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Next year’s Sunfish Days festival could be a very different festival as organizers prepare to overhaul a community event that has been sliding for several years. And if next year’s festival isn’t a marked turnaround, there might not be another next year for Sunfish Days.
In some ways, this year’s Sunfish Days didn’t do too badly. The weather was pretty good, the parade drew a good crowd, Kids Day participation was almost overwhelming and the experiment of having the carnival midway stay for half a day on Memorial Day was a big success.
That Monday midway will be back next year, as will be the parade and Kids Day, said Lil Smith, president of Onalaska Festivals Inc., the organization that puts on Sunfish Days. But Smith said everything else is going to get a hard look, starting with a post-event meeting June 12.
“We’re going to be ripping every piece of Sunfish Days and redoing a lot of stuff,” Smith said. “We’re thinking it’s time, time for a big change.”
Sunfish Days got its start after the bicentennial celebration in 1976 showed people how much fun a community festival could be. The event is run by a coalition of civic groups that these days includes the Onalaska American Legion, Legion Auxiliary and Sons of the American Legion, the Onalaska and Brice Prairie Lions Clubs, the Onalaska Area Jaycees and the Onalaska Rotary Club, which hasn’t been sending representatives to board meetings but supplies help during the festival.
The idea behind the festival isn’t only to provide opportunities for fun and fellowship. It’s meant to be a moneymaker. Each organization is supposed to walk away with some money, which ends up going back into the community in the form of scholarships and other civic efforts undertaken by the clubs.
Ira Brown, an Onalaska Lions Club member and veteran of many Sunfish Days festivals, said there have been years when each club took home more than $1,000, even after leaving a sizeable sum in the bank as seed money for the next year’s festival.
Last year for the first time the festival partners didn’t get any money back. “Some of the people think they put in a lot of hours for nothing,” Brown said. “The Lions Club is going to be involved in it whether they make any money or not.”
Smith said she has her doubts whether any money will go back to the clubs this year, either. “We’re trying so hard,” she said. “Some of the clubs are getting really tired of doing all this work and not getting any money to take back to their programs.”
Probably the biggest disappointment was lack of attendance for the musical acts playing in the OmniCenter. “All you want to do is look out and see a bunch of happy people enjoying themselves and we didn’t see that and that’s why it’s so frustrating,” Smith said.
This has been a problem in recent years, Smith said, except for the battle of the bands the past couple years, but while the battle drew large crowds, they didn’t buy any refreshments and the night lost money. This year Smith tried something different with booking bands.
Smith heard from people saying they didn’t want to see local bands play Sunfish Days because they have plenty of opportunity to see them in area bars, usually for free. They also told her that they thought Sunfish Days was turning into a “rockfest.”
So this year, Smith booked mostly out-of-town bands, but not necessarily ones with big name recognition, and signed up a wide variety of acts, from blues and rock to country and jazz. Most of the crowds for the bands were pretty small, and most disappointing was the crowd for Charissa and the Auburn Sky Band, a country combo fronted by an award-winning 11-year-old with a big voice.
The people who saw Charissa and the Auburn Sky Band “were amazed with her and they loved her,” Smith said. “They said, ‘She’s awesome, you’ve got to get her back.’”
Brown has a theory about why more people aren’t coming to see bands at the OmniCenter during Sunfish Days: It’s too loud.
“It seems like the people controlling the sound are deaf, and they don’t know what’s going on as far as the music,” Brown said. “I think people should be able to talk while the music is playing.”
Booking a big name act like Holmen’s Kornfest does is an idea, but Smith said the only way to do that is get some sizeable sponsorships. Well-known recording artists get $15,000 minimum for a 90-minute set, and that’s too much money.
There’s another theory about why people aren’t flocking to the OmniCenter during Sunfish Days. Some think people don’t want to be indoors when the weather has finally turned nice and that if they had to be “indoors” they’d rather be in a tent, which offers more of a communal atmosphere than the OmniCenter arena space.
Neither Brown nor Smith think going back to holding it in a tent is a good idea. It was held in a tent for many years, back when the festival was held on the American Legion grounds.
“I remember when the Legion built the activity building, and we were tickled pink to get out of the tent,” Brown said.
More than a few people, Brown among them, think Sunfish Days might have a problem because it’s on Memorial Day weekend when a lot of people either go out of town or have graduation-related functions.
Smith, on the other hand, doesn’t think that’s a big factor, and even if it were, the options for moving the festival are limited. Making it any earlier might increase the risk of running into cool weather, and after Memorial Day there’s a steady stream of festivals in the area and the festival code of honor says you don’t establish a festival on a weekend when there’s already one in the area.
When OmniCenter manager Tom Hammill was Onalaska Festivals president, he presented a list of changes that might boost participation in Sunfish Days, and only one was adopted: switching to canned beer.
One of those ideas suggested moving Sunfish Days to the fourth weekend in August, the weekend after Holmen’s Kornfest. Two years ago, the Onalaska American Legion started its own festival on that weekend, Legion Community Days, which limits Sunfish Days’ prospects for a date change even more.
Still a date change will be discussed and just about everything else is on the table. Smith said she’s determined to do everything possible to improve the viability of Sunfish Days.
“I don’t want to be the president that ends Sunfish Days,” Smith said. “That’s exactly what’s going to happen if we don’t get the public support.”
Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or 786-6812.
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