I arrived at the first-ever Capitals’ Convention yesterday just in time to catch the start of the ‘Covering the Caps’ panel discussion late in the morning, walked into the two joint convention rooms hosting it, and was barely able to wiggle my way into standing space in the very back of the very large room. There were easily 500 Capitals’ hockey fans cramming the room, 495 of them wearing either a red Caps’ sweater or a red Caps’ t-shirt. Various NHL officials attended the convention, and more than one commented on not knowing exactly what ‘Rock the Red’ referred to.
“I know now,” Mike Murphy, NHL Senior Vice President of Hockey Operations, told his panel audience Saturday afternoon.
Down in the main ballroom — 70,000 square feet of it — the volume of conventioneers in lines to shop for red Capitals’ merchandise often exceeded those for player autographs. Fan faces were painted red. Autograph-hungry fans carried posters of their heroes uniformed in red. Team alumni wore their old red road sweaters. And the Capitals really did nothing to accent this uni-coloring of lower Prince Georges County, Maryland, on Saturday — it wasn’t as if bouquet-bursts of red balloons or streamers enveloped the convention space. There was at least one competing convention taking place at the Gaylord on Saturday, and I had sympathy for the comparative mundaneness of it: ours was chock full of passion and smiles and high-fives and laughter and rousing cheer — oh, and a lot of hand-helds Twittering away.
The single overwhelming association of this convention for me was of an already sizable fanbase obliterating, with finality, any lingering belief of apathy toward hockey in this area. The last time I saw this many Caps’ fans congealed in unified passion away from the team’s home rink was at 2:30 on weekday June morning out at Piney Orchard a few hours after Joe Juneau catapulted an unlikely Caps’ club past Buffalo and into the Stanley Cup finals in 1998.
I have bad news for the Capitals’ employees who labored so long and hard to pull this convention off: it was so successful that you have to do it again, next year, and then the year after that, and so on. With this Capitals’ Convention the organization has created, for the first time in its history, a must-attend event outside of its home rink. The program content is wonderful for young children and simultaneously edifying for mature fans.
Like you, I have to attend my fair share of traditional business conventions, with their stultifying agendas and often phoney and forced networking. This convention of puck-lovers was the antithesis of those. Panel discussion after panel discussion you didn’t want to end (most especially the press conference for kids one!). I met readers of my blog I perhaps otherwise wouldn’t have, and it was important for me to look an OFB patron in the eye, shake his or her hand, and say “The time you take to share your own passion with our readers is what makes a blog a community.” I learned on Saturday that a sliver of federal and private sector workers around the region read this and the other terrific Caps’ blogs and consider the content the highlight of their days.
I knew something special had taken hold by 1:00 yesterday afternoon. The Caps’ Mike Vogel, who seems to work 27 hours a day during the hockey season, came up to me, shook my hand, and smiling widely said to me, “Can you believe this?”
I asked one of the best centers ever to play for the Caps, Michael Pivonka, if he ever could have imagined attending such an event during his playing days in D.C.
“No, not even close. The interest in hockey in this area has completely changed,” Pivo told me.
“The game has changed [since] the lockout, they changed some rules, and it’s more fun to watch, and having the talent they have here — the best player in hockey, probably — it’s exciting. I mean, who wouldn’t like to come to the game?”
Undoubtedly there will be a litany of lessons learned for the organization from Convention I. Foremost among them: should this remain a September gig, which by virtue of its proximity to the hockey season precludes many, many Capitals’ alumni from traveling into town for it? Or should the buzz about this be targeted for the quiet months of the hockey season (July or August)? There are tradeoffs with every option — a mid-summer convention, for instance, presumably would mean fewer current Capitals in town to attend.
But this is an event for the fans — they are its star attraction. The Capitals knew this, and they offered their fans a pretty big thank you this weekend.
3 Comments
The convention far exceeded my expectations. I went initially because of the equipment sale and because the person who I share season tickets with wanted to go. The panel sessions were fantastic. The main room was what I expected the whole thing to be.
I hope they make a few changes next year to address the following:
- The main room was too loud to hear the presentations on the big stage. Better isolation of the interactive events and merchandise areas could help.
- The merchandising has to be revamped. It seemed like the only lines longer than for the autographs was the line snaking around the building to pay for a shirt.
- One of my favorite parts outside of the panels were the trophies. One was missing however, but I’ll leave that up to the players to correct for next year.
Overall though, for an inaugural convention I believe it went smooth. I’m sure that the staff will go back and make future conventions that much better.
“The single overwhelming association of this convention for me was of an already sizable fanbase obliterating, with finality, any lingering belief of apathy toward hockey in this area.”
Shhhh……Much of the local media still doesn’t get it.
I enjoyed the Bear Facts panel. Thanks for moderating it! I thought Woods and Alzner were great.
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