Minor league baseball, hockey teams seeking COVID-19 relief

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Laying off 17 people in the Charlotte Checkers front office of 25 felt like gutting a team for chief operating officer Tera Black.

"The front office is a team just as much as the team on the ice," she said. "We never want to go through that again."

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Similar scenes played out across the rest of the American Hockey League, along with the ECHL, Southern Professional Hockey League and all levels of minor league baseball during the pandemic. Two years in and countless jobs and millions of dollars lost, over a hundred minor league baseball and more than a dozen minor league hockey teams are hoping to finally receive some COVID-19 relief from the U.S. government along with restaurant, gyms and other industries hard hit by the pandemic after being left out of the first round of small business subsidies.

"Everybody who’s in our situation really is deserving of and needs some of this relief," said Jason Frier, chairman and CEO of Hardball Capital, which owns and operates minor league baseball teams in Columbia, South Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee and Fort Wayne, Indiana. "It would help break this sort of vicious cycle we’re in and allow us to make the investments we need to get back up on our feet."

Unlike major professional sports leagues that could play games in empty stadiums and arenas thanks to TV and streaming revenue, the minors are almost entirely reliant on attendance to stay afloat. A Minor League Baseball survey found the average team lost over 91% of revenue from pre-pandemic levels — a result of the entire 2020 season being canceled — and the AHL reported leaguewide revenue down 85-95%