On Monday afternoon, Tiger-Cats president Scott Mitchell and head coach George Cortez took part in a conference call with the national media. Here’s a transcript of what they had to say…
OPENING REMARKS
Scott Mitchell (SM): Thank you to everybody for joining the call today. It is obviously an exciting week as we get ready to head into training camp. This season marks another year of excellent growth for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and we’re quite thrilled to come off of three exciting playoff seasons, which gave our fans a lot to get excited about. We’re now looking to take that next step from good to great and we feel we have a lot of reasons to be feeling excellent about the 2013 season.
As I said, we’ve had three straight seasons of record growth, including 2011, and we are trending toward that again [this season]. Despite three consecutive off-seasons of double-digit growth in every revenue category, we have had by far the best off-season on record, in some cases doubling and tripling the previous off-season’s successes.
Corporate partnerships continue to escalate at double-digit growth. We are essentially sold out of corporate partnerships in the stadium and could probably sell half a million of them if we had the inventory, and that’s very exciting.
Merchandise has more than quadrupled for the Tiger-Cats in terms of retail sales in the last three seasons, and again, we have had by far the best off-season we have ever had in that regard. Just for example, our new jersey launch with Reebok was a huge success. Obviously the fans not only love what we are doing but the look of the new merchandise. We’ve sold four times more new jerseys at this point of the year than we had at this time last year.
Season seats continue to be a hot item in Hamilton and throughout the TigerTown region. As I said, we’ve had great double-digit growth in each of the last three seasons.
This off-season and through the season we anticipate adding more than 3,000 new season seat holders to the Tiger-Cats season seat base. We are on a three-year plan to get into our new stadium, which will essentially see us sold out of new season tickets once we get into the stadium for 2014. We are very excited about it and as I said we have had great growth from a business perspective and we expect 2012 to be the fourth straight season of record revenue for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
We are continuing to work hard on our regional approach in the TigerTown region. We have had a great partnership and buy-in from the league office and as most of you know we have been running both football and community events throughout the TigerTown region, which stretches from London to Guelph, Oakville to down in Niagara Falls. This off-season we have had great commissioner’s luncheons in Kitchener, Waterloo, St. Catharines, and Brantford.
We’ll have another event in Burlington this summer which will be sold out and, of course, we are looking forward to our Black and Gold Day up in Burlington at Nelson High School on Saturday, June 16th. We also have a St. Catharines practice on Saturday June 23rd and we will have another full practice in Kitchener and Waterloo at some point, likely in August.
We have launched our Play Action program which is a great minor football program that sees the Tiger-Cats investing in minor football throughout the TigerTown region. We have had a great response since we rolled out that program this spring.
Obviously we are very excited about the 2012 season. We have had a terrific partnership with our friends at Tim Hortons, who are bringing us the Final Season of Ivor Wynne after almost a hundred years of participation at that site. More than 60 years of Tiger-Cat football will come to an end at the stadium this year. We are thrilled with the investment that our friends at Tim Hortons have bought into this year. They are rolling out the most intensive marketing campaign we have ever had with a corporate partner as they launch the Final Season of Ivor Wynne in more than 60 of their stores across the TigerTown region.
Part of that is all the excitement that is building as part of the All-Time Tiger-Cat Team. The fan polling will begin in the next few weeks and there is a huge amount of interest amongst our fans and everybody who is a part of TigerTown across the country. We are excited to get that launched, and we have had a phenomenal reaction to our ticket stock capturing great moments in Tiger-Cats history. The reaction is such that we have had almost 500 of our season seat holders ask if they could get their season tickets framed and replaced with generic ticket stock so that they could keep that as part of a memorable piece of the final season of Ivor Wynne.
Obviously we are excited about the final regular season game at Ivor Wynne Stadium which will be on October 27th against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and clearly, we are looking forward to closing out Ivor Wynne with a final playoff game at some point in time in November.
The theme of the Final Season of Ivor Wynne Stadium presented by Tim Hortons is to engage the fans and to celebrate the players. Obviously, the commemorative ticket stock is an example of that. We are very excited to be bringing some of the great all-time Tiger-Cats back to the stadium this year for the final season. Each game, one of the all-time Tiger-Cats will be there as a 13th man if you will. This will include the return of the great Earl Winfield on Labour Day to celebrate one of the great performances of all time in the Labour Day Classic.
So we are thrilled and excited, and it has generated a huge amount of enthusiasm for everyone in the TigerTown region to celebrate Ivor Wynne Stadium in the way it deserves, and clearly we feel like there is a very exciting and compelling product on the field as well.
I will let Coach Cortez speak about the football operations in detail and I will say that we are excited about the schedule, and obviously with starting off our exhibition schedule with our Season Seat Appreciation Day which was a huge success last year. We had an almost sold out crowd in the stands for an exhibition game. We have distributed more than 4,000 more tickets than we had last year at the same point in time, and that has been a huge hit with our season seat holders who essentially get to own the stadium for that exhibition game.
We are thrilled to kick it off against Andy Fantuz’s old team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, on June 29th and it’s a real source of pride for us to be able to kick off the CFL season. We have a great schedule throughout the season and the CFL office has done a terrific job listening to all the teams and trying to put together a schedule with our friends and partners at TSN that gives us the best chance for success on and off the field. Clearly, we are thrilled with the return of the Argos to Labour Day which should be make for an electric atmosphere for the final Labour Day game at Ivor Wynne stadium.
I will say that I think everybody across the league is hugely enthusiastic about the concept of the 100th anniversary of the Grey Cup. For us in Southern Ontario and in the TigerTown region, the ability to combine the final season of Ivor Wynne Stadium with the pursuit of the 100th Grey Cup is something we are all taking very seriously here. It would be quite something for us to be able to close out Ivor Wynne Stadium and be able to participate in that game and obviously that is the goal.
In terms of the football operations, Coach Cortez will speak to that, but I will say th
at I think we have developed a great group in the football operations side. We have a ton of depth in terms of the administration and management. With Coach Cortez, of course Bob O’Billovich, Danny McManus, Joe Womack, Drew Allemang, and Shawn Burke, we feel we’ve got as good of a front office as anybody in the league with a lot of depth and a lot of expertise and who has been able to deliver a great competitive group of players for Coach Cortez’s coaching staff.
We’re thrilled to have Coach Cortez on board as the Director of Football Operations and very enthusiastic about the coaching staff he has put together.b In closing, for us and on behalf of our owner Bob Young, I know its an exciting time for everybody to be a part of the Tiger-Cats right now, and we feel like we have a great team put together both on and off the field. We certainly feel like we have been able to take advantage of the great resources that our terrific owner Bo Young has allowed us to have. To be able to go out and pursue coaches, players and management people enables us to be competitive and certainly makes us feel like we are able to pursue that Grey Cup in 2012.
With that being said, I’ll turn it over to Coach Cortez Director of Football Operations and Head Coach to talk about football operations.
George Cortez (GC): Since I came on with the team in January, our first duty was to put this coaching staff together and I think we have a good mix of veteran coaches and young coaches. That was a goal that I had. We have guys who have experience as CIS coaches, as CFL coaches, and with the NCAA. Today we added a former Tiger-Cat, Paul Osbaldiston, as an assistant special teams coach. He’ll be working with the kickers and we think that’s a great opportunity for the kickers and punters, and for Paul to get more involved with the special teams aspect of the game.
After putting the staff together, we moved straight into the schemes and the playbooks and working on the draft. We had minicamp in April which did a good job in putting down the foundations of what we want to do as a team and letting the players know how we plan to go about practising. It was educational and evaluative, and we made some decisions off of that. We brought in additional players where we felt that we needed to. From our viewpoint it was a huge success and gave us a chance to evaluate things pre-draft. We felt that the draft went very well and that the coaches and personnel team did well to put together a plan on draft day.
We’re very excited about finally getting started this week. It feels like it’s been a long time that we’ve been talking about practice and we’ll finally be able to start practicing and preparing for games. With the rookie camp this week, one of the biggest things will be our bringing in three rookie quarterbacks to camp and deciding on which two of those will be coming to main camp with us.
Some of the guys will have been in mini-camp, so we’ll have a leg up at some positions, but it’s very educational, in that we want some of the rookies that we have to be able to compete on Sunday when we start main camp with everybody here. These four practices are more about bringing those guys up to speed so that they’re not totally lost at the first practice than about working them to death. For the quarterbacks it’ll be very evaluative and for everybody else it’ll be more educational.
One of the things we have working for us this year – and that anybody who starts anew has – is that we’re not tied down to a system of how the ratio is going to be set and who the designated imports are going to be. We’re probably going to look at a variety of combinations to decide what works best for us. Maybe it won’t always be the same. One week it could be one way and the next it could be different. That’s one of the advantages that we have with a brand new coaching staff and a new team for all practical purposes. We’re trying to have our players understand that it’s all about playing fast, playing hard, and playing confidently. I was encouraged with the way that we practiced and the way that we went about our mini-camp and I’m very excited to get started on Sunday and get ready for this new season.
QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIOD BEGINS
Coach Cortez, how did the Paul Osbaldiston hiring come about and do you foresee him one day becoming a full-time coach?
GC: It was a situation which just came about recently. He worked with us as a consultant last year and came by to discuss some possibilities. I think it will help our kickers to have someone who was such a successful kicker and punter in the league around and it will also allow him to see what happens behind the scenes and experience coaching to see if that’s something he wants to do in the future.
Q: Speaking of the rookie quarterbacks that you’re bringing to camp, could you give us a brief scouting report on them and what you like about their games?
GC: The key thing about Tate Forcier – who many people probably saw play as a freshman at Michigan – is that he has an amazing ability to make plays in clutch situations. Sedrick Harris, who’s from a small school in East Texas – East Texas Baptist – is an outstanding athlete. Both guys have above average arms and hopefully we’ll give them the chance to show us what they can do later this week.
Q: Scott, you guys have had a few pretty interesting promotions over the years, including letting the fans vote for what play the team would open the game with. Do you foresee doing something like that again this year?
SM: That was one of the first things that Coach Cortez wanted to clarify. He wouldn’t sign his contract until we made sure we weren’t letting the fans call the plays any more (laughs). No, that was a fun thing that we did – and went 2 for 2 on and got a first down out of – but this year we’re engaging the fans through a number of different methods. We’ve used social media extremely well over the course of this off-season. Bob Young has had a great time tweeting some of our incoming announcements and at the same time giving people some loose trails on a few other things. We will continue to differentiate ourselves through the way that we use social media and the way that we engage our fans. This year, the big thing in engaging our fans is having them decide through a 100-percent fan vote the members of our All-Time Team. I know that’s generating a lot of excitement with our fans.
Q: Another promotion that you held last year involved teaming up with Mark Hominick and showcasing mixed martial arts. Do you foresee doing anything along those lines in the future?
SM: We’ve got an ongoing arrangement with Mark. He’s a popular fighter in the UFC and it was a great promotion for us last season. He’ll certainly be involved this year. We’ll have another mixed martial arts day which will include a number of fighters and will be headlined by Mark Hominick, who’ll be giving a clinic in the sport.
Q: Has the CFL guaranteed you guys a Grey Cup within the first two years of the new stadium?
SM: No. The CFL has a great policy in place regarding how and when they announce Grey Cups. We always talk about long-term planning in regards to everything in the league but there are certainly no guarantees regarding that.
Q: What will be the seating numbers and configurations at the new stadium for regular season and will the stadium be expandable for the Grey Cup.?
SM: The stadium process is ongoing and we’re thrilled about it. The winning bid should be decided in the coming months. It’s been a bit of an inverse process where you build out the details a
nd cost, and then the bid is awarded. I can’t really talk about any of those details, all I can tell you is that the three qualified bidder are world-class organizations. I’ve seen the presentations and they’re phenomenal, and we’re excited to bring that to the public at some point this year.
Q: Where are you playing in 2013?
SM: We’ll go into those details when we have them.
Q: It’s been a busy off-season for your team, with a number of new faces coming in. Is there one off-season acquisition that has you most excited?
GC: Obviously on offence, we signed a couple of guys that have been very successful players in our league. Martell Mallett was the CFL’s Rookie of the Year, and of course we added Andy Fantuz. And we’ve got a guy in the fold now that we drafted a few years ago in Sam Giguere. Those would be the high-profile guys on offence. We signed some guys on defence that not a lot of people know about but who our personnel people are very high on and expect big things from. But we’ll let their actions speak for them when they get here.
Q: On defence, with the release of Stevie Baggs and with Justin Hickman going to the NFL, there seems to be two vacancies at defensive end. Is there anyone we should be looking at to challenge for those spots?
GC: We saw some guys at mini-camp that we liked, and we’ve also signed a few in the past few weeks as every other team has. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Greg Peach, who we signed away from Edmonton and was a very good player for them. We think he could be a very good player for us at that position.
Q: Any status update on Marwan Hage?
GC: It’s a long rehab period and that rehab period is still ongoing. We’ll cross the bridge of when he can play when he’s fully rehabbed.
Q: With this being your first foray into head coaching, how are you feeling about the approaching season?
GC: I’m very excited about getting started. I think we have a great group of coaches who have been working very hard. During the mini-camp I was very excited about how our players reacted to being coached and how their attention to detail stood up and I think it’ll only get better as we get to full practices. I’m like everybody else, I’m just excited to be moving toward games. There’s only so much you can do on the practice field.
Q: How do you plan to use Sam Giguere?
GC: We have a starting point for Sam as we do for all of our receivers. That’s one of the toughest things when you put a new system is getting people into the right place. The guys who were here at OTAs and mini camp have a much better feel for where the best place is for them. And that’s one of the things we need to determine with Sam, whether he’ll be inside or outside. Ultimately, I won’t know until he gets here and practices for a week or ten days. Will he be returning kicks? I know that’s one thing that he’s done well. How he stacks up with the other guys that we have in that spot, we’ll have to see. That’s why you hold training camp.
Q: You’ve got a pretty formidable receiving corps with the addition of Fantuz and Giguere, and the return of Chris Williams. How do you keep all of those guys happy?
GC: You can never keep all of the guys that handle the ball happy. They have to understand that there are only so many opportunities. There’s only one ball and only one guy can have it on a given play, which is the same problem that everyone in the league has. We’ve had some great players in the past that have been able to coexist, because they understand that one of the reasons they can be successful is that having good players at other positions takes the emphasis of the defence off of them and forces defenders to worry about more than one guy. So I think that we have some good weapons and that it gives us the ability to spread the field.
Q: What kind of offence can we expect from the Ticats this season?
GC: Hopefully one that can score enough points to win games (laughs). We’d like to be multi-faceted. We want to be simple in what we do but multi-faceted so that it’s easy for the guys to become acclimatized to what it is that we do.
Q: A lot of attention will be paid to the offensive and defensive lines given the injuries and departures at those positions. How much will you be focused on the trenches?
GC: Obviously, whether you can run the ball, whether you can protect the quarterback, and whether you can put pressure on the opposing quarterback all starts with the fronts on both sides. It is an important aspect of our team and we’ll obviously be evaluating what’s going on in those spots play-to-play and day-to-day. Is it overwhelming us, thinking about the lines? No, but it is an important part of what’s going to be going on at training camp.
Q: You’ve worked with both Andy Fantuz and Henry Burris in the past… what did you like about the way they play that made you want to coach them again?
GC: Andy is a very good player – a very productive player. He’s done an outstanding job in his career in getting open and making plays. Henry was here before I was hired, but we worked together on two separate occasions. We have a pretty good understanding of what he’s done well in the past and hopefully we can build on that. Nothing is ever the same. Everything changes and has different focuses, but having worked with Henry, I think I have a pretty good idea of what we can do best before it’s all over.
Q: Is Burris your starter?
GC: Either him or Aaron Rodgers (laughs). Yeah, Henry will begin training camp as the starter and will be there until someone beats him out. That’s the nature of pro sports.
Q: How do you manage the number of repetitions that each quarterback sees in preparation for the new season?
GC: We have a plan, and I talked to the coaches this morning about how I view the first preseason game. We have a plan for how we practice and how the reps are broken down, and it’s based on how we’ve done things in the past. I think it’s proven to be a good way to ensure guys their reps. There are only so many snaps, and while you’re trying to get everyone as ready to play as possible, you also want the guy you expect to be your starter to be the most prepared of all.
