ITHACA, N.Y. — A stroll into the Southern Tier Sports Corner in Ithaca can feel like a time-warp for those who remember hours spent perusing the yellowed spinning cases of plastic-sleeved cards in the vintage sports trading card shops of their youths.
The store, located on Elmira Road, functionally serves as part trading card spot, part shrine to sports legends from today and yesterday, part collectors’ social club. It’s the only store of its kind in Ithaca.
The Southern Tier Sports Corner’s residency in Ithaca began just last summer. Previously, owners and die-hard sports fans Grant Vennel and Michael Crelin held court in a strip mall in Horseheads, N.Y. since founding the business in 2019.
But the duo’s collecting days stretch back even further: Vennel has collected sports memorabilia since he was 13 years old. In the decades since, he’s built up an encyclopedic knowledge of trading cards in a variety of sports as well as in the sports memorabilia industry as a whole.
Vennel says he wants the shop to channel that rare, effervescent moment of anticipation familiar to anyone who’s ever hoped to find their holy grail in a pack of baseball cards.
“What we tried to do when we opened the shop was make it more of an experience versus just a hobby shop,” Vennel said. “I think a true hobbyist prefers to go to a shop because they like to have the atmosphere and be around other people to share the experience of ripping a box.”
The store’s shelves are lined with cards of current fan favorites like Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen and Los Angeles Dodgers phenom Shohei Ohtani, along with plenty of rarer, older cards like Chicago Bears legend Walter Payton. Customers can choose from low-cost starter packs to rarer cards for collectors, like a particular Patrick Mahomes card the store carried that was valued around $80,000.
Vennel said the most prominent cards he’s ever had in the store are a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card and a 1986 FLEER Michael Jordan rookie card.
There’s also larger pieces of memorabilia on display: several signed jerseys of current quarterbacks like Green Bay’s Jordan Love and Cincinnatti’s Joe Burrow, helmets, hats and shirts emblazoned with the logos of dozens of different teams.
As the business expanded, Vennel added Crelin and began considering a move to Ithaca, where the two would co-run the venture. Vennel said he yearned for a new market opportunity where sports card collectors could ply their trade or sit around and talk about their latest scores. The nearest similar stores are in Cortland and Auburn.
“Ithaca had a card shop a decade, maybe 15 years ago, but it hasn’t really had anything since then,” Crelin said. “We’re big sports fans, and we knew Ithaca needed this space and we needed a larger footprint, so it made sense.”
The sports trading card business has experienced a renaissance over the last several years. It saw a particular boost during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 when restrictions on public activity were at their highest.
Vennel said a flood of amateur collectors, temporarily flush with COVID-19 relief checks, began to invest in trading cards. More joined in an attempt to ride the wave, causing card prices to skyrocket. The market has since normalized somewhat, but card values are still higher today compared to pre-pandemic markets.
“People were at home, they wanted to rip, they wanted something to do, and they started buying the product,” Vennel said. “So all the product moved up exponentially during COVID. You could take a select hobby box of football [cards] that was selling for $400, and then you’d look and it was selling for $3,000.”
The industry is expected to grow from $12 billion last year to over $27 billion by 2033, according to Yahoo! Finance. Some of the most prominent American sports figures have also begun investing in sports card businesses in recent years, including future Hall of Famers Tom Brady and LeBron James. It’s a potential departure from the era of significant downturn in the 1990s and 2000s prompted, in part, by the flood of mass-produced cards in the market.
Crelin said the customer base since opening the new location last summer has been varied: from hobby outsiders looking for gifts for their loved ones who collect to college students buying their favorite jerseys.Of course, there’s still the hardcore collectors seeking that niche card to flip on the secondary market.
“If you’re chasing autographs, if you’re looking for a particular player in his rookie year, if you’re trying to find cards that you think will flip online,” Crelin said. “We can share that expertise that you don’t get when you just go on Amazon and buy a box.”
Despite the growing popularity, Crelin and Vennel know they are up against the fact that the trading card market is still somewhat niche. The pair have worked to diversify the store’s offerings: while it started as a traditional brick-and-mortar sports trading card spot, they have added non-sports options like Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering, as well as memorabilia and the aforementioned sports apparel.
Like many other businesses seeking to attract customers to physical locations instead of online shopping, Vennel said he wants the store to offer something that goes beyond the norm.
Crelin and Vennel have introduced regular meet-up events for local card collectors, part of an effort to foster a local community. Hobbyists come to the store every Wednesday for “live breaks,” where several people buy into a single, higher-end box and open it as a group to see who gets luckiest while they watch live sports on the store’s televisions.
The events, Crelin said, allow for newer collectors to participate in the upper levels of the hobby with a more accessible access point.
Like vintage sports trading card shops of yore, the shop creates a connection of sorts between the athletes whose moments of triumph were captured on a piece of cardstock and those dedicants who collect, preserve and treasure the evidence of their feats. But perhaps more importantly, Vennel says, he aims to create a place to foster a local community of collectors.
English (US) ·