A ticket bundle that let Bellwater sports fans mix and match games across the Ironclads, Frost and River FC sold better than any of the three front offices expected in its debut year, and now the teams are expanding it.
The “Around Town” bundle, which launched alongside the Ironclads’ season-opening promotional push last year and let fans purchase a discounted package of games across Founders Park, Anchor Arena and Millrace Stadium, sold roughly 4,200 bundles in its debut season, according to figures shared jointly by the three organizations. Starting with the coming season, fans will be able to build a custom bundle of any combination of games across the three teams rather than choosing from a fixed set of packages, and the discount tier will scale with how many games a fan commits to across the three venues.
Ironclads General Manager Sandra Tolliver, who helped design the original promotion, said the flexible format was the most requested change from fans who bought the first version. “People kept telling us they loved the idea but hated being locked into a set schedule that didn’t match when they could actually make it to a game,” Tolliver said. “If someone wants six Ironclads games and two Frost games and one River FC match, there’s no reason we should be telling them they have to buy it some other way.”
A rare joint pitch from three competitors for attention
The three franchises compete for the same discretionary entertainment dollars in a metro area of about a million people, and front-office officials acknowledged the promotion required setting aside some instinct to protect their own attendance numbers. Bellwater Frost Vice President of Ticket Sales Priyanka Solis said the arrangement made sense once the data came back from year one. “We found that fans who bought the bundle actually attended more Frost games on their own outside the package than a typical single-team season-ticket holder,” Solis said. “It turns out exposing our product to Ironclads fans who had never been to Anchor Arena was worth more than whatever ticket revenue we might have captured by keeping people in our own lane.”
River FC Business Operations Director Owen Delaine said his club, the newest and fastest-growing of the three by attendance, benefited the most from the arrangement in its first year, with roughly 60 percent of bundle buyers attending a River FC match for the first time. “We’re still the team a lot of longtime Ironclads and Frost fans haven’t gotten around to trying,” Delaine said. “This is the cheapest, lowest-risk way for us to get them into a seat at Millrace Stadium at least once.”
We compete with each other for the same sponsors and sometimes the same nights on the calendar, but none of us are competing with the couch. The real competition for all three of us is a Tuesday night at home doing nothing, and this promotion is about beating that.
Sandra Tolliver, General Manager, Bellwater Ironclads
Not every fan loves the crossover
The expansion has not won over every longtime season-ticket holder. Some Ironclads fans have complained on the team’s social media accounts that the flexible pricing model makes the bundle more expensive for buyers who only want a heavy dose of baseball rather than an even split across the three sports, a criticism Tolliver said the front offices are still trying to solve without undercutting the season-ticket base each team relies on for its core revenue. “We hear that, and we don’t want our most loyal Ironclads fans to feel like this program was built for casual fans at their expense,” she said. “We’re building in a loyalty credit for existing season-ticket holders to make sure of that.”
The three teams have also discussed, but not finalized, a shared parking arrangement for fans attending games at Founders Park and Anchor Arena on the same night during weeks when both teams are in season, an idea Solis said emerged directly from fan complaints collected through the bundle program. Delaine said Millrace Stadium, farther from downtown along the river, is unlikely to be included in any shared parking pilot given the distance between venues, though he said the club remains interested in coordinated shuttle service if ridership data from the other two teams’ pilot supports it.
Each team plans to release its own single-game and season-ticket pricing separately in the coming weeks, with the expanded bundle going on sale ahead of all three individual on-sale dates, a sequencing decision Tolliver said was designed to reward the fans willing to commit across all three organizations before scarcity drives up demand for any single team’s best games. “If you’re the kind of fan who already goes to all three parks, we want you to feel like you got there first,” she said. “That’s the whole point of doing this together instead of each of us just running our own promotion.”
The three organizations have also begun sharing anonymized attendance and purchasing data with each other for the first time, an arrangement Solis said would have been unthinkable among competing franchises a few years ago. “We’re telling each other things like which zip codes are buying the most bundles, or which nights of the week underperform across all three venues,” Solis said. “None of us would hand that over to a rival in almost any other business. But we’ve decided we’re not really rivals for this particular problem.”
Delaine said the data sharing has already changed how River FC schedules its own promotional giveaways, shifting several toward weeknights that the shared numbers showed drew disproportionately from Ironclads season-ticket holders rather than the club’s existing base. “We used to guess at this,” he said. “Now we have actual cross-team purchasing data telling us where the untapped audience is sitting.” Tolliver said the three front offices plan to meet again after the coming season to decide whether the arrangement should expand further, potentially including the metro area’s college programs at Kincaid and Bellwater State, though she cautioned those conversations remain preliminary. “We’re not there yet,” she said. “But nothing about this partnership so far has made me think we’ve found the ceiling on what fans here will buy if we make it easy enough for them.”