On the morning of March 12, 2020, Mark Goudie addressed a packed house in Ottawa City Hall’s council chamber as part of a panel discussion on local pro sports teams. Goudie, the president and CEO of the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, was joined by executives from two franchises just breaking into the city’s sports […]
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On the morning of March 12, 2020, Mark Goudie addressed a packed house in Ottawa City Hall’s council chamber as part of a panel discussion on local pro sports teams.
Goudie, the president and CEO of the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, was joined by executives from two franchises just breaking into the city’s sports scene – Michael Cvitkovic, then the president of the Canadian Elite Basketball League’s new expansion team, the Ottawa BlackJacks; and Eric Perez, chairman of the Ottawa Aces, which was slated to debut in the Europe-based Rugby Football League in 2021.
But unbeknownst to the crowd, Goudie had other things on his mind.
The previous night, the National Basketball Association had announced it was suspending its season after a player – later identified as Utah Jazz centre Rudy Gobert – tested positive for COVID-19. Goudie, whose daughter worked at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, had a better idea than most about the true severity of what was then widely referred to as the novel coronavirus.
Partway through the Mayor’s Breakfast event at City Hall, he gave his apologies and hurried out of the building.
“I couldn't stay for the whole panel discussion because I was coming back here to effectively close the office down,” Goudie says, exactly five years after that fateful day. “I know I mentioned that at the panel, and I think I got some cross-eyed kind of looks at me. I think people at the time felt it was fearmongering a little bit.”
Indeed, just one day after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, people were still struggling to come to grips with what that really meant – Goudie and the staff at OSEG included.
Goudie, who oversees the organization that owns the Canadian Football League’s Ottawa Redblacks and the Ontario Hockey League’s Ottawa 67’s and operates TD Place stadium and arena at Lansdowne Park, remembers exactly where he was standing when he gathered his employees to tell them OSEG was suspending its operations until further notice.
“It was going to be a month or so, is what we thought at the time,” he recalls. “I just remember the sad looks in people’s eyes. (The 67’s) were in first place; we were just about to break an all-time 67’s record and had a really great shot at going to the Memorial Cup. I was telling people, ‘Take your shoes home. This is going to take a while.’”
Looking back, Goudie says pausing OSEG’s activities was a no-brainer.
“We had events coming up, and we needed to make a call – whether this is something we kind of just went day by day or just shut ’er down. We decided to shut ’er down was the right answer. It wasn’t a difficult decision because I think the data and the facts dictated that’s what needed to be done.
“Intellectually, it wasn’t a difficult decision. Emotionally, it was excruciating. We are an events business, and that was day one of an events business that didn’t do events for over a year.”
As it turned out, the shutdown lasted far longer than Goudie expected. Once the extent of the health crisis became clear, the CFL cancelled its entire 2020 season that August, marking the first time in more than a century that the Grey Cup would not be contested.
For OSEG, which relied on the Redblacks to draw hundreds of thousands of fans to TD Place each summer and fall, it meant finding new sources of revenue. As a public-private partnership, OSEG initially didn’t qualify for government relief programs, so Goudie and his team had to put their thinking caps on.
That summer, TD Place stadium was converted into a giant drive-in theatre. Cooped-up Ottawans jumped at the chance to escape their homes and the first four movie nights sold out in an hour.
“I remember just how happy people were to be out and doing something,” Goudie says. “There was kind of a cool sense of community and happiness to be out and seeing people.”
Besides keeping people entertained as best it could, OSEG did its part to try to stem the spread of COVID. TD Place arena was quickly turned into a mass vaccination facility that administered up to 1,000 jabs a day.
All the while, Goudie was working the phones and sending out daily updates – or “box scores,” as he called them – to employees, detailing the latest public health bulletins and COVID statistics.
“I was having tons of calls with doctors throughout North America at the time, just trying to understand what’s likely to happen, the vaccination protocols, all of that stuff,” he says.
“It was exciting times – not in a completely positive way, but every day was different, frenetic. You woke up and started running for your life and you looked up and it was all of a sudden eight o’clock at night. It wasn’t easy.”
With no public events to host and revenues in a free fall, OSEG had to make tough financial decisions.
The organization – which downgraded its 2020 revenue forecast from more than $50 million to $25 million early in the pandemic – initially implemented an across-the-board pay cut of 20 per cent in an effort to retain all of its 140 employees.
But by the fall of 2020, it was clear OSEG wouldn’t come close to hitting its revised revenue targets. As a result, the organization laid off 40 per cent of its business operations staff.
“We got tons of calls here with (other employers) looking to hire our people,” Goudie says. “We were kind of able to play matchmaker a little bit with businesses that were looking to hire people. A lot of them took jobs on contract so that they could come back after the pandemic. That’s something I’m really proud of.”
Amid all the doom and gloom, Goudie says, there was a silver lining. An organization that typically staged 200 events a year suddenly found itself with an abundance of what had been a scarce commodity – time.
“Our season is every season,” Goudie explains. “So it was kind of cool that we had some time on our hands to go back and do some of the things that we really hadn’t had time to do since we opened. So we tried to invest in some of those programs and (figure out) how we were going to come out of this better on the other end.”
For example, he says, OSEG was able to make headway on developing its equity, diversity and inclusion program and improving its digital ticketing technology.
“For us here, our team pulled together,” he adds. “We would jump on anything we could to kind of keep busy.
“When we started, we tried to be flexible and not make rules, kind of figure out what people want and just deliver that. When we got into COVID and how our people reacted to things, I think it was just that – they were flexible and they just adapted to what we had and kind of went with that, which was awesome.”
Goudie also feels the pandemic gave him a new perspective on what the organization truly means to the community.
“There are worse things that can happen than a cold hot dog or a lost game,” he says. “I think I learned the power of sports and entertainment in people’s lives. We’re social animals, and you could see that as we were coming back out of COVID – people were really longing to get back together and do things together and see each other.
“We do something that’s really important in people’s lives. It gives people an escape, and that’s what we’re about.”
