Snowball effect
Originally published: Insight on Business Magazine, April 2024
We’re going to own a [expletive] football team?”
Kathy Treankler still remembers her reaction when her husband, Larry, laid a carefully folded newspaper in her lap. She read the news that had caught Larry's attention while “sitting where men go to read the newspaper:” the community’s arena football team was going to exit Green Bay if it didn’t secure new ownership.
Kathy had never even been to a game, but Larry knew how well received Blizzard company outings were by his employees at BayTek Entertainment and MCL Industries. At the time, Kathy saw Larry as entering “semi-retirement mode,” so despite her initial skepticism she came around rather quickly, figuring the Blizzard could be a satisfying adventure for Larry and, more importantly, a way for the Treanklers to amplify their support for the community.
More than a decade later, the Treanklers have no regrets about purchasing the AF2, now Indoor Football League (IFL), franchise. But to say the transition was easy would be a massive understatement.
Keeping busy
Larry Treankler did not, in fact, retire from manufacturing after buying the Green Bay Blizzard. He would go on to found The Village Companies, bringing together his existing companies and growing an even broader business in Pulaski. Kathy Treankler, meanwhile, was also more than active in a number of enterprises. Today she still owns and manages Trinks Inc., formerly known as Lawton Machinery Group, which manufactures custom hydraulic presses in De Pere.
Running a football team was nothing like running a manufacturing company, Kathy quickly learned, and the franchise was also much more in her hands than she’d originally envisioned.
“I didn’t think I was going to have to do anything operationally,” says Kathy, a Milwaukee native who holds multiple business degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “until I found out I was gonna have to do everything operationally.”
One of the first moves Kathy made was to hire someone for the front office. Throughout her career, she says, she has prided herself on identifying talent in unconventional places, routinely sliding her business card to people who give great customer service. This particular time, she was inspired by a visit from The Geek Squad.
Ryan Hopson was working for Best Buy when he was called out to supervise the installation of sound equipment for the Treanklers. Hopson’s interactions impressed Kathy — “it’s more about your personality than what you know, because I’ll teach you what you need to know,” she says of her hiring philosophy. Hopson was equally impressed by the Treanklers, and before he even merged onto the highway, he was talking to Kathy about a job overseeing sales for a professional football franchise. He continues as the Blizzard’s sales and marketing director today.
If Hopson was up for a challenge, he found it in his new job.
“[Ryan] and I are very, very close friends. We have the same mindset,” Kathy says. “But as Ryan and I were starting to gel, the AF2 was going downhill. We were losing as many teams as were coming in, so that’s when I started getting ingrained in the [league]. Now the thing that was supposed to be fun, that was supposed to be Larry’s, not only am I involved — but I’m involved in the league as well.”
A side project had become a full-time challenge, the franchise was bleeding money, the league was in relative shambles, and “then we found out we weren’t liked in the community,” Kathy says. “In fact, we were hated in the community.”
Perhaps it’s a character flaw, Kathy says, but she isn’t one to say no, to shy away from a challenge, or to twiddle her thumbs. So it was time to get to work.
Culture shift
Larry says that, when he and Kathy first took over the franchise, Blizzard games attracted a lot of bachelor parties, excessive drinking, foul language and even “a fair amount of fights,” making it exactly the opposite of a place people wanted to take their kids. Area schools and corporate partners, many of which are now the Blizzard’s biggest advocates, wanted nothing to do with the team.
“On the football side, we didn’t attract the best humans,” Larry says — a fact that made community partners disinterested in even offering housing and services to Blizzard players, let alone advertising at games. “[Now] we work really hard on the front end to attract good young men, first and foremost, and then football players secondarily.”
Furthermore, Larry says his wife and Hopson deserve “all the credit in the world” for the monumental effort that was rebuilding the team’s fractured relationships with community partners, including area schools. Hopson estimates the team made visits to 60 schools last year and says connecting with youth is a critical pillar of the franchise today.
Tony Ebeling is a former Blizzard wide receiver who is now principal of Bay Harbor Elementary School in Suamico. Speaking last month at the Blizzard’s season kickoff event, Ebeling drew a stark contrast between the team’s reputation when he joined in 2003 and the community-minded, family-friendly organization it is today. He says he, of all school principals, should have been eager to partner with the Blizzard, but it wasn’t until Hopson came to visit him about five years ago that he began to fully embrace his connections to the team.
“The Green Bay Blizzard is not the same team or organization now as when I was there,” Ebeling told the packed house of Blizzard supporters at Green Bay Distillery. “The outreach nowadays, the family commitment … it is a whole different game. Now I’m partnering with the Blizzard every year to bring hundreds and hundreds of kids, hundreds and hundreds of parents, to a game because they love it, and [Larry and Kathy] give five dollars per ticket back to my school.”
“Kids, cancer and community with a Christian bias,” Larry says, is where the Treanklers have long focused their philanthropy, and that has remained their emphasis with the Blizzard, though Kathy says she also has a special affinity for causes related to the arts and animals. The support of schools has been a major focus, and Larry and Kathy have both had cancer, along with several members of Larry’s family, so a number of events and fundraisers support Ribbon of Hope and the American Cancer Society.
“The reason we were able to get to a yes [on buying the team] so fast was that, with our businesses, we give back 10% to the community,” Larry says. “With matching funds and getting fans involved with being charitable, [owning the Blizzard] is like a 1+1 equals four or five.”
View from the 25-yard line
Fans of traditional American football will recognize many elements of the indoor game, but the indoor product is far from a facsimile of NCAA or NFL football. First and foremost, the field is about 28 yards wide and just 50 yards long — half the length of a traditional American football field. The goalposts stand more tightly together, the field is surrounded by a 3-to-5-foot wall (which typically sees a lot of action), and each team fields eight, not 11, players.
Because of this compression, high-scoring affairs are common. The Blizzard scored 45 or more points in nine games last season, and over/unders north of 100 are the norm for IFL contests.
Larry says he thinks the coolest IFL rule is the one that permits pre-snap forward motion for two eligible receivers: “When you’ve got a kid who can run a 4.5 40 and he gets 10 yards to build a head of steam, it’s a whole different deal for the defensive backs,” he says.
Other noteworthy quirks of the indoor game: A kickoff that travels through the uprights earns a team two points. Drop-kicked field goals earn a bonus point. A linebacker who plans to blitz must identify himself before the play.
In the Arena Football League and AF2, IFL’s long-time predecessors, linebackers were required to blitz on every down — a rule that rendered the running back position essentially moot, Larry says, because backs were replaced with the “300-pound offensive linemen” needed to stave off these blitzes. The current rules more closely mirror the outdoor game, he adds, which Larry says appeals more to “conventional fans” — a category he would put himself in, or at least used to.
“Kathy and I are football fans. When we were buying the team, I was trying to debate whether it was football or gimmicky,” he says. “It only took me one practice to realize it’s every bit real football, and [I’ve] fallen in love with the actual sport — but that was post owning it.”
No blizzness like show blizzness
If you’re not a conventional football fan, or even a football fan at all, indoor football holds another appeal: It’s affordable, exciting, family-friendly entertainment. For Kathy, this is the side of team ownership that keeps her creative juices flowing. Over the last decade, she and Hopson have worked side-by-side to make Blizz games attractions that transcend football.
“It didn’t take Kathy very long to fall in love with the entertainment component of indoor football,” Larry says. “She’s in costume most nights; we have a theme night for every freaking home game and our fans and families just cherish that. She’s an actress and a ham and just eats that stuff up.”
Kathy has also developed an affinity for props, finding a particular bit of inspiration when she was backstage working on a St. Norbert College production of “White Christmas” that utilized snow machines.
“So I call Ryan and say, ‘Hey, we need snow. Could we make it snow?’” she remembers. And thus was born a beloved fan tradition: the annual Blizzard game in which it snows inside the Resch Center. (If it were logistically feasible, Kathy says, she would have it snow every game.) A postgame laser light show and even a postgame full-fledged Christian rock concert on “Faith and Family Night” are also among a given season’s biggest recurring attractions.
Then there’s the magic of the fifth quarter: a postgame, on-field gathering, win or lose, with players, fans and families.
“I’ve got football players who just lost a game in overtime, and they go out on the field with those families and kids afterward and it’s just amazing how a 7-year-old can rebuild a 325-pound 25-year-old,” Larry says. “It’s just one of the coolest things.”
“Half the people who attend our games don’t even know what the IFL stands for, or who else is in our league, but those are the people we have to make sure come back,” Kathy says. “They’re there for the entertainment. Did whoever came have a good time? Even if they’re disappointed we lost, did they go on the field after the game and feel better?”
Home sweet home
The focus on entertainment wouldn’t be possible without one of the Blizzard’s most important business partners: the Resch Center.
Kristie Haney, vice president of events and booking at PMI Entertainment Group, which manages the Resch Center, has worked with the Blizzard from the beginning and plays a key role in assembling the daunting scheduling puzzle the team faces each year. She says it’s easy to go the extra mile for the Blizzard, holding dates for them and accommodating what she affectionately calls “Ryan’s shenanigans” such as rolling in a ring of snow machines, because the partnership is one of mutual benefit and respect.
“It’s so much easier when somebody is a pleasure to work with,” Haney says. “If they weren’t such great people, it wouldn’t be as easy.”
Hopson and Kathy have earned their collegial reputations not just in Green Bay, but within the IFL. The league’s John Pettit Person of the Year Award has been presented to each of them in consecutive seasons. Juli Pettit, general manager of the Iowa Barnstormers and daughter of the award’s namesake, says Kathy is a mentor to her, particularly being a female sports executive.
“Ryan and Kathy continue to be very deserving of that [Person of the Year] title,” Pettit says. “They are both very selfless when it comes to the sports business. And Kathy, I just can’t express enough that she’s someone I look up to as a leader. She’s passionate about the Indoor Football League; she cares about the greater good of the league.”
As a further testament to the Blizzard’s success, Green Bay was named 2023 IFL Franchise of the Year despite finishing with a 7-8 record and missing the league playoffs. IFL Commissioner Todd Tryon, a former championship player, coach and owner with the Sioux Falls Storm, says the Blizzard’s consistency, creativity and commitment make it a model franchise, even if it has never hoisted the title trophy.
He points to Kathy’s involvement with the growing league as critical to its success. At its lowest point, the conference thinned to just six teams and faced a highly uncertain future. Today, Tryon calls Kathy “the gatekeeper of the league,” saying she keeps the focus on “the IFL first, franchise second.” The IFL has 16 members this season and will have 18 in 2025.
And if Tryon had 16 teams just like the Green Bay Blizzard, he says, the IFL would be sitting pretty.
Leadership in practice
Tryon is the first to admit that, when he and Kathy first served together as owners on the league’s executive committee, he didn’t necessarily appreciate Kathy’s contributions.
“We butted heads,” Tryon says. “[Sioux Falls] didn’t contribute real well at the league level, and she called me out on it. I thought I was the one who had all the experience, and here’s some newbie trying to tell me what to do. But as I look back on it, I was the one who should have taken a step back. The Treanklers are great people; they do a great job contributing to the community; and they’re in this for the right reasons. They run a great program.”
With decades of collective business experience, the Treanklers have created a quality product as they enter their 11th season of team ownership, perhaps against the odds, and community has endured as their most important focus.
“It’s not a lucrative business, owning an indoor football team,” Hopson says. “Larry and Kathy are relentless, and probably stubborn in the best way possible. But it’s never been a pocketbook decision that’s kept this team around. [It’s when you] see a kid in a youth jersey from seven years ago that you’re like, ‘OK, it matters that we’re here.’”