When Gaby Sennebogen “more or less” stumbled into ice hockey by accident, she couldn’t even begin to imagine the current problems. End of the season, lack of income – and she doesn’t even want to think about a season without spectators. In the men’s domain of ice hockey, as managing director of the Straubing Tigers, she makes sure “that things are going well”. And that is currently harder than ever.
“It hits us very hard,” says Sennebogen. The trained bank clerk doesn’t have to think twice about what the premature end of the season in the German Ice Hockey League (DEL) means for her club. There is a lack of important income “that would have been good for us”. But she’s even more worried about the coming season: “Without spectators, we agree in the whole league, it can’t be financed.” Then “the clubs are dead, and that doesn’t help anyone afterwards.” The Tigers before one Preserving horror scenarios is an affair of the heart for Sennebogen. Her father took her to the Niederbayern games when she was a child, and today she directs the fate of the club: “When you do something like that, you are one of the team’s biggest fans yourself,” she says.
As a temporary worker in the fan shop, the professional path began in the club for the mother of two sons. When the children no longer needed them so intensively, they got bored, says Sennebogen, who was already a lay judge at the Regensburg regional court and a city councilor in Straubing. Then she took on more and more topics in the club. Sennebogen has been the managing director since 2008. She doesn’t mind the fact that she is the only woman in the group in the men’s DEL domain. “At first I was greeted with a somewhat skeptical look, but when my colleagues see that you are basically doing the same job over so many years, I have earned the standing I need.”
The Straubing Tigers have earned a good reputation. The surprise team made it into the Champions Hockey League for the first time as third in the table. The reason for the success is clear to Sennebogen: “We tried to keep the team together to a large extent, we have now done it again.” A constant in a season full of question marks. The start of the season planned for September 18 was recently postponed again by the DEL, and the Champions Hockey League is to be played without a group phase from October 6. “It also depends on when we bring our import players to Germany,” says Sennebogen: “The earlier they come, the higher the personnel costs will of course be.” SID / nd
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