Workers take break for NCAA tournament
Posted on Friday, March 17, 2006
BENTONVILLE — Eight workers in business attire sat at a table under a projection screen at Buffalo Wild Wings sports bar Thursday morning as game buzzers and the squeaking of basketball shoes on hardwood echoed through the bar.
The group from Kraft Foods Inc. in Rogers decided to grab lunch while watching the matchup between Oklahoma and Wisconsin-Milwaukee at 11 a.m. Thursday in the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Chris Jongko said Kraft supervisors are OK with the workers in the Rogers office checking scores and talking about March Madness, but a trip to the sports bar provided a game-like atmosphere.
“Note that we’re drinking water,” Jongko said.
This year’s tournament threatens to harness the attention of 142 million U. S. employees like never before, experts say.
While the tournament has been known to draw congregations of workers to televisions and spark a flurry of tournament pool e-mails, free online viewing of tournament games offers unprecedented opportunities for office workers to watch basketball, said John Challenger, chief executive officer of the Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas global outplacement consultant firm.
The Web site, www. ncaasports. com / mmod, even has a “boss button” that covers the game broadcast with a dummy spreadsheet should a supervisor walk up unexpectedly.
Companies should embrace the tournament to “not only help build morale, but it may also help the company control the amount of productivity lost,” Challenger said.
Online viewing of tournament games didn’t appear to keep basketball fans glued to company computer monitors on Thursday.
Jim’s Razorback Pizza in Lowell was bracing for tournament action before the 11: 20 a.m. start of the day’s first games.
The restaurant’s lunchtime revenues double to nearly $ 2, 000 during the first day of the 2005 NCAA tournament, said Store Manager Phil Wilson. The pizza restaurant has three televisions mounted on top of a salad bar, and usually serves customers who work at Lowell-based J. B. Hunt Transport Services, Wilson said. Only a few empty tables surrounded the eight Kraft employees at Buffalo Wild Wings in Bentonville. General Manager Eric Capo expects today’s Arkansas Razorbacks game at 11: 30 a.m. to pack the restaurant. In Fort Smith, Jeff Cogburn of Sallisaw, Okla., and John Darger of Gans, Okla., put down roots on stools at the Varsity Sports Grill while watching one of several TV screens showing basketball.
“The last five or six years I’ve spent Thursday and Friday here,” Cogburn said.
Their plans were to watch basketball nonstop for each of the tournament’s first two days, and neither would miss any work.
Cogburn is self-employed in the floor covering industry and Darger volunteered to work the weekend shift at the Holiday Inn so he could have Thursday and Friday free for basketball.
“We marked these days on our calendar a few weeks ago,” Cogburn said. Darger said they likewatching the early round games because it gives them the opportunity to see teams that don’t make the TV schedule often, like Oral Roberts or Seton Hall. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. won’t be showing the games on instore televisions, said company spokesman Dan Fogelman. Wal-Mart negotiated a plan to license and run highlights from the 2006 Winter Olympics in stores, but not for the NCAA tournament, Fogelman said. People walking through Northwest Arkansas Mall intermittently ducked into Champs Sports to watch the tournament’s games, said Nathan Thurman, sales associate. “It helps bring in the customers,” Thurman said as he folded shirts as Tennessee and Winthrop played in the background. Information for this story was contributed by Dave Hughes of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette staff.
To contact this reporter: cmorasch@arkansasonline. com
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