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Ski crowd sparse on Super Bowl Sunday

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February 02, 2012|By T.D. Thornton

Skiing during Super Bowl Sunday is a decidedly uncrowded undertaking at… (Photo courtesy Okemo Mountain )

Here’s the most bankable prediction for Super Bowl Sunday: Skiers and boarders will win big, while resort operators will humbly accept the trouncing pro football inflicts on their accounting ledgers with a mixture of resignation and inventiveness.

Having long since given up fighting the hype, the region’s ski areas now try to market what is essentially an annual black hole for business as a bonanza for diehard customers.

Super Bowl Sunday is one of the few weekend days of the season when sparsely populated slopes and quick lift lines are the norm. Although this ritualistic crowd-disappearing act affects ski areas all across the country, the phenomenon is accentuated here in the Northeast, where the Patriots will be playing for the National Football League championship for the fifth time since 2002.

And because New England’s opponent this year (like in 2008) will be the Giants, the adverse impact on ski-resort revenue is further compounded when you factor in how many New Yorkers won’t be making the trek north on Interstate 91 this weekend.

“The first year or two the Patriots made the Super Bowl, we noticed some extra space on the slopes,’’ said Karl Stone, marketing director for the industry consortium Ski NH. “Now that the Patriots make this almost an annual tradition, the ski areas have gotten creative with some incredible deals.’’

True, there will be bargains aplenty this Sunday. But that’s only because marketers have learned that appealing to reason won’t cut it when trying to fight the myth that enjoying the Super Bowl has to be a full-blown, all-day endeavor.

If you are the type of person who regularly hits the slopes on weekends, there really is no reason you can’t ski and watch the game without overlap. Official kickoff for this year’s Super Bowl is listed as 6:30 p.m., more than two hours after most resorts (without lights) stop running the lifts. Even assuming a drive home of 150 miles, if you leave the mountain by 3 p.m., you can be comfortably entrenched in front of a TV in plenty of time to catch the opening play.

It’s been 35 years since the NFL last scheduled its championship game with an afternoon East Coast starting time (Super Bowl XI kicked off at 3:47 p.m.). But even by 1977, it was becoming evident that the nation’s most anticipated televised sporting event had the power to knock recreational skiing off its axis for one Sunday every season.