Foley’s Vegas Golden Knights Portfolio Adds Another Knight To Sports Roundtable: Indoor Football Team Name Is Vegas Knight Hawks Playing In Henderson
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Bill Foley is a fast learner.
If you’re going to build an arena, you:
a. get the local government — in this case, the city of Henderson — to give you free public money. Henderson is contributing $42 million of the $84 million cost for the 6,000-seat Dollar Loan Center arena. (Yes, Dollar Loan Center bought the naming rights to the building.)
b. create your own programming like launching a new indoor football team for the venue. The team, the Vegas Knight Hawks, will share the building with Foley’s Henderson Silver Knights, the feeder team to the parent VGK club. You’d think that Henderson, for contributing $42 million to the cost of the arena where the football team will play, would be in the official name of the team. But no dice.
c. create your own entertainment and sports business organization to book events and acts for the arena. It’s called the Foley Entertainment Group.
d. announce the indoor football team’s new name with a local TV station to maximize buzz with the built-in coverage.
So, Foley’s latest venture is the Vegas Knight Hawks of the Indoor Football League. The team is the latest sports industry addition to a market of 2.2 million that is already crowded with both team sports and annual events. Plus, there’s a new indoor lacrosse team that’s getting ready to play at the arena at Mandalay Bay.
As you can tell, Foley and the VGK franchise are a little obsessed with this “knight” theme. Even the title of the announcement had knight in it. A 1967 West Point graduate, Foley loves the “knight” reference because the U.S. Military Academy’s sports teams were called the, “Black Knights.”
The team’s coach is Mike Davis, who was the defensive line coach for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League.
Some reactions on Twitter:
Before name announcement Monday:
Here is some info right from the league’s website:
• The IFL is the largest and most prominent indoor football league in the nation and the only indoor football league with a national footprint and a national television partner. There are currently 16 teams in the IFL, with 11 of those teams playing in 2021, and additional expansion is expected in the coming years. Eight of our 16 teams are in top 50 media markets.
• IFL teams play a 16-game schedule with each team having eight home games and eight road games.
• The IFL includes a number of historic indoor football organizations such as the Arizona Rattlers, the Iowa Barnstormers, the Green Bay Blizzard, the Sioux Falls Storm, and more. Numerous organizations within the league have more than 20 years of operating experience in their market.
• The IFL offers a unique product, playing on a 50-yard field with padded dasher boards surrounding the field. The IFL’s game play has 8 players on offense, two of which can be in motion at the snap, and 8 players on defense.
