Sean: So looking at, so, you know, you've tackled bringing Tasmanian together and then looking at the commercial piece. And then the other part is where do we get the fans, that fan building piece? Where do we get our season ticket holders? How did you go about going to market, you know, with our players signs, you know, with colors and logos being launched and saying, Hey, become a season, come on our ride. How did that initial foray to the Tasmanian market go.

Christine: Well, we were very aware that this is still a very high touch environment. So it wasn't going to be a bunch of emails that went out or a bunch of social media posts. It was actually going to have to be very high touch for us. So the first thing that we actually did was build a mascot. Jack the Jumper became a very important part of our fan engagement piece in the very early days. Once Scott Roth arrived, which was essentially three months after we'd sort of got on the ground here.

Scott and the mascot and our head of community hit the road and they just went all around the state visiting schools, visiting basketball associations, talking to people in the streets, you know, visiting anybody that basically we thought could be part of this community. And so that was very successful for us. People began a real affinity with Jack the Jumper. We created his own social media platforms and then Jack became a big cult figure in himself. So, between Scott and Jack, really they were the two people that were the front people of this brand while the rest of us were working in the background to build the obvious things that happened behind the scenes to build programs out to make them successful.

Sean: And was, I mean, did you, I mean, you've struck gold with Scott as a coach, but do you think his off court efforts and what he's been doing, you know, off the court has almost been just as valuable, if not more valuable, especially for a startup team?

Christine: I've worked in a lot of clubs and one thing I've really learned is your best operating clubs have the administration and the high performance unit working hand in glove. If you've got those two things working together and if your messaging is the same and you're all buying into the same values and the same promise then you're going to be successful. So we drove those things from the inside out. So Scott was part of those initial conversations. What do we want our values to be? What do we want our mission to be?

And so getting him involved right from the start meant there was buy-in. So we're not just saying, this is our marketing message for 2023. Make sure you let the players know this is what they've got to do. It was driven by him and his high performance department, obviously aided by the front office. But for this club, I think that the difference in every club I've worked for and a lot of synergies, I guess, with the Melbourne Storm is that there is a seamless relationship between everybody in the club and that's, you know, the coach, the chair, the CEO, and all the staff, front office and back office. And that's what I think has been the recipe of success for this club.

Sean: And so then getting from that startup phase and setting up and selling the first tickets and getting to that, you know, the first game and the first season, you're getting into operational mode. How have you built on that initial success to, you know, get the cheeks in the seats, get the sponsors to support? How have you gauged the success off the court?

Christine: Hey look Sean, I guess I do have to say, you know, there's been a little bit of luck on our side. I mean, when I think about the first game, which was a sellout, went into double overtime. Sam McDaniel shot the first basket. He was the only Tasmanian born player we had on the court. We went in double overtime and the fairy tale started right there. And then, the arena got was actually ready the day before. Like we went right to the wire and everything.

We had our first win and it just grew and grew and grew from there. And people that had gone to that first game said, wow, what an entertainment experience. We loved it. And so we quickly found the next game and sold out. The next game and sold out. And all of a sudden we're in this position where, here we are three seasons later and we haven't had a game that we haven't sold out. And we've got a real supply and demand issue here. And when you talk about problems off the court, the biggest one I need to solve is supply and demand without putting too much pressure on the government to expand the arena again. You know, how do I take the brand to the people if the people can't come to me? We have three and a half thousand people sitting on a paid waiting list. How do we