Sommet Remains Black Eye For Predators

In 2007, Sommet Group, with its pastel green and blue stick-man logo, popped up seemingly out of nowhere to put its name on the downtown arena at a time when the Nashville Predators desperately needed sponsorship.

Source: http://gigapan.org/gigapans?tags=tennessee

"What is a Sommet and how do you pronounce it?" was my initial thought. At the time, I had been living in Alabama for two years and figured that my knowledge of Nashville was beginning to fall behind the times, and that this "Sommet" was a major player in my hometown. As it turns out, people all over Middle Tennessee had the same questions.

Right around the time we all figured out how to say the name and began to surmise what they did (simply put, Sommet Group provided back-office support for small businesses‒—sometimes), the Predators sued Sommet in November 2009 for non-payment, and the Sommet name was abruptly removed from the arena in early 2010, a few months shy of the length of the term. Curiously, though, the Sommet name remained elsewhere in the arena, even on the dasherboards through the 2010 season.

A few months later, Sommet's offices in Cool Springs were raided by the FBI and the company was effectively shut down. The Predators turned around and whistled as if nothing had ever happened, washing its hands of the one-time partnership.

Today, we learned that the scumbag leaders of this company were indicted on Federal charges of fraud, theft, and money laundering. Among their alleged crimes: 

The Whitfields committed wire fraud, including stealing from an employee pension plan, to pay $254,535 toward their arena naming-rights obligations. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, their employees' pension plans paid for the naming rights of the arena.

Here's a brilliant idea... let's commit fraud and launder the money to make our name WIDELY known!


I mean, seriously... the writing was on the wall. A small B2B company with a tiny leased office in Cool Springs suddenly has the money to plaster its name across a major sports arena. Did no one with the Predators analyze this? Or did they just not care?

Sommet's name remained on the boards
even after Bridgestone had taken over
the arena naming rights.
Photo: self-taken, March 23, 2010

The deal was inked in May 2007, on just a three-year term. Three years is breathtakingly small for a major naming rights agreement, but the thought that the Predators would even be in the arena in 2010 was, frankly, a pipedream. The team was all but gone at that point. Whether Boots Del Biaggio was moving it to Kansas City or Jim Balsillie was taking our talents to Hamilton, the team simply wouldn't be in Nashville after the 2007-08 season. Everybody knew it. Craig Leipold certainly knew he wouldn't be around much longer. (He announced a week later he was selling the team to Balsillie.) Taking Sommet's money was a quick-fix cash-grab. It was a band-aid. The risk was worth taking, because the ones who made the deal wouldn't even be around to see it through.

We all know the rest of the story: how Boots is in jail, how Balsillie has lost control of his company, how the Preds were saved by local businessmen, how Bridgestone became our new favorite tire, and how <ahem> golden the Predators have become, both on and off the ice... but every time this Sommet story rears its ugly head, one cannot help but think of the arena downtown‒—and by proxy, the Predators‒—and how sad and sordid the Sommet affair really was.

Happy Fifteenth, Bridgestone Arena

On this day in 1996, the Nashville Arena opened to the public to great fanfare. On a Sunday afternoon, Mayor Bredesen cut the ribbon and invited area residents to tour the mostly-completed facility. There were no tenants for the building yet, but we had a general feeling that a basketball or hockey team would somehow find its way here. The New Jersey Devils had been flirting with Nashville before settling on a lease extension at The Meadowlands; and the same was true with the Minnesota Timberwolves, who used Nashville as leverage to get a better lease at Target Center.

On the concourse, around the area where the Predators Radio Network does its pregame & intermission reports, there was a Nintendo 64 set up with kids taking turns playing "Wayne Gretzky's All-Star Hockey", billed then as the first hockey games ever played at Nashville Arena. People were encouraged to fold paper airplanes and launch them from the upper deck. If one happened to land in the sunroof of a car at the center of the arena floor, the thrower would win the car. Elsewhere, locals were able to explore everything from the seating bowl, concourses, luxury suites, tunnels, and locker rooms.

Over the years, the arena has had various names associated with various sponsors. Gaylord Entertainment took the reins in 1999, at a time when many Nashvillians openly resented the company for closing Opryland less than two years earlier. Gaylord had part-ownership of the Predators at the time, and owning the naming rights seemed like a good fit. Except it wasn't. This was before Gaylord had expanded its hotel offerings beyond Nashville (the company now has 3 additional hotels; one each in Florida, Texas, and Maryland), and the corporate name carried no weight anywhere but here--where most people hated the company! Add to that, nobody seemed to know if it was the "Gaylord Entertainment" "Center", or the "Gaylord" "Entertainment Center". Where should the emphasis be? Crap...we don't know. Let's just call it "The Geck". Gaylord sold its interest in the Predators and stopped paying the team its annual naming rights fees in 2005, and after a lawsuit or two, Gaylord's name was finally taken off the arena in 2007, whereas the arena reverted to its default name: Nashville Arena.

Out of nowhere, Sommet Group snatched up the rights in 2007, around the same time as the Predators ownership upheaval. Sommet? Who? It seemed nobody could pronounce the name of the company (so-MAY, so it was), and we sure as hell couldn't identify what the company did. Apparently, Sommet Group was a Cool Springs-based company that provided a variety of services to small businesses, from human resource management to IT support. Personally, I wondered how such a small, unknown company could afford such a thing as arena naming rights (then again, there's always Jobing.com). In early 2010, Sommet was raided by the FBI for fraud. Shocker. The Preds wound up with a major egg on its face.

Then along came Bridgestone. A name you know. A name you trust. Except for that exploding-tire fiasco in the 1990s, Bridgestone has maintained a pretty good reputation, even if their TV commercials are awful. "Bridgestone Arena" is a name that caught on extremely quickly in the city. It's hard to believe it's only been 20 months since that change occurred. But today, on the arena's fifteenth anniversary, Bridgestone has extended its naming rights agreement through 2019.

It's good to have a local corporate citizen with a recognizable name sponsoring our arena, even if we don't have a cutesy nickname for the building now. "The Bridge"? "The Stone"? What do we call it? If Bridgestone had its way, and it seems they do, we'll just keep calling it by its full name, Bridgestone Arena, for the foreseeable future.