Roughriders’ Ticketing Turned Into A Gail-Force Over 27 Memorable, Eventful Years
After spending 27 years in ticketing with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, Gail Mund is poised to immerse herself in another form of greenery.
Her garden.
Mund retired on Friday, concluding a formal and fruitful association with the Canadian Football League team that began on March 6, 1996.
“The day she started was the same day that I had minor surgery, so she was totally on her own,” Carol Hoeving, who has worked in the ticket office since 1991, says with a chuckle.
Mund had spent the previous eight years at the Globe Theatre as the Box Office Manager.
One fine day, she was handed an advertisement that had appeared in the Regina Leader-Post. The Roughriders were looking for a Ticket Office Manager.
“Working in the world of professional sports, this individual must have strong office and supervisional skills,” read the ad, which appeared in the newspaper on Jan. 20, 1996. “Must be a team player with excellent computer, interpersonal and communication skills.”
Mund was eminently qualified and suitably intrigued. She faxed a job application to the Roughriders’ office mere minutes in advance of the Jan. 31, 1996 closing date.
“That way, they’d know that I knew how to use the fax machine,” she says. “Back in the day, that was crucial.”
Not long after that, Barry Taman (then the Director of Marketing) and Jill McDougall (Director of Business Operations) were driving to Saskatoon for a Roughriders-related function.
“Jill was riding shotgun in the car and she had brought along a stack of resumes,” Taman remembers. “I vividly recall Jill saying, ‘Oh, here’s one from the Globe,’ and the applicant was ticking off all the boxes.”
The ticking soon turned to ticketing — at a rather challenging time.
The CFL was in a perilous financial position, having just ended its experiment with expansion to the United States.
The 1995 Grey Cup Festival, held in Regina, had provided a desperately needed infusion of revenue for the team and the league.
But the funds would soon be exhausted as everyone languished through a 1996 season in which the Roughriders won only five games.
By December, plans had been announced for a telethon. The plea for province-wide support made life even busier for Mund and her colleagues in
a streamlined business office.
“During the Save The Riders campaign, Gail worked so hard,” says Hoeving, who is now the team’s Ticket Control Officer. “She was on the road and I was holding down the fort in the ticket office.”
The community-owned team had set a goal of selling 200,000 game tickets by March 15, 1997. The objective was met, with an additional 15,222 tickets to provide breathing room, and the survival of the team was ensured for another year.
Looking at the landscape now, it is difficult to believe that there ever was such a time.
Several current employees in the Roughriders’ business or ticket offices weren’t even alive during the telethon of 1997, let alone the televised ticket blitz of 10 years earlier.
When Mund joined the organization, everyone was shoe-horned into cramped quarters at a deteriorating Taylor Field. The ticket office was not immune to the occasional flood or the presence of a rogue mouse.
“And there were bats,” Mund points out. “How many coaches does it take to catch a bat? We don’t know, because they all went running.
“It took two Tinas and a Gail to catch a bat.”
Bit by bit — or bat by bat, as it were — the team chipped away at an accumulated deficit that had soared past $2.5 million.
In 2003, the Roughriders showed a profit for the first time in 20 years. The team made money that season independently of the revenues that were realized from the second Regina-based Grey Cup Festival.
Then came the transformative season of 2007, when the Roughriders exploded out of the gate under first-year head coach Kent Austin and captivated the public en route to winning the third championship in the history of a franchise that was formed in 1910.
Suddenly, there was a voracious appetite for tickets. A plan to upgrade the venue, which had been re-named Mosaic Stadium in 2006, soon became more ambitious. The talk turned to a new stadium, the construction of which was approved in 2012. Five years later, the Green and White played its first game at Mosaic Stadium 2.0, where a retirement reception was held for Mund late Thursday afternoon.
The gathering included Mund’s current colleagues, of course, but also three past volunteer presidents (now chairs) — Fred Wagman, Tom Shepherd and John Lipp — and Craig Reynolds’ predecessor as the President-CEO, Jim Hopson.
It was Wagman who had announced the telethon of 1997. Shepherd was the treasurer at the time.
“Gail started when we were doing telethons,” Reynolds told Thursday’s gathering. “Look around at where we’re doing this right now — in the locker room of a $278-million stadium.
“Gail has seen it all.”
And done it all.
There was a time when all the season-ticket holders’ names were stored on recipe cards.
In the late 1990s, the Roughriders entered the computer age, with Mund at the forefront — and with the support of then-General Manager and Chief Operating Officer Alan Ford.
“Gail is the first one who taught me how to use a computer,” Hoeving says. “The team got me a laptop and I played a game of cards on the screen so I could get used to the keyboard. I had never used a computer before.”
The Roughriders’ first fully functional computerized ticketing system was launched in 2000, in collaboration with tickets.com. That was a precursor to more advances and an alliance with Ticketmaster in 2012. There was also an evolution from printed-up to digital ducats.
All the while, the ticketing area of the team grew in terms of personnel and process, with Mund — who in 2002 was promoted to the role of Director, Ticket Operations and Sales — leading the way in terms of ingenuity, inspiration and interaction.
“She’s always good at teaching and always has time for conversation,” says 20-year Roughriders employee Jenn Senger, who succeeds Mund at the helm of the ticketing side.
“I always joke that Gail is my longest relationship. We never fought for 20 years.”
Although there were battles of a different sort — one more fight for the franchise’s survival, preceded by a logistical challenge that had been unprecedented in franchise history.
With the approval of the new stadium came the gargantuan task of moving 20,000-plus season-ticket holders from one venue to the next.
“It was like taking everybody in Moose Jaw and saying, ‘Get on the bus. You’re moving,’ ” says Mund, who also had to deal with the utter dissimilarity between the antiquated and advanced Mosaic Stadiums.
It was an enviable problem to have, given the reality of a state-of-the-art stadium, but nonetheless a daunting project that devoured countless hours, days and months at various tiers of the organization.
“It was a massive endeavour,” Reynolds says. “At the time, it was the biggest season-ticket-holder transition in Canadian sports history.
“If you think back, the Blue Jays were the only ones who were kind of close, but they didn’t have the same season-ticket base that we did when they moved from Exhibition Stadium to the Rogers Centre.
“So Gail led the single biggest season-ticket move ever achieved in Canada. She really understood what was important to our fans in that transition.”
That understanding has been built over 27 years of interacting with and appreciating the customers, establishing and nurturing relationships, one by one.
“When she looks at Rider Nation and the fan base, she does not look at it from an amorphous glob or a singular level,” Chief Brand Officer Anthony Partipilo says. “She’s looking at it from the standpoint of relationships and lives and people who have good times and bad times, people who have had struggles in certain years in their lives, whether it has been economic or health-related. And she has been on the front lines with them, talking to them, whether it’s in person or on the phone, learning about them and then finding ways to make sure that they stayed next to their Rider family.
“She talks about that quite a bit. When fans come to games and they sit next to other fans, those fans are their Rider family. Sometimes it’s the real family, but oftentimes it’s the Rider family.”
Mund took an important step toward joining that family on Feb. 14, 1996, when she was interviewed for the position of Ticket Office Manager. The job interview was more like a coronation, because the fit was perfect from the outset. She soon began her first of 9,889 days in the Roughriders’ employ.
On the 9,889th day, she received a game ball from Jeremy O’Day (General Manager and Director of Football Operations) and Gordon Gilroy (Equipment Manager).
Mund subsequently took one final tour of the entire, expansive facility, exchanging hugs, email addresses, warm wishes and stories about good times, and even tough times.
Shortly after 5 p.m., she said goodbye to her dear friends in the ticket office, which is generally the point of first contact between the football team and its devotees.
“Gail encouraged everyone in our organization to put fans first and she has just been a hugely impactful leader,” says Reynolds, who like Mund has received two Grey Cup rings (from 2007 and 2013) as a member of the organization.
“She has seen all the highs, such as winning the Grey Cup at home (in 2013), opening the new stadium and closing the old stadium. She has also seen the lows, such as starting with the organization and then there’s a telethon shortly after that.
“She has seen the challenges in terms of modernizing our ticketing and has also seen challenges on the financial side of things with the Club.”
The challenges didn’t end when the new-stadium era began.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the cancellation of the 2020 CFL season and a shortened 2021 campaign. The economic devastation reverberated world-wide and the Roughriders felt the impact, as evidenced by an $7.5-million loss that was incurred during the 2020-21 fiscal year.
“It was like going full circle and past it,” Mund says. “The pandemic was like another Save The Riders campaign.
“Nobody knew what was going to happen. I was still pulling 18-hour days. Nobody (in the general public) knew it was that dire.
“The staff had been scaled back and we were phoning every season-ticket holder. I was sitting there beside them.”
The current climate is more reminiscent of normalcy. A $3.9-million profit was derived from the 2021-22 fiscal year. Another healthy surplus is anticipated for 2022-23, thanks in part to the success of the Regina-based 2022 Grey Cup Festival.
Fittingly, Grey Cup week included the presentation to Mund of Jane Mawby Tribute Award. Mund was the third person to receive the award, which recognizes a highly valued but often unsung employee at the club or league level.
Mund was honoured Nov. 17 during the CFL Awards presentations at the Conexus Arts Centre.
Also in 2022, Mund received the Hugh McKay Memorial Award, which recognizes an individual who embodies the characteristics the Roughriders’ former Manager of Facilities and Stadium Operations exemplified during 21 years with the team. McKay died suddenly on Aug. 9, 2019.
“I would give the award back if Hugh could still be here,” Mund says, quietly.
Such a sentiment is typical of Mund, who has always accentuated and appreciated the people around her.
The Roughriders have sold 7.5 million tickets during her time with the team. It is a staggering number, but one that is founded on friendships with fans and co-workers.
So it will seem strange without her here.
Monday will not be a Mund day at the Roughriders’ office, for the first time since early March of 1996.
Rest assured that, even in retirement, she will be as busy as she is beloved.
There is reading to catch up on and some passion projects that will no longer be simmering on the back burner. The travel bug is certain to bite at various junctures.
Not to be forgotten is her backyard pool, which is to open May 15 — weather permitting, of course.
“But I’ll see you all on July 15,” Mund said during Thursday’s reception, referencing an early-season clash with the visiting Calgary Stampeders. “I’ve got 50 seats booked and I’m bringing my family.”
