“It just drives that much business, not just to ours but to businesses all over town.”
By Charles Thompson/PennLive
For hospitality-related businesses in State College, where Penn State home football weekends build an almost-unstoppable economic power source, it’s all about making it to 2021 now.
Because with the Big Ten Conference confirming that its fall sports season is off, the last real hope of salvaging something like real commercial success in a year already stunted by the ongoing assault of coronavirus seemed to expire Tuesday.
So for hoteliers, bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and everybody that supports them, it’s officially better luck next year and pray for a vaccine.
“It’s a huge loss,” said Steve Moyer, a manager at Lion’s Pride, one of the best-known Penn State souvenir and gift shops on the College Avenue strip at the base of the University Park campus, where the success of the business is usually driven quite directly by success of the Nittany Lions football team.
“It just drives that much business, not just to ours but to businesses all over town,” Moyer explained. “So hopefully it’s only a year and we can get back to it next fall.”
Experts have noted that the loss of college sports, and especially football, has an outsized effect on the college towns that are home to some of the nation’s major land grant universities like Penn State.
Cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh serve as home to multiple professional sports teams and host major concerts, festivals and conventions. Meanwhile, smaller towns with powerhouse football programs — from State College to Starkville, Mississippi, to Clemson, South Carolina — have a rare dependence on those sports teams.
“There’s no other event that brings 100,000 people to State College, to your community for a weekend or at least for a couple days,” Jeremy Jordan, associate dean of Temple University’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management told PennLive in an interview earlier this year.
In Centre County, statistics show the effect those games and those fans have on the local economy.
In an average year, PSU’s seven home football weekends make up 16 percent of annual room revenue across Centre County, according to the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau, the region’s visitors bureau.
In total, visitors spent $794.2 million in the county in 2017 — more than double the amount in any of the surrounding counties in the Alleghenies — and the local tourism industry supported more than 5,000 jobs, according to a study conducted by Tourism Economics.
Nittany Lions football is by far the main draw for visitors, and Happy Valley Adventure Bureau President and CEO Fritz Smith on Tuesday estimated the cumulative loss, in terms of visitor spending from a normal season, as in the high tens of millions of dollars, and an overall economic impact, including the multiplier effect of that spending, as over $100 million.
In truth, the 2020 season was probably never going to be like the usual, given the almost-certain restrictions on crowd size. (Penn State announced last week that it was not planning to host fans for the five home football games currently scheduled at Beaver Stadium in 2020. The decision stemmed from the Wolf Administration’s pandemic emergency mandates limiting outdoor gatherings to 250 people and indoor events to 25.)
The biggest blow from The Big Ten’s announcement may land on the retailers like Lions Pride.
Restaurant, bar and hotel operators reached for this report noted that they were already staring down the gullet of a lesser-than season because of 25 percent capacity limits for indoor dining under the state’s pandemic emergency orders, rules that require food service with all alcohol purchases and new local ordinances that restrict even the waiting lines to enter bars to 10 people.
“Under the current climate, the only toll it takes on us is emotional and not financial,” said Curt Shulman, director of operations for Hotel State College & Co., which runs a group of well-known bars and eateries in downtown State College, including The Corner Room, Allen Street Grill and Bill Pickles Tap Room.
“Until we can get to a point where we can service more customers, things like this don’t make much impact,” Shulman said, noting his firm is only operating The Corner Room and Pickles right now, and has already had to lay off about 250 staffers from the other sites.
It’s worth noting that Penn State itself – under its current “Return to State” plan – will still be an economic engine for the area.
The school will still serve as the academic home base for tens of thousands of students starting later this month. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and that’s key for us here. They’re (business owners) just happy there’s going to be some return to normal,” said Douglas Shontz, assistant to the State College borough manager.
But the extra lift that might have been provided by fans holding tailgates, renting the hotel rooms, eating in the restaurants or gathering in bars has now officially and finally gone away.
And that, most business people reached after Tuesday’s announcement said, is just another thing to forget about 2020.
“Obviously not playing will negatively impact the performance of the market and really hurt everybody in State College,” said Plato Ghinos, president of Shaner Hotels, which operates five Holiday Inn properties in the State College area. “They’re adding salt to the wounds, that’s what Penn State is doing.”
Borough officials said one bright note of the fall sports announcement is that the extra potential of COVID-19 spikes from football crowds will be lessened, and at the same time, the conference left open the door to a spring season that could – if all goes well with the current vaccine trials – be played under vastly different rules.
That could give everyone reliant on the PSU sports economy a chance to bounce back strong in 2021.
But first, they have to make it there.
Shulman and Moyer said their businesses have strong enough bases and that they both expect to weather the COVID storm: Hotel State College is confident enough that it has embarked on some capital projects at some of its sites to give patrons some new features when the businesses are fully reopened.
But that may not be the case for everyone.
“The hospitality sector in general can’t sustain the lack of travelers coming to Happy Valley,” said Shaner Hotel’s Ghinos. “This is adding to the uncertainty in a bad economic environment; that’s the problem.”
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