I drove down from NY's So Tier to see PSU play Clarkson early last season simply to get a look at this "generational talent" but then again, I drove to the Meadowlands once to see Pele and Beckenbauer play for the Cosmos.
I sincerely doubt that PSU made the $700k back in ticket sales alone, but if the way soccer in the States grew after Pele and Beckenbauer made their cameos, I believe that McKenna will have a similar impact on Central Pa hockey interest.
Love the super rare Pele/Beckenbauer/Cosmos mention, kudos for thinking outside the box. However ... although soccer got a nice temporary bump in the late 1970's from the Cosmos era NASL, that was pretty centralized to New Jersey, which already had a latent soccer market in place, and the sheer numbers and the publicity of its proximity to NYC. NASL successes outside of the Meadowlands were sparse and scattered (Pacific NW, parts of CA, and FL), and once the NASL bubble burst when the Cosmos' novelty faded, the NASL went away shortly thereafter, and the only "major league" soccer the US and Canada enjoyed for ten years in between the crash of the NASL and the founding of MLS after the 1994 World Cup was MISL ... as in, Major Indoor Soccer League, which for you boys and girls may have forgotten, was soccer played on an enclosed hockey rink-sized "pitch". So I don't think the Pele/Beckenbauer/Cosmos thing did more than pick US Soccer up from virtually non-existent to a temporary fad/blip.
US Soccer learned its lesson at last after the 1994 World Cup when instead of the "top down" approaches being taken beforehand, MLS and US Soccer took a ground up approach, plowing money into the game at the grass roots level, and keeping the nascent MLS teams tied to a strict salary cap and revenue sharing arrangement that kept the league afloat while the game grew at club levels below the MLS clubs, and further down into an existing and finally growing base of millions of kids actually playing the game. The US Women took the lead there, only because the Women's game worldwide was ignored in many major soccer countries, so instead of like the Men's side where there was literally a 100 year head start everywhere else - think the reverse of hoops born in America before it spread in quality elsewhere almost 100 years after Doctor Naismith and Springfield YMCA - the Women had that head start then.
Pennsylvania is hardly a newbie to the sport of hockey, but yeah, at D-1 college level, and stranded in the middle of the state, PSU is definitely isolated. But it seems to me Gadowsky had already built a thriving program, and if McKenna was either supposed to be a "loss leader" for the future and/or a cherry on top of a Frozen Four team the prior year, who knows? Long term, PSU's future rests on how far further GG can push things, and otherwise who he will eventually be succeed by IMHO.
Good enough for me! Ha!