Nothing screams 'major-league sports' to TV viewers like junior-high football stadium metal bleachers
Pro beach: The venue in Central Park represents another botched opportunity for the embattled AVP League
Bobby Corvino went to all the trouble and expense to rent a prime spot in New York’s Central Park for this?
Does 10-row “junior-high” metal bleachers sitting at ground level convey the message to mainstream sports fans that the AVP should be considered “major league”?
This weekend offered the biggest — and perhaps last — chance for the ownership group fronted by Corvino (who lives in the New York area) to gain traction for its controversial and fans-challenged AVP League. The sixth installment of the League will receive invaluable exposure to a vast and likely untapped audience when two hours of competition is televised Sunday afternoon (starting at noon Eastern) by legacy broadcast giant CBS.
The broadcast no doubt will generate the largest viewership the AVP has generated since it last was seen a decade ago on NBC.
But after taking in the spectacular Central Park setting, what will the casuals see? They can’t help but notice that the venue around the sand court sitting atop the popular Wollman ice-skating rink consists of seating for perhaps 850. Their view from the sideline “hard” camera will show four sections of non-elevated seven-row metal bleachers. Each section has room for approximately 15 bodies per row, which works out to about 600 total. Then, VIP sections around the remaining three sides might seat another 200 and change.
That might be a good crowd for a junior-high football game — for that’s precisely the image evoked by those bleachers — but it’s certainly not the most desirable optics for an over-the-air TV audience on CBS that might eclipse 400,000. The League premiere on The CW in May garnered 261,000 total-average viewers, according to the Nielsen ratings. (The indoor Pro Volleyball Federation’s All-Star Match averaged 414,000 in an afternoon CBS time slot in February.)
Corvino’s group likely has invested upwards of $1 million in TV production costs from a “remote” location and time buys on CBS and The CW (which broadcast a two-block of League matches in prime time on Saturday), only to create a venue that looks decidedly “Little League” done on the cheap.
The AVP made quite a point on its social media to boast that tickets sold out. But is moving fewer than 1,000 tickets per session in a giant market such as New York really a big deal?
In a vivid example of why the domestic volleyball promoters are desperate to cultivate new fans, on its free YouTube channel Saturday, the "views" count on the live stream late in the first set of the women's match was 1,127. Later in the evening, the live streaming audience for the men's match midway through the second set was 1,594.
That continued the trend of AVP die-hards pretty much ignoring the League, even when they can watch it for free.
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