CNYSME honors Dolgon with 2014 Crystal Ball Award

SYRACUSE — A year after reaching the American Hockey League’s (AHL) Calder Cup Finals, the Syracuse Crunch find themselves on the outside looking in at the Eastern Conference playoff spots with the regular season winding down.

The 2013-14 season has included what Crunch owner Howard Dolgon described as the “imperfect storm.” It involved several players from last year’s squad moving up to play for the parent club, the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lightning.

The player departures combined with injuries put a “strain on the ability for us to ... be as good as we can or as good as we were ... last season,” Dolgon says.

But the Crunch doesn’t organize its annual marketing efforts based on the team’s on-ice performance. “Everyone likes to win. But it’s not part of any marketing formula that we put together and never will be,” he says.

Dolgon and his staff need to be innovative and successful with their marketing efforts no matter the hockey team’s record of wins and losses and they have done so for many years. That leads to community recognition and accolades.

The Central New York Sales & Marketing Executives (CNYSME) has selected Dolgon, owner, president, CEO and team governor of the Crunch, as the winner of the 2014 Crystal Ball Award.

The organization annually bestows the award to a local businessperson who has contributed to the sales and marketing profession and has worked in community development and support.

Dolgon calls his selection a “great honor,” which is “reflective of the team effort from our staff.”

“My vision … my creative leadership is only good if it gets carried out effectively by the people we have,” he says.

CNYSME will present Dolgon with the Crystal Ball Award on April 10 at the 38th annual Crystal Ball and Sales & Marketing Excellence Awards (SMEA) ceremony at the Holiday Inn Syracuse-Liverpool on Electronics Parkway in Salina.

Dolgon will join a list of past Crystal Ball winners that he calls “impressive,” a group that includes the 2013 recipient, Peter Belyea, president of CXtec and TERACAI. Other winners include Debbie Sydow, former president of Onondaga Community College in 2012; John Stage, founder and CEO of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in 2011; Peter Coleman, the publican of Coleman’s Authentic Irish Pub in 2010; and Edward (Ed) Levine, president and CEO of Galaxy Communications, LLC in Syracuse in 2009, according to the CNYSME website.

Prior to his ownership of the Syracuse Crunch, Dolgon was a founding member of Alan Taylor Communications, Inc., an independent sports public-relations agency, which has since rebranded to Taylor, according to its website.

In addition to the local focus on hockey, the Syracuse AHL affiliate also includes an organization that works to benefit the community.

The Crunch Foundation, the charitable arm of the Syracuse Crunch, strives to strengthen and broaden the impact of the Syracuse Crunch in the Central New York by providing support and funds to non-profit groups, educational programs and community initiatives, according to the team’s website.

For example, the team and the Crunch Foundation will continue to support the Hillside Family of Agencies with programs that bring awareness and monetary support throughout the 2013-14 season, according to a news release on the website.

Dolgon acknowledges it’s a cliché, but he believes the CNYSME wouldn’t consider him for the award if he didn’t have “the kind of staff he has” in Syracuse.

Besides Dolgon, Vance Lederman, the team’s CFO and senior vice president of business operations and Jim Sorosy, the team’s COO, lead a staff of about 25 people, including Julien BrisBois, the team’s general manager and Crunch head coach Rob Zettler.

Lederman has worked for the Crunch for 20 years, while Sarosy has been with the organization for 19 years, Dolgon says.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com