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| Friday, September 14, 2001 24:14 EST |
Carolina on Miami's mind?
By Jeff Bradley
[ESPN The Magazine]
You read in this space a while back that South Florida was going to get one more season to prove it could support the Miami Fusion at Lockhart Stadium. If SoFla could produce some respectable attendance numbers, the Fusion would stay. If the numbers didn't improve from the Fusion's first three seasons, the team was on its way out.
Well, it appears the Allied Van Lines truck is already warming up. Key members of the Fusion front office have already been in discussions with a group in Winston-Salem, N.C., that calls itself the Carolina Soccer Foundation.
The CSF has been working feverishly to build a Columbus-Crew-Style stadium for the area known as the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point), selling "Stadium Builder Licenses" and gaining support from the local business community. A member of the Foundation, who requested anonymity, says they've sold 350 SBLs so far, but "that's been with the idea that we could have an expansion team in 2004. If word gets out that we could have a team in place by 2002, we're confident things would really pick up."
The CSF website, www.carolinasoccerfund.com, has pictures of the proposed 22,500-seat stadium, which would be located just off Interstate 40 in Winston-Salem.
The foundation also envisions the stadium as home to the men's and women's ACC Soccer tournaments, men's and women's national team games and outdoor concerts. They believe the stadium would require 18 months to construct, but add that Grove Stadium, the football home of Wake Forest, would be a reasonable stadium for one season if the Fusion moved in 2002. So confident is the foundation that the Triad would support MLS and the other stadium events, the board member said, "We'd generate a profit the first year."
Meanwhile, the Fusion have asked the league for marketing and advertising funds because, according to several sources, owner Ken Horowitz believes MLS is in debt to him because he overpaid ($25 million) for the club in 1997 and also kicked in $8 million of his own to refurbish Lockhart.
The Fusion have already sold close to as many group tickets for 2001 than they did for all of last season, but when you consider the total number for last season was around 3,000, even that's not a lot to feel positive about.
In tight space
According to a source, the hold up in the hiring of a coach in Dallas (they were hoping to have a coach in place last Tuesday) has occurred because the league is now trying to see if it can agree to financial terms with SMU coach Schellas Hyndman on a deal. If they cannot hammer out a deal, the Burn would probably turn to Mike Jefferies.
Seems I accidentally left the Tampa Bay Mutiny out of my holiday poem. So here goes:
And so the Tampa GM's promises are not hallow,
How about a new contract for a guy named Diallo?
Seriously, Big Mama is going to be one unhappy camper if MLS doesn't up him from around $100,000 to the max for next season. And that's not something first-year coach Alfonso Mondelo is going to want to deal with.
Miami coach Ray Hudson has been perhaps the busiest MLS coach this off-season, traveling to Honduras, England, Scotland, Holland and most recently Argentina. Only problem is, Hudson and the Fusion don't know what the travel will bring the club. First off, Miami has to rid itself of one foreign player (Diego Serna, Welton and Andy Williams are all under contract for 2001) if they want to find a senior player. Secondly, no one in MLS knows at this point whether they can "discover" junior internationals, or whether those players will be part of the Super Draft. Fusion GM Doug Hamilton said the best players the club has brought in to train this off-season would all qualify as juniors.
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