Study yielded $115 million. So again, jobs, taxes, all that stuff.
That’s the next question I was going to ask. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah.
… because it’s a huge impact to the area.
It is. It definitely is, and I think what we have to be thankful for is all the support that we get from the city to support all of these folks visiting.
So yeah, we’ve had three really great years with the teams that we’ve had here. It’s not like people’s disposable income was unlimited, so we’ll see what happens with some of these different teams here.
How many people came last year?
I’d have to [check the] official number. It’s at my desk, but I think it’s uh, it was upwards of 390, some 1000 which was a record. We sold out most sessions and then a lot of them, once we sell out, we do offer about 1000 standing room only tickets, and we’ll do the same. Those are usually determined that day though. And we figured out that we can get about 1000 more in without it just being too much. I think it was an average of 22,000/game. Again, if you average it out, but the other numbers are on my desk.
What’s capacity?
We’re 24,500, just depends on who you talk to.
…And whether they’re standing or not standing.
Yeah.
How many seats are there?
Technically 24,500.
So, any new technology? I remember some time ago there was a change in the bats.
Nothing new that I can think of… ESPN continues to change how they cover this. In fact, the NCAA entered into a new agreement with them starting next year, but what actually was really exciting for us is game two of the finals, which could potentially be the championship game will be on ABC. Being able to be off the cable network and probably get into more homes is pretty cool for us. [It’s the] first time that we’ve been able to do that. ESPN continues to expand our coverage of baseball.
They used a drone the last few years and then so looking at the at the game from different lenses. That’s been kind of cool for the audience.
The technology with the drones…
Yes. The funniest story of all is we have this resident hawk over here. It lives on the light standard over here in right field. She not a big fan of drones. You’ll see her kind of causing some problems sometimes out there.
So..she feels the drone is threatening.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So she’s pretty harmless, but she does show herself well.
..You know, your babies and your home. A drone must be a pretty strange animal [to her] and it flies.
Yes. It’s been pretty funny. Some people have names for her, but . . .
I was going to ask what do they call her
They call her “Falconia” or something. I don’t know. But there’s some funny stories that come around throughout the two weeks while they’re here.
I remember one of the years, there were this couple of birds that just kept flying around, a pair.
When you have an outside venue, you’re going to get some of that stuff.
Anything else you can think of? We want to get the fans all ready and know what are they supposed to be doing.
This year is pretty similar to most, so nothing new that we need a lot of people know about other than just some of those special days and we do still have Monday, Tuesday afternoon game tickets for sale, pretty reasonably in the outfield.
We have the ticket exchange where people will go out if they can’t make it. They’ll resell their tickets. We’ll just be a normal year, but were interested in to see how the Super Regionals shake out, and see who’s coming here. And hopefully we’ll know everybody by Monday night.
There’s just a lot of surprises [which teams are coming] this year.
Yes, definitely, which isn’t all bad.
Our opening event, we used to do the parade and everything. Last year we did it at the Steel House. It’s just a more private for the teams because they are here with one goal, and so we’re doing that again where they get to see a different part. So it’s a shorter than kind of per their request, but so…
So no big parade …
No big parade, fireworks or anything. Not this year.
We just we kind of struck out a lot. We had half the time ended up with weather that ruined all of our plans. We’re like, maybe we need to look at this differen
Once those are wired, they do have to go off. It’s sad to put those off for no one really.
They’ve oftentimes gone up just for us. That’s why we need to look at this differently. You know, continue to make sure that we have the student athletes’ best interest in their time.
You don’t want to wear them out either.
Right. That’s a really long day with their media obligations and practices and stuff. We’re trying to be cognizant of that while still giving them something special here.
Something that’s interesting, and something I learned this year that I didn’t know, is Saving Grace Food [Rescue]. They work with Levy, so any food that does not come out of the kitchens here that’s made, goes directly to them so that they can provide it to different parts of the community. And we’ve been working with them to try and also get that out to some of our private people that have hospitality, so that this food isn’t just being thrown away.
Some of the other events like . . .
Baseball Village, the Hilton does a lot of catering for hospitality. That’s a really cool community piece that I did not know about until this year.
Oh, that’s great.
I’ve been wanting to do a story on them. But they had different troubles different years when I was trying to do it. So this would be really great lead in to that story, too….
Yeah.
…Because we try to promote the nonprofits and people doing good in Omaha. I told you before we don’t do bad news,
If we find, bad news, we might connect people behind the scenes. But we want OmahaNebraska.com to be that place to go to find out cool good things.
Just another…We have a renewed partnership with the zoo. We’ve had our national championship trophy out there and got a win with the penguins, and interacted with some of the animals because it’s obviously our number one tourism destination. It makes sense for us. We have obviously a lot of our visitors will also visit there. It makes sense that we collaborate, so it’s been fun. They do nights at the zoo, adult nights at the zoo, so we’re going to have the trophy there Thursday. It’s going to be a baseball themed night.
There are probably some really good puns for social media.
We’re just trying to still get out [the word], still talk about it with our community partners and all that.
Thank you.
More on Fan Fest:
https://www.ncaa.com/fan-fest-present
2024
Please check out our posts on the College World Series and share!
Omaha Interview: Alec Woockman, the Executive Sous Chef at Levy Restaurants
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-interview-alec-woockman/
Omaha Event: College World Series Food Tasting, 12 June
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-event-college-world-series-food-tasting-12-june/
Omaha Event: College World Series- Food Tasting-The Fan Food
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-event-college-world-series-food-tasting/
Omaha Event: College World Series Pre-Game Press Conference, 12 June
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-event-college-world-series-pre-game-press-conference-12-june/
Omaha Interview with Amy Hornocker, Executive Director, College World Series of Omaha, Inc.
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-interview-with-amy-hornocker-executive-director-college-world-series-of-omaha-inc/
