1 week Ago By Editorial Board
Minor-league sports franchises are fascinating operations.The face of the business is always a group of players put together and paid by a major sports organization, which cares about one thing above all else: To foster a competitive, healthy, consistent environment in which to develop their youngest talent into players who can contribute, or even be stars, at the highest level of their sport. This matters much more than ticket sales, than fan satisfaction, than even winning.
But the backbone of the franchise is always the behind-the-scenes team that has among the most challenging jobs in sports business: To make the team itself feel connected with the community, when the player roster undergoes sweeping changes yearly. That’s why teams doing the best businesses around the nation aren’t necessarily the ones packed with future stars or living at the top of the standings. They’re the ones who do the best job making their communities the star of the show.
Northeast Pennsylvania is lucky to have a pair of professional sports franchises that do that well, and the American Hockey League’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins’ next big promotion at Mohegan Arena at Casey Plaza in Wilkes-Barre Township is as good an example as one will find of that.During their April 12 game against the Springfield Thunderbirds, the Penguins won’t be the Penguins at all. They’ll be rebranded for one night only and play as.
..the Carbondale UFOs.
They’ll wear special UFOs jerseys. They’ll have a new logo. The team store will be loaded with UFOs merchandise, including jerseys, for fans to buy.
Even the Carbondalien is expected to be on hand to celebrate.“There will be no sign of the Penguins, except for center ice,” said Nicole Curtis, who co-organized Carbondale’s inaugural Carbondalien Festival in November.Of course, the event is an homage to the Carbondalien Festival, which in 2024 celebrated the 50th anniversary of an unidentified flying object soaring over Salem Mountain and landing in a pond near the city’s Russell Park which, legend says, was discovered glowing underwater by a group of teenagers who notified police.
A scuba diver fished a lantern out of the water a few days later, and police immediately labeled the incident a hoax. But, the people of Carbondale leaned into the legend, and it became part of the city’s culture in the decades that followed — even if few outside the Upvalley community in Lackawanna County were aware of the story.Now, thanks in part to the Penguins franchise promoting the festival and bringing the story mainstream, there very well could be an influx of interest in this year’s event from around the region.
That’s great for Carbondale, a city 35 miles north of the Luzerne County arena that is too small to ever host a professional sports team of its own to promote its own unique culture. Frankly, in a region as large as this, it’s a positive for residents who live even further from a place like Carbondale to understand there are fun, interesting things going on and people to meet not so far away from their own backyards.One-game rebrandings have become somewhat of a tradition in minor-league sports over the last decade.
The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders — the Triple-A baseball affiliate of the New York Yankees who play at PNC Field in Moosic, Lackawanna County — paid homage to one of the area’s favorite foods when they rebranded themselves as the SWB Pierogies and drew more than 9,300 fans to the park for a game against Rochester on Aug. 26, 2016. Several times each year, they play in colorful blue and red jerseys as the Vejigantes, part of Minor League Baseball’s Copa de la Diversión initiative that has proven popular with Hispanics and Latinos.
The Penguins have honored local municipalities and their cultures as part of their Community Theme Night dating to 2023, transforming that year into the Old Forge Pizzas for a game before becoming the Pittston Tomatoes for a night in 2024. But the Carbondale UFOs take it even a step further, honoring not just the food our towns are known for, but their fun histories.It’s potentially great marketing for the teams to embrace this area’s uniqueness and quirks, of course.
But in doing so, they also bring the entire region together to celebrate itself. That transcends games and builds togetherness between communities. It’s a tradition well worth continuing, and even expanding.
The WBS Penguins’ Old Forge Pizzas logoThe WBS Penguins’ Pittston Tomatoes logoShow Caption1 of 6Expand.
