On this episode of Fired Up, Kerry Vick, Director of Tickets – Premium Services & Events with the Indianapolis Indians, talks about opening up the venue for many events which allows the community to experience the stadium in different ways – but always to be entertained – and the importance that plays for the bottom-line.

Kerry joined the Indians in 2000 and has spent his career getting his hands involved in almost all facets of the business.  He has led teams in tickets, suite sales & services, and premium hospitality while making contributions to sponsorship sales, marketing, facility improvements, hiring and training, and culture-building.  

‍Kerry led the formation of Victory Field’s special events business in 2012 and turned it into a year-round operation in 2020 after redesigning the suite level and premium seating program through multi-phase renovations.

A Ball State graduate and board member for the ALSD and Sports Circle Indy, Kerry also chairs the Indians Fun Committee and coaches youth basketball and softball in the community.  

Chris:

Welcome to Fired Up. Today, we welcome Kerry Vick. He’s director of sales for the Indianapolis Indians. Kerry, welcome. Glad to have you with us.

Kerry Vick:

Thanks you, Chris. Glad to be here. Appreciate you having me.

Chris:

Sure. So let’s just jump in, and tell us about yourself. Just background, position, responsibilities, how you found your way to Indianapolis and what your day to day looks like compared to eight months ago.

Kerry Vick:

Yeah, you got it. You got it. So I started off with the Indianapolis Indians fresh out of college. I went to Ball State. I’m a lifelong Hoosier, born and raised in a small Indiana town. Came down the road to Indianapolis just in need of an internship to graduate. The old story, it’s the best way to break into sports, find an internship program that gives you an opportunity to just get your feet wet, go through the grind, go through all the mud, and if you come out of that and you love what you do, then you know you’re cut out for sports, and if you don’t, you’re not. So I did that and I happened to land a internship with the Indianapolis Indians, Victory Fields, the AAA team, here in the heart of central Indiana, and I love it. It’s a fantastic organization.

Kerry Vick:

I didn’t come into this industry with the hopes and dreams of being a lifelong Minor League Baseball guy. Everyone who’s coming out with that degree in sports management or sport administration has their sights set on the Major Leagues because that’s where all the glitz and glamor is, but I love the small organization feel. I love the connectivity that you have with the community, and it’s just been a great fit for me and I’ve now been there for just over 20 years now. And I’ve been around since we had a relatively new stadium, ,to now, we’ve got a relatively old stadium, and seeing that evolution and life cycle has been pretty rewarding for me.

Kerry Vick:

What I do on a day-to-day basis? So I oversee tickets with a specific focus on premium services and events, and that’s a bigger and bigger part of sports in general, and hospitality is just figuring out the best ways to capture your clientele and create the kind of experiences that they’re looking for. So premium seating and premium services is basically any time when a ticket is more than just a ticket, so that includes anything from food and beverage to extra leg room, to just more of a social interaction kind of space, and some amenities to it, and it’s considered a premium seat. And that’s an area that sports in general has gotten better and better and smarter and smarter at over the past, really, five, 10, 15, 20 years, is figuring out how to create those experiences.

Kerry Vick:

So that’s one of the things that I’ve tried to bring to the organization is kind of what my background is in. The other side is events were really, any time the team is on the road or we go through an off season and we’ve got this really nice ballpark in the middle of Indianapolis, right across the street from the Convention Center and some hotels, and we’re like, what are we going to do with this space? There are people that would love to come in here and do something, and so our events program has taken off and given us the opportunity to create some of those different kinds of experiences that people don’t get a chance to do, to get down in the field, play their own game of softball, have a wedding reception there, that kind of thing.

Kerry Vick:

So I oversee the events program from A to Z. I’m heavily involved in the premium service sales and operations. We’ve got a sales department that handles most of the inbound and outbound, but in terms of strategy and services and operations, I’m right there. And I also work with our corporate suite holders as well, so I oversee those sales services and operations. But that’s kind of in a nutshell. At the minor league level, you wear all the proverbial hats. You get to do a lot of different things. You’re not pigeonholed into one or two areas, so that’s what I love about it.

Chris:

I’d say I’d love that. I find that to be just so much fun. And Minor League Baseball, I love Minor League Baseball because it’s so engaging, and I think even Major League has taken a cue in some ways to engage fans from the Minor League organizations, but Minor League Baseball is going through some changes. Can you tell us a bit about your market first, and the reaction shown by the people of the greater Indianapolis area?

Kerry Vick:

Indianapolis is interesting because I’m sure every team and every market’s got his own story. For us, Indianapolis, it’s at that cusp of being a major league market but we’re a minor league team and you don’t get that a lot. You get a lot of minor league teams and minor league markets or major league teams and major league markets, but to be in a city that’s very rich on sports and sports has been the backbone and really help make the city what it is. There’s a lot of stuff that we’re competing against, and then being a minor league team, it’s interesting. We get a lot of support from the community. We’ve got a really good fan base but you don’t have the same passion of fandom as you would get for a major league team, or if you’re in a small town and that’s the only team in town and you’re on the front page of the sports every day and everyone embraces you there. We’re in that weird no man’s land where we get very little coverage around the market because there is so much going on. There’s two major league teams, it’s the racing capital of the world, there’s Butler University, there’s some other universities really close by. We’ve got a lot of amateur sports, a lot of other minor league stuff, so there’s just so much that we’re competing against.

Kerry Vick:

For us, we could have a championship caliber team or we could have a last place team and our fans really don’t care. We fought that battle for many years. We did everything we could to try to get genuine passion and interest in the club, in our record, in our players, and the fans, they’ve got so much else going on, other things that they’re paying attention to, but we turned that into an advantage. We’ve found over the years that you can roll out a really consistent product night in and night out when it doesn’t matter who you’re playing, it doesn’t matter who’s on the mound, it doesn’t matter if we’ve won eight straight or lost eight straight, the crowd is pretty much the exact same size as it would be otherwise and they’re going to be enthusiastic throughout. They may leave in the sixth inning and have no idea what the score is, but if you exit polled them on the way out, they’re like, “Yeah, we had a fantastic time, best time of our summer.” We might have lost 12 to nothing and they don’t care.

Kerry Vick:

That part is really interesting for us and it just allows us to really focus on what we do well, which is entertainment, making sure the facility is nice and clean and it’s attractive and we’re touching people in a lot of different ways, we make sure the food options are there and it’s warm and the drink options are there and they’re cold and clean restrooms and easy parking and very fan-friendly services. All that kind of stuff is really what’s critical for us to succeed and thrive. That’s a little look into our market and what our daily challenges are.

Chris:

Sure. It’s interesting and I’m happy to hear that you know you’re in the entertainment business, that it’s keeping those folks that come entertained and it’s a joy for them to be there, and the whole idea whether they win or lose, that’s very interesting because obviously your on-field product changes pretty regularly so you don’t get to develop a hero. You develop the hero, he goes to the show, right?

Kerry Vick:

Absolutely. We’ve got the highest level of baseball in the entire state of Indiana, but our guys don’t even want to be playing for us because they’re at the AAA level. They’re just one twisted ankle away from getting a phone call up where they’re going to make salary 50 times greater than what they’re making for us. They don’t want to be there, but they get that’s part of the process and we get that it’s good for them to move their way through Indianapolis as quickly as they can, and yeah, the talent level is a revolving door. We don’t have the same starting lineup from one day to the next, but that’s part of it. We’ve accepted that long ago, and again, we know what we can focus on and the things that we can’t.

Chris:

Good deal. Talk a little bit if you will just about the relationship between Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball right now.

Kerry Vick:

Yeah, you got it. It’s actually a really interesting time because there is a whole collective bargaining dispute going on between Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball, which doesn’t make our lives any easier right now, as if there’s not enough to worry about. We don’t even have a schedule yet for this upcoming season and it’s partially COVID related, but it’s more so because there’s this whole renegotiating going on between Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball. Ultimately, what that’s going to mean for us is probably not much different. I think Major League Baseball wants to have a little bit more control over the minor league teams and they’re kind of sorting that stuff out right now. They’re looking to contract several minor league teams. We’ve been at, I think, 160 Minor League Baseball teams for quite a while. That’s going to go down this year, so there are some wholesale changes.

Kerry Vick:

From our perspective, it’s a partnership. The Indianapolis Indians, we’re our own separate entity. A lot of people don’t really understand how that relationship works, but we put on the business, so everything that happens within our gates is on us. We sell the tickets, we do all the marketing, we do all the promotions, we do all the operations, we clean the ballpark, we build the ballpark, all that stuff’s done however we want it to be. Then, everything that’s done on-field, basically between the foul lines, actually from dugout to dugout, is ownership of the Pittsburgh Pirates. They send us the players, they send us the coaches, the managers, the strength coaches, trainers, all those guys, all that on-field team personnel. Those are all Pittsburgh Pirates employees. They’re basically like the traveling entertainment. We’re the host venue, those guys come in, they put on a show, and then they leave and we clean up the mess.

Chris:

Let’s shift a little bit and talk about just average game attendance pre 2020. What do you do and what do you plan to do to invite people back and to get them back to the stadium and to feel comfortable in that venue?

Kerry Vick:

Yeah, so attendance is our primary driver. Everything revolves around attendance. It’s not like at the major league level where you got enormous TV contracts and huge naming rights deals. For us, it’s all about getting butts in seats and getting as many people in there as you can, which helps to drive the concessions and the merchandise and the sponsor value and all those ancillary categories. We generally average about 9,000, give or take, per game, which by minor league standards is great.

It annually puts us usually in the top two or three. In all of Minor League Baseball we’ve had a couple years where we were number one, we’ve had a couple years where we were number four or five, but usually there’s a core group of us that are all competing for that attendance title, and honestly, it’s usually us and a few other teams that have pretty new stadiums. You see throughout sports, really, you build a new stadium and there is a honeymoon period. There is five years or so where it sells itself and your numbers are peaking, but then eventually they start to dwindle once the newness and the polish has worn off a little bit. But we’ve got a 25 year old stadium now and we’re still up there in that upper echelon and we’re still trying to be the top every year. It’s an annual challenge to keep people coming back when you don’t have that new stadium, so our biggest challenge is what can we do to make people still feel like it’s fresh and interesting and new.

That’s always our biggest challenge and it’s going to be even a bigger challenge this year coming off of a pandemic, a completely lost season where we didn’t host any Minor League Baseball games last year. We had to get creative and do whatever we could to keep the ballpark operational and keep the lights turned on, but our bread and butter, of course, is Indianapolis Indians baseball.

Moving forward, our goals, we don’t even know what to expect this year, just out of what’s going on in the public. We know that there’s a lot of enthusiasm, we know there’s a lot of people that want to get back out and want to do some stuff and feel comfortable being in an outdoor venue. But at the end of the day, are we going to get 9,000 people every game that are willing to sit in 21 inch seats shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers the way they used to? I don’t know. We got to rethink everything and that’s going on across sports and entertainment and really in any business where your whole business is about gathering people together in a social environment because that’s the one thing that COVID is really challenging right now.

Chris:

Yeah, it will be interesting to watch, watching human behavior and consumer behavior, how it will evolve, the migration back to something that’s similar to what we were used to, and what that will look like and how the human mind will adapt to, and force us to do things in different ways. It’s going to be quite interesting, so there’s things we need to pay attention to.

Kerry Vick:

And we’re all just kind of guessing. I mean, right now we’re just a bunch of guys sitting around a bunch of Zoom meetings trying to predict these behaviors and the new buying habits. And, talking to other teams and it’s the same kind of thing. We’re all in it as team representatives saying, “I think this is what our customers are going to do,” but there’s no track record for this. There’s not a precedent in any of our lifetimes to really figure out what’s going on.

Kerry Vick:

And what we’ve seen so far is anytime we have opened up the gates for something kind of new and unique, our goal is really to convince our public that we’ve got everything thought of. It’s going to be a safe, clean environment. We want to take that worry away from you before you even decide to come down to the ballpark. And what we found is that there is a consumer demand, there is an appetite for people to come out and do something like that.

Kerry Vick:

You just have to make sure that they understand that things are going to be a little different and it’s going to be different, as a benefit and a service to them. Things are going to be cleaner, things are going to be neater and tidier, and everyone’s going to have a little bit more space than they had before. And I think from the public there’s enough people out there that are really excited for that opportunity.

Kerry Vick:

From a corporate standpoint, our corporate clients are a little bit more hesitant right now. I mean, they’ve got more things to worry about. There’s a liability part. They don’t want to have their company associated with any kind of an outbreak for very good reasons. So they’ve been a little bit more reluctant right now, or a little bit more nervous, I guess, but like I said, anytime we have opened up the gates over the past six months or so we’ve been overwhelmed by the support.

Chris:

Let’s shift. You touched on premium early on, but let’s talk about just premium seating, well specifically, how has your premium offering evolved or changed over the past five years and where do you see it strategically headed in the future?

Kerry Vick:

I’d say premium seating is probably an area that has evolved more than maybe any other area, certainly for us. Years back, when our ballpark was built back in 1996, the trends of the industry were to pack in as many seats as you could, and as many suites as you could, but there was nothing in between. And nowadays, you want to have a lot of different levels, a lot of different price points. It’s not just either you’re in a corporate suite up here, or you’re just a common folk in those green seats.

Kerry Vick:

Now there’s a lot of different price points and levels in between where you got folks that want to have food built into their ticket, or they want to have unlimited drinks built into the ticket, or they want to have complimentary onsite parking, or they want to have their own table space, or they want to have in-seat, wait service. They want to have white-glove service, or private restrooms, any number of things.

Kerry Vick:

And everyone’s a little bit different in terms of what they’re looking for. You do see more of a focus on smaller, more niche packages these days, than what you might’ve had before, where, if a company wanted to entertain, they bought themselves a suite for 15 or 20 people. Now they want to do more four-person, private boxes and things like that, or six-person pods. So there’s a lot of middle ground there now, where instead of just having a price point at $10 and a price point at $200, you got maybe eight different layers in between of things that you can do.

Kerry Vick:

So really, there’s just a wide variety of different options. People want to explore multiple areas now. They’re just naturally more inquisitive. And naturally too, I think fans today are a little bit more dispassionate with the team itself, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just, you don’t have as many folks that are just diehard into every play, and particularly at the baseball level, which we notice people that are into every pitch. They want to be there and they just want to experience the venue.

Kerry Vick:

They want it to be more immersive, more so than just having a great spot to watch every pitch that’s coming in and all that. So a lot of it is just kind of driven by that, is creating that environment where somebody can have more of that truly immersive experience, rather than just coming in and being a spectator and watching a game.

Chris:

How has your evolution in premium seating performed in relation to bringing new people that hadn’t been to the ballpark before?

Kerry Vick:

Yeah, it’s been really good, and with our evolution, we were probably a little bit late to the game for different economic factors. Like I mentioned, the ballpark was built in 1996. We got a new lease agreement 20 years later, which actually gave us the ability to have some capital expenditures and gave us the chance to do some renovations that we really needed for quite a while.

Kerry Vick:

So just within the past few years, we updated all of our suites. We built a new club space where we actually tore down some suites. We had five suites right behind home plate, and it wasn’t distressed inventory. They were still getting sold on a pretty regular basis. So we had to swallow a little bit of a loss there initially, but we tore out five suites and created a large open club space that allows us to sell more of those premium products, allows us to sell private loge boxes and some VIP club seats.

Kerry Vick:

It also gave us space that we can operate year round, some indoor club space that we had sorely been lacking. So, yeah, that’s really opened up, excuse me, a whole other book of business from folks that might’ve been in one of those middle tiers. We’ve only got so many corporate suites to go around and, once you knock out the banks and law firms and a few other really good partners in town, there’s limited opportunities for folks to come out and have a VIP experience. And now we’ve created that.

Kerry Vick:

Even though we’re taking some short-term losses on that leased suite inventory, we’re going to be able to add revenue in so many different categories now. And it really sets us up for the long haul. It’s really kind of the way the industry was going, where the market was going. Even though we were selling all those sweets now, in 10 years from now, we were going to have some empty ones, just by the way things were going.

Kerry Vick:

So a lot of premium seating is just kind of adapting to the trends and having to rearrange your stadium. And it’s costly, but it’s something you got to do if you want to stay relevant and show your fan base that you’re always thinking and you’re always trying to get new products made to meet the demands of the consumer. Then it does, it opens up a whole other book of business for you.

Chris:

I’m going to focus a little bit on the venue itself and really think about your best practices within the areas of the stadium in relation to within premium, but in total, around inclusion, accessibility and diversity, especially as it relates to folks with disabilities.

Kerry Vick:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s an area that also is emerging, and it’s great that it is. When our ballpark was built, again, 1996, it was very much an afterthought. There wasn’t a whole lot that was really adapted for those purposes. And now, we talk a lot about ADA, and every renovation that we do, every adjustment we do, we’re thinking about that. We’re talking to the experts, we’re bringing in some legal advice and architectures to figure out how we can be accessible and compliant.

Kerry Vick:

And back in those days, it was more like, “Okay, how many ADA parking spaces do we need? Okay, let’s do that and exceed it. How many accessible seats do we have? Okay, let’s exceed that, and then we’re fine.” But now, it’s every modification we make, it’s, “Okay, we need to have more space, we need to have more rails, we need to have more adaptability.”

Kerry Vick:

And you can see it now throughout the stadium. But it goes way beyond that now. Nowadays, we’re thinking more about, “Okay, let’s do Autism Awareness Night,” and we have a sensory room whenever we do those events. We started doing a Peanut Allergy Awareness night a few years ago, where one night of the year is one …

Kerry Vick:

Night a few years ago, where one night of the year is 100% peanut free, which is not easy to do at a ballpark.

Chris:

No, sir.

Kerry Vick:

Because you know how popular peanuts are with baseball, and then you get the shells. The shells could be infectious, and you’ve got to clean the ballpark like you never have before, but that’s something that we’ll do the first day of a home stand after we’ve had a week-long road trip, plenty of time to get everything cleaned up, get all the peanuts shipped out of the stadium. We started doing that, and it’s going over really well. We’ve built in two mother’s rooms just for nursing mothers, one on suite level as part of our new club project and one that’s down on the concourse. There’s things like that.

Kerry Vick:

It’s not enough. It probably will never be enough, but it’s much more top of mind now than it ever had been before. We’ve got our own diversity and inclusion committee here on the staff. We’ve got half a dozen or so people that meet every so often and they just kind of get their brains together and say, “Hey, what, what do we need to be doing as an organization?” We’ve taken some really good steps on hiring practices and recruiting practices and just some internal staffing things as well. But the fan facing things are every bit as important, and that’s always going to be a focus for us moving forward.

Chris:

How about as it relates to even just communications, from website usability to just other communications? Even within the whole area of ticket sales to, well, just practices that make sure there’s an awareness and a nod to different ways to communicate and engage people.

Kerry Vick:

Yeah. It’s pretty prevalent in all of our communication pieces these days. I’m not a marketing expert, but our marketing people know that that’s got to be front and center. Yeah, you see it in our social media. You see it on our website. We’ve got assisted listening devices and other tools like that that are available at the ballpark every day. You come up to a ticket window or if you’re just in the stands and you need some assistance, we’ve got some of those tools in place. Again, we’re still learning. There’s always going to be more that we can do, and there will be more that we will do. But yeah, it’s very much been a focus.

Chris:

All right. I am out of questions. Kerry, I sure appreciate you spending the time with us today and giving us your thoughts and the benefit of your years of wisdom in the business. I hope we get to talk again soon. Everyone, thanks for listening to Fired Up with Kerry Vick today from the Indianapolis Indians. Take care.

Kerry Vick:

Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.