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Wanted: Owner for Professional Basketball Team
By George NelsonYOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Minor-league basketball will be played in Youngstown next year, Mikal Duilio said this morning. Whether that means a season of games or just a game or two depends on a team owner coming forward.Duilio, founder and commissioner of the International Basketball League, talked with reporters this morning about the new league and his efforts to find an owner for a team based in Youngstown. A news release issued Wednesday reported that the IBL would operate the team until an owner or group of owners steps forward. Should no one comes forward in time for the season's launch next April, Duilio said, Youngstown would still serve as the site of an exhibition game or two "to build enthusiasm" for a potential team here. An IBL team would play a Youngstown exhibition team. "It'll be a game that counts on the schedule, so it'll be really neat actually," he said. "We'll possibly break even on the game and, hopefully, find an owner for 2006."Duilio, still putting his league together, said he has examined why other minor league teams have failed, leading him to construct a financial model that addresses the reasons for their demises.The IBL teams, which will play 20-game schedules, will be clustered geographically, three or four teams per cluster, as Duilio sees it. The teams would play 12 games within their cluster, then travel to another for four games as a visiting team. Teams from a different cluster would travel to Youngstown for the remaining four games on the schedule."The problem is everybody who goes into it loses money, primarily because of the travel," the league owner said. Other leagues, he noted, needed 3,000 fans at games just to break even. Under the model he has devised, an owner should need only 800 fans per game. "The owner should be able to make money. Certainly if he's not making money, it's not going to be a significant amount of loss," he observed. "The reason why this is different is it's affordable for the owner." He also recommended that IBL teams play in smaller venues such as high school gymnasiums and other facilities that could accommodate 2,000 to 3,000 fans. He discourages using facilities such as arenas that seat more than 5,000. He didn't rule out playing in a venue such as the downtown Youngstown convocation center, set to begin construction next week.Youngstown has seen at least two minor-league operations attempted. The Youngstown Pride and its World Basketball League both collapsed in the wake of the Phar-Mor Inc. scandal in 1992, and the Youngstown Hawks were here and gone in 2000.Duilio plans to speed games up to avoid the situation in the National Basketball Association where a 48-minute game can last three hours and longer. "Fans don't want to see out-of-bounds plays that take 45 seconds to get the ball back in play," he said, noting that the league will have what he called an immediate inbound rule to get the ball in the hands of players more quickly. "Referees can influence the game tremendously in terms of the speed of the game, and if the game's faster the game's better because offensive players, when they're constantly physically moving, sweating, running, they shoot better and they shoot more because the pace is higher," he explained. In addition, he said the shorter pauses give the defensive players less time to regroup. "In the IBL, we eliminate all the dead time, or as much dead time as possible, so you can watch the same 48-minute game -- that's 48 minutes worth of action -- spread out over about an hour and a half," he said. "It's more fun for the fans, it's more respectful for the fans.Â…They don't want to spend 3 1/2 hours at the event."So far, Duilio has verbal commitments from owners in Dayton, Peoria, Ill., Waterloo, Iowa, and the Quad Cities in Iowa and Illinois, he reported, and he is involved with teams in the Northwest. He is looking at Akron for a team and said he received good response from Canton. He hopes to have an owner for a Youngstown team by December so it can be marketed during youth, high school and college basketball season.The owner would pay a rights fee of $45,000 spread out over six years, and Duilio said an owner would likely spend $88,000 to operate the team at what he described as "a good level." The rights fee is non-binding, he said, so if a team owner decided to pull out after two years, for example, the owner would not be required to pay the balance. With his financial model, however, Duilio said an owner can break even or show a profit with 800 fans at each of the 10 home games. Adult admission would run $7 to $7.50, children's admission $3 or $3.25.Greg Sherlock, chief lobbyist for the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber, allowed minor-league teams face many challenges, but "this gentleman is saying that maybe it's just the wrong model that was tried, so you never know."Youngstown mayoral candidate John R. Swierz, also present, said Duilio offered a good presentation. "We need to put it in a place where people will come," he said. "We've had some failures in the past but I think his concept is fairly good."Contact George Nelson at [email protected]"