The city of Everett is finally a Four-horse town

Earl Dutton remembers the hustle. And the flow.

When Dutton, now 78, was growing up in Everett in the 1930s and 40s, the downtown area was the place to be. With department stores like Montgomery Ward, Sears and JC Penney’s, as well as four different theatres, Everett’s central district had plenty of foot traffic on any given day or night.

“On the intersections at Hewitt and Colby, at Colby and California, there was a mass of humanity crossing the streets whenever the light would change,” said Dutton, who now serves as president of Everett’s Public Facilities District. “It was just a real jumping place.”

Thanks in large part to the initial popularity of the Everett Mall, and the eventual addition of several strip malls that sprouted up all over the county, the downtown area died out over time and became a virtual ghost town by the mid-1960s. There just wasn’t much to do in downtown Everett.

And if you were a sports fan, there was virtually nothing. When it came to professional sports, the city of Everett was like a tone-deaf yodeler at an American Idol audition.

Boy, has that landscape changed. The evolution of Everett as a sports town has transformed as suddenly, and dramatically, as Sanjaya’s hair.

With the addition of three professional teams in the past four years, Everett has reached a level that not many towns can boast. Just five U.S. cities, not including those that have professional teams at the major-league level, have minor-league franchises in all four of the main team sports. Everett joined that group this year, and the assortment of entertainment options has brought life back to downtown.

“It’s been phenomenal,” said Karen Shaw, director of economic development for the City of Everett. “It’s gone from dark streets at 6:30 every night to life downtown. Restaurants are staying open later. There’s a buzz downtown on the streets.”

In the past month alone, the Silvertips hosted several Western Hockey League playoff games, the Explosion opened their inaugural season of International Basketball League play, and the AquaSox called a press conference to announce new ownership that included local celebrities.

Today, the Hawks will play their first home game of another arenafootball2 season (see story on Page C1).

During one five-day span in June, Everett is scheduled to host an IBL and af2 games at the Events Center, sandwiched around an AquaSox’s five-game homestand against the Yakima Bears five blocks away.

Everett has four professional teams, an ever-growing fan base and even a local sports radio station.

For a town that was ranked 356th of 369 sports towns in a 2004 poll by The Sporting News, Everett has certainly come a long way.

“I think it’s an awesome sports town,” said former Seattle Mariner Jay Buhner, who joined state politician Dino Rossi as a part owner of the AquaSox last month. “It’s a great community. When I came here for rehab (in 2001), they rolled out the red carpet for me. The fans were awesome. And they’re diehard fans.

“… You can see it all around you. It’s growing like a weed. There are a lot of great things going on here right now.”

Due in large part to the Events Center’s draw, downtown Everett has become the place to be again.

“It’s brought a whole new vitality that Everett didn’t have before,” Shaw said. “It’s driving traffic into the area, with very sport-specific fans.

“It’s helping expose downtown Everett to people who remember the city as what it used to be.”

While Shaw did not have specific dollar values to prove the impact of the city’s sports teams, she said it was not hard to see the difference.

“We do know that the Events Center hosted 575,000 people in the last year,” she said. “And because sports is the main thing happening there, we know that sports is the major thing driving that number.”

While the Silvertips remain the area’s most popular franchise – the hockey team had an average attendance of 6,460 during the regular season, and an even higher number in the playoffs – the AquaSox, Hawks and Explosion have also, to lesser degrees, found their niche. Based on ratio of average event attendance to city population, Everett has supported its local teams better than cities like Tacoma, Spokane and Boise (see chart, Page C1).

Once a one-sport town, Everett now has plenty of sports options for the entertainment dollar. And fans have been spreading that dollar throughout the sports.

“The first thing is the really strong growth in the Puget Sound,” Events Center general manager Kim Bedier said when asked how the city was able to support all four sports. “And traffic actually helps us in a way because it’s so much easier to go to the Events Center than to fight traffic all the way down to Seattle.

“And the teams have been successful right from the beginning, and that’s important to people.”

The Silvertips have won the Western Hockey League’s U.S. Division three times in their four years of existence. The Hawks made the playoffs as an expansion team in the National Indoor Football League before moving to af2. And the Explosion is off to a 6-2 start that is good for second place in the IBL’s West Division.

But the biggest draw, fans say, is convenience.

“People don’t want to travel,” said Bill Tsoukalas, a local sports fan and executive director of the Everett Boys &Girls Club. “They want to do everything here. They don’t want to travel to Seattle anymore because it’s too congested.

“Especially with young kids, they want to go where they have access, where it’s affordable and where they have access to the players. And that’s what they get here.”

The most obvious reason for the sports boom has been the Oct. 2003 opening of the Events Center, which houses three of the professional teams and has also hosted sporting events like Disney on Ice and the Harlem Globetrotters.

Explosion owner Nathan Mumm said the Events Center was the driving reason he brought an IBL franchise to this city. It’s also a good reason for a man who grew up in Marysville to spend time in Everett.

“This space right here used to be shanties,” the Marysville native said while sitting in the front row at the Explosion’s home opener on April 10. “It had the reputation of a place not to hang out.”

That’s not the case anymore. Fans from all over Snohomish County are coming to Everett to see affordable games involving former and future stars.

“When we first moved here from Bellevue (eight years ago), we used to go back to Bellevue for everything,” Shaw said, referring to a relocation she made with her husband because of a change in jobs. “We’ve gone from that to seeing the city come alive. Now, people come here and say: ‘We never knew Everett was like this. Everett is great.’”

But there are some people who certainly remember Everett being like this. They just have to think back pretty far.

“I love it,” said Dutton, who attends almost every sporting event played in this city. “At the time the Events Center was built, the purpose was two-fold. The first was for entertainment, and the second was to revitalize downtown.

“I like to think it accomplished both.”