Souk and Ye Shall Find
October 22, 2006 - American Basketball Association (ABA)
Vermont Frost Heaves News Release
By Alexander Wolff
The twin economic fundamentals of minor-league hoops, as explained to me and other rookie owners, Amway-style, at every ABA meeting, are these:
1. You'll need about $400,000 to operate your team for a season.
2. The more you can reduce that figure with trade and barter, the better off you'll be.
At the last ABA gathering-the one where commissioner-in-waiting John Salley vowed to "go gangsta" on any club unable to get its operational act together-we heard from the owner of the ABA's Arkansas Aeros and Arkansas River Catz, a constitutionally cheery man named Charles Wilkerson. Charles runs the American Exchange Network, a.k.a. BarterAmericas. He is the Baron of Barter. I suspect that his good humor follows from his involvement in scores of encounters in which everyone walks away happy.
"I once traded bat manure for a 747," he told us.
The way the room turned attentive, you'd have thought he'd just said that he had a trove of 7-footers for the taking.
Turned out Charles never pays for a hotel room, because he has traded for vast quantities of something hotels need every four of five years, and for which they're happy not to pay cash: hotel furniture.
I joined the owners mobbing him after his remarks, and asked whether we could get a few hotel rooms.
"What have you got to trade?"
"I can write press releases," I replied, recalling that Charles had said that barter networks accept services as well as goods.
So: I would do copywriting for someone with hotel furniture; that person would in turn trade credenzas and settees for non-smoking doubles, which he would give to the Frost Heaves.
That's a much more global marketplace, of course, than the kind of local trade deals we're cutting every day. (That bat guana was not, of course, traded straight up for a 747-there were plenty of other trades in between.) But Baron Charles has blown open my horizons of what's swappable.
Anyone with a spare set of 24-second clocks care to make a deal? . . . WILL WRITE PRESS RELEASES FOR FOOD. . . . Trade you one Bump the Moose mall appearance for 15 winter jackets with quadruple XL sleeves!
Like the man said, souk and ye shall find: We've swapped equity in the team for office space. We've traded an arena banner and yearbook ad to the Vermont Air National Guard for a color guard, plus security at our Burlington games. The Superstore is getting signage for the TV monitor on which our guys will watch video. Our coach, Will Voigt, wandered into an outfit called Vermont Eye Laser to have his vision checked; by the time he'd left, Vermont Eye Laser had a passel of ads; the Frost Heaves had a team eye doctor; and our coach had an appointment for laser surgery.
(The surgery went fine. Coach V's fear of an operation gone wrong-"You just might discover what kind of a feel for the game I have"-proved to be unfounded.)
Other attempts at striking a deal have been exasperating. We figured that Cabot, the cheesemaking cooperative of Vermont dairy farmers, would be a natural, seeing as Coach V grew up in Cabot and went to Cabot High School. ("You've got a Cabot product. We've got a Cabot product. What's not to like?") But that logic has gotten us nowhere, perhaps because Cabot is now part of a consortium based in Massachusetts.
In order to make Vermont as attractive a place to play as possible, we've promised our players that we'll feed them, and that pledge has forced us into even more dealmaking. Breakfast is included at the players' extended-stay hotel, and our strength and conditioning coach is handing each a Met-Rx Nutrition Shake after morning workouts. But that still leaves 14 lunches and dinners we have to come up with every week, at least until the season starts and the guys collect per diems on the road.
We spent weeks cultivating a trade deal with a major sandwich chain that shall remain nameless. (Let me rephrase that: We spent weeks cultivating a trade deal with a major sandwich chain that shall remain nameless until they come back to the table-at which point we'll shout its name from the rooftops!) They lost their nerve at the thought of 15 ravenous ballplayers descending at the lunch hour on a handful of their franchisees.
Meantime, to the restaurateurs and caterers who are on board-from Sean & Nora's, to The Lakeview, to Mexicali, to The Busy Chef, to Anything's Pastable, to CityMarket, to former UVM coach and current ESPN broadcaster Tom Brennan's favorite watering hole, The Rusty Scuffer-I'd propose a banner in the arena: We've Got the Heaves!
Except that, if I really want to swap press releases for food, that won't be much of an advertisement for my copywriting skills.
For more information on the Vermont Frost Heaves and to purchase team gear, go to vermontfrostheaves.com.
Note: OurSports Central no longer actively covers the American Basketball Association (ABA) as a professional league due in part to its inability to publish and play a schedule and the transitory nature of many of its teams. For information on professional minor leagues, please see OSC's basketball section.
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American Basketball Association Stories from October 22, 2006
- Noise release schedule - Knoxville Noise
- Souk and Ye Shall Find - Vermont Frost Heaves
- Tropics ink seven to contracts, four more to follow - Miami Tropics
- ABA CEO Joe Newman to participate in True Millionaire series - ABA
The opinions expressed in this release are those of the organization issuing it, and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts or opinions of OurSports Central or its staff.
