Originally titled: Desperate League Looks to Connect in Order to Survive! http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/s...ens-soccer-league-a-path-to-success.html?_r=0 Bill Lynch's terrific response: https://twitter.com/Sarah_Gehrke/status/457270989554855937/photo/1 IMHO this writer didn't do their homework on past history of other leagues, attendance, speed/technical play of the womens game, free clinics, life lessons passed on to young girls and yes, girls playing this game for pennies because they love the game. You have to crawl before you walk, marketing needs to be better, salaries need to improve and attendance has to increase! Sound familiar. Lastly, with all the newspapers rapidly disappearing you would think this writer could have, should have written a positive article but that wouldn't have sold papers!
*nods* Someone posted a link to this article on an Equalizer piece and said many of the same things. This writer tried to highlight as many "problems" with the league as they could. One of the biggest grievances I had was that the author highlighted both Bill's 3k target and the 2.3k home opener, but completely ignored last season's 3.8k average.
Well the first problem was the original title. Who exactly is desperate. None of the teams r apparently in any financial trouble at the start of year two which apparently wasnt the case in the other two leagues. Plus the league actually added a team this year. While the dip in attendance in Washington was troubling and hopefully not a trend, the number new kid on the block Houston threw up was way above expectation.
The original headline was the big problem. You could quibble here and there with the rest of the story, but the headline was the killer.
Well, the article writers don't write the headlines, so it's not his fault. Overall, I didn't see anything particularly wrong with the article except it was fluff without substance.
Well, according to most BS posters on the attendance issue, talking about the Thorns and Riveters is irrelevant because Portland is so unique that it isn't really relevant to attendance or financial survival for the rest of the league's teams. (Houston may cause them to reconsider.) If you read the article to get its central message, it isn't much different than what you read on BigSoccer every day.
Yes, that's true, but here we at least know that the Thorns and Riveters exist. You would have no way of knowing from that article that a team had an average attendance of over 13,000 and have sold almost that many season tickets this year. The largest money earner and league champion isn't even mentioned.
It's true that, based on last year alone, the Thorns were a very different team than the other organizations in the league. But there were many other successes that the league had last year, and I wholeheartedly agree that the article completely ignored said successes, such as the attendances for KC and DC last year, and some of the international talent the league has been able to attract despite its shoestring budget. Those kinds of things are highlighted here on BS a lot, so I disagree that the general feeling of the article matched the general feeling on these boards.