Congratulations, Back-2-Back Champions
For the second year in a row, the University of South Carolina Gamecocks baseball team won the NCAA National Championship. The Gamecocks defeated Florida for the title, and the team was welcomed back home with a parade. Fans of the Gamecocks lined Columbia’s Main Street, four or five deep, for six blocks. Various reports estimated the crowd for the parade to be as many as 45,000.
The post-season run to the Gamecocks’ second NCAA National Championship also brought out patrons to TV-viewing parties, and it generated the consumption of Gamecock paraphernalia by fans eager to celebrate the good times.
Bill Richardson is the general manager of the Wild Wing Café in Columbia’s Vista. The restaurant sits in the shadows of USC’s campus and is filled with fans when a sporting event of any magnitude is taking place. Richardson says Gamecocks fans have helped keep the cash registers popping. “The College World Series games are a big event for us,” Richardson says. Comparison of the store’s June sales from the years before USC was in the College World Series prove the games are a substantial boost to the restaurant’s volume. “We set a record for sales one night of the series,” Richardson says.
The fact that the post-season games are played in June is good, too. With college students leaving town for summer break and the end of the South Carolina Legislature’s session, June is usually slower. Richardson says that was not the case this year, or in 2010, because of the baseball games.
Kevin Lucas is a buyer for Jewelry Warehouse’s four locations in the Midlands. The store’s Garnet & Black Traditions line of merchandise has been hard to keep on the shelves since the last out was recorded in the College World Series.
“There has been a frenzy to buy everything associated with the College World Series,” Lucas says. Garnet & Black Traditions personnel worked all night after the Gamecocks won the College World Series, using local maker Eat More Ts, and the store had T-shirts on the shelves the next morning. Lucas says Nike owned the rights to the clothing styles the players wore, and that took an extra day to get into the store. “We had those by Thursday,” after the Tuesday night finale, he says. The store has even hired extra help to handle the rush.
Lucas says the norm is a drop-off in sales of merchandise the second time a program wins a national title, but that has not been the case, so far, with USC. “We’re probably getting 20 percent more volume on our website orders,” he says. He believes Gamecocks fans and businesses knew more of what to expect after having been there a year before. They were not caught by surprise.