The VHL's continued expansion, and the issue of travel.

[David O'Quinn 115]

The Travel Crisis

 

The VHL is a great, expansive and expanding league, ranging through the various cultures of hockey, stretching from Seattle, Washington to Riga, Latvia, a distance of nearly 8000 Kilometers between them, covering 9 time zones between all of its teams. As the league ramps up its expansion efforts and expands to one of the worlds most prominent centers of hockey, Moscow, Russia, adding nearly 300 KM's to the girth, a very real issue comes to light for the players and staff in this league... the distances cause insane amounts of travel time for many players. For a player playing for Seattle, a flight to Moscow could last nearly an entire day, that's a day missed practicing, playing hockey, training, and just spend more or less sitting around and waiting. 

So, let's hypothesis. Say, I'm drafted to the recently announced Moscow team, and at the start of the year, the team goes on a road trip. From Moscow to Seattle, they play every team within a span of two weeks, how far will I travel, and how much time will I spend traveling vs playing hockey? 

 

Let's say the schedule is hypothetically this: Helsinki -> Riga -> Davos -> New York -> Quebec City -> Toronto -> Calgary -> Seattle

Moscow to Helsinki is at least 1hr and 40mins of flight time, to play 60 Minutes of hockey. Seems fine so far. Next, we go to Riga, which is another 1hr 10 minutes for another 60 minutes of playing hockey. Our last stop in Europe, getting to Davos from Riga takes about 3 hours on a nonstop flight, adding up to 6 Hrs of flight time compared to 3 hours of playing time, which is, again, fine.   

Our issues really start to pop up when we reach America. From Davos to New York, up to 16 hrs of flight time for 1 hr of playing time. Overall, from Davos to Seattle and all our stops in-between, you end up with an astonishing 31 hours of time spent flying for 5 hrs of hockey, not counting transportation back and forth between hotels, arenas, airports, etc. Hockey players are resilient and will more likely than not manage this fine, but expanding further east could be disastrous for the league, creating extreme fatigue for players, who spend much more time flying than doing much else. 

 

Many of you reading this may point out a personal issue many of us have also faced, the distant time zones. While Seattle may be playing in Moscow at a reasonable time in Moscow, most if not all Seattle fans will not be able to watch the game live without structuring an entire day around this hobby of theirs, and that's anything but realistic. While options to circumvent this is available, most prominent being the ability to watch a full game using various streaming services after the fact, this leaves the potential for fans to have the games they look forward to spoiled by fans who are ahead of them simply because of where they live.

 

There are a few solutions, but the one I would put forward to the league is this: Make the re-playing of games free to fans, just include up to date ads. Much of hockey's income is based off ads, and this could be an incentive for teams to increase their revenue, instead of charging fans ridiculous costs to rewatch games.

TL;DR, Most players will spend significantly more time traveling than all other activities combined, especially if a team is slated to go from Seattle to Moscow, and this is a burden upon both fans and players. The VHL is a business, and I can't blame them for expanding as such, but pity your fans who've given you the economy to do so. 

 

This is reporter Rogers Pennies, signing off.

 

 

639 Words, claimed for the week Jan 28-Feb 3

Edited January 28, 2019 by JohnOQuinn