NSituated on the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a wooded area overlooking an artificial lake on the edge of the Clemson University campus, the James F Martin Inn is the modest venue where thoughtful leaders check in for conferences. nationals about education and struggling parents check off before saying goodbye to their freshmen for a last tearful goodbye. Along with its pastoral trails, restaurants and the adjoining golf course with echo-shaped bunkers of the college football team’s tiger leg logo, the inn offers one more luxury that may be of interest. for rabid football fans: 20-minute walk to Memorial Stadium.
They call the stadium Death Valley, a name that makes a gesture with the slender powers of 81,500 Clemson fans in their throats. Even more resonant is its impact on this northern city of the state with a permanent population of just over 16,000, making it a leap from South Carolina’s 33rd largest city during the summer holidays to the most populated the state on football Saturdays.
Sign up for The Recap, our weekly publisher selection email.
Tens of thousands who fail to get a seat in the Death Valley are happy to get the back hatch by land or lake. Much of the remaining overflow drowns in College Avenue, where supporters dressed in orange and purple pack inside the downtown bars and shops like cotton swabs. But when Covid swept last year and snatched life from that game, the shocking effects were far worse than any defeat against South Carolina or Alabama. “Everything was shattered,” says Sharon Franks, the inn’s general manager.
Football isn’t just the tide floating Clemson’s $ 130 million athletic department; it is the vital axis of this community. The local chamber of commerce estimates that a single football match has a minimum economic impact of $ 2 million, taxes that go to the police, public works and other line items from the city’s $ 28 million budget . Related companies accrue up to 50% of their annual revenue during the Tigers ’seven home games each year. “We’re very blessed,” says Clemson Mayor Robert Halfacre.
In this symbiosis of suits and cities, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney is more than the $ 8 million man who mocks the idea that student-athletes get a piece of the pie. (“That’s where you lose me,” he said in a 2015 interview, raw meat for an old John Oliver lean.) Julie Ibrahim, owner of a pair of clothing stores called The Tiger Sports Shop, calls football of Clemson “our stock” market “and is afraid of Swinney who recalls the reverence of Wall Street by Warren Buffett. “If you want to say something bad about Dabo,” he says of the coach who has won two national titles in the last five seasons, “you can forget about it in front of me. He’s actually my hero.”
The more Clemson thrives under Swinney, the more other employers see the green. “A lot of people come here to spend a football weekend and they say to themselves,‘ Wow, this city could use another bar or restaurant or clothing store, ’and open a place,” says Cameron Farish, co-owner of Tiger Town Tavern, a home center. bar that transforms into a mosh chest on game days. “And then, when the business doesn’t come, it’s because there are no football matches. What they don’t realize is that you make sauce seven days a weekend, but you have to make a cookie for 360 ”.
Cthe ovid not only stole the cookie; he lit the fire in the kitchen. It forced Clemson to close in mid-March and wrapped up its sports scene with uncertainty. The Atlantic Coast Conference, in which Clemson competes, canceled spring sports, a not insignificant source of income for the Clemson community, and maintained suspense throughout the summer over its football plans. for the fall.
To save an estimated $ 25 million pandemic-induced deficit, Clemson’s athletic department abandoned its men’s track and field teams and scored the first time a college-level elite school in athletics, the Power 5, abandoned these sports. Clemson’s football coaches were forced to cut salaries; USA Today found that the amount charged to Swinney, which was relatively modest at $ 698,500, nevertheless exceeded the annual pay of at least 24 head coaches in the Football Bowl subdivision.
Eventually, the ACC decided to move forward with the 2020 football season, but there was a limit of 19,000 spectators in Death Valley and the team only played six home games on a short schedule.
On top of all this, it was the virus itself, which introduced more clutter into the football calendar as the ACC adjusted its Covid protocols in real time. Not only did more than 20 players test positive for Covid during the preseason, but the Tigers lost star quarterback Trevor Lawrence to the virus in two games.
Overall, the city of Clemson recorded a $ 1.8 million decrease in revenue between September 2019 and September 2020 as a result of the pandemic. “If you only talk about hospitality and accommodation taxes, the average loss was 18.5%,” says Halfacre. All the while hotel reservations were drying up and bars and shops struggled to get people to walk through their doors under strict guidelines of masking and social distancing. On match days, Clemson went from the biggest party in the state to a real rehearsal festival. “We closed for four weeks during the pandemic while the university struggled to figure it all out,” says Franks, the hostel.
Luckily for the inn, his ties to the university proved to be a saving grace. Once athletics returned to Clemson, he used the inn to house visiting teams and recruits during the fall, a deal that made the Franks people work. “The other hotels struggled a little more because they didn’t have that option.”
The few Clemson companies that did not fight were mostly tied to the city’s outdoors, on hiking trails, or on rental boats, where social distancing is most natural. Off-campus housing rentals also thrived during the pandemic. “Our students tried to get out of our leases,” says Katie Green of Tiger Properties. “Unfortunately, due to our lease, there is no clause to break the lease.” This is so, as the university has frozen university enrollment for the second year in a row.
Just to make you wonder the difference Covid might have made to this community if there was, for example, an auto parts supplier or a bottling plant in the city. Why there is none is less a matter of economics than geography.
The town of Clemson covers less than eight square miles with no access to the sea. It is surrounded by mountains, the lake and tens of thousands of acres of protected forest land. Clemson University has an area of 1,400 acres.
The unique alloy of the dizzying popularity and scarcity of land in the city make high real estate values and property taxes coincide, especially in relation to Greenville, Anderson and other neighboring cities, where there are more tax credits and there has more room to grow. That’s why car dealerships, big boxes and other store businesses are on the outskirts of the city, while smaller, hospitality-based businesses operate on campus. These restrictions not only alienate major industries. Clemson graduates with an entrepreneurial mindset are discouraged from building businesses around the university that can help diversify the local economy by moving away solely from football, in the same way that Duke, North Carolina and Wake graduates have. Forest in and around the Research Triangle. “Take a look at these cities,” says Farish, the bar, which is also part of the city’s economic development advisory board. “There are think tanks, engineering companies, biomedical software boot companies. And these places employ the husbands and wives of teachers, professors and staff. And they diversify the economies of those cities that were once dormitory communities. Clemson doesn’t have that. “
When the Tigers ’sports are in season, small business owners thrive and also keep students and residents in paid employment. But when sports disappeared during the pandemic, local entrepreneurs had to be creative to survive. Ibrahim, owner of the Tiger sports store, was on the verge of heavy losses last year as regular traffic on foot in and out of her shops slowed during the Covid. But with the help of manager Shawn Cartmill, he quickly boosted the sale of face masks with Clemson logos, while expanding his online business and adding customer service.
“There were a lot of things I thought about before Covid got, you know, what could make football go,” says Ibrahim, who has been working since 1974. “Would they be too injured or go on probation for some reason? This has “It was by far the biggest and most unusual crisis we’ve ever had in our business. But we’re still strong and we want to move forward at full speed until someone tells us otherwise.”
Last Saturday, Clemson’s football returned to campus with full force, with the home team bouncing 49-3 against the state of South Carolina after being hit by Georgia a week earlier on neutral ground in Charlotte. The Death Valley was packed to the brim, bars and shops were packed, and College Avenue shook again (although some social distancing measures were maintained). The party officially returns, but for exactly the time no one can say for sure. With the Delta and other Covid variants in the air, a community maintains the collective breath. The last thing this city needs is another pandemic closure. If it seems like the people here are rooted in the Tigers as if their lives depended on them, well, it’s because they are.