Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Tulsa - Informal Deadline of September 30th?
From an post on the KTUL Channel 8 website in Tulsa:
Tulsa - The City of Tulsa should know by the end of September whether a WNBA team will be coming to town.
Bill Cameron and David Box told the Tulsa Press Club last week that they were about 75-percent of the way to their goal of bringing professional women's basketball to Tulsa for the 2010 season.
The WNBA extended the investment group's September first deadline. The investors have been looking for corporate and community support ever since.
Last week, Cameron and Box announced that SpiritBank had joined Bank of Oklahoma as a corporate sponsor.
If Tulsa is successful, it's unknown whether the team would be an expansion team or if an existing team would relocate.
That's the entire article. It's not attributed to any author. My belief is that if the investors and the WNBA can't come to an agreement by September 15th, Tulsa should give up its quest for a franchise. If Tulsa's deadline has to be extended again, or if the WNBA waits until the end of the month before approving Tulsa, then what kind of message does that send?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
The sad part is that if Tulsa goes forward, the rah rah will wear off after about a year and the result will be an embarassing crowd or a failed franchise. Unless they are going to give away tickets, the city is just too damn tiny to support a W team - that math just does not work no matter how you slice it! Fine if they get five sponsors upfront, or some club seats people to commit....none of that changes the reality of needing millions in ticket sales money both to survive economicially and also to put butts in the seats! I love the W but I still cant believe they are even doing this...unless it is just to save another team from folding, but even then honestly the league might be stronger if they just divvied up the players instead of playing in an empty building a year from now....
Someone posted it before, but if I remember correctly Tulsa is something like the #60 media market in the USA. I don't know if I am as negative as Anon #1 but that seems pretty small (I work in sports media). From what I read about WNBA teams struggling in all of these major cities with big diverse populations, the idea of conservative small town Tulsa loving a WNBA team seems pretty far fetched....but I guess we will find out! I just hope it is not my Dream moving there!!!
One way to look at this is that Tulsa may have assuemd they were getting a good team like the Dream or Fever or Shock, but are now finding out that all three of those are not going to fold...so that they are suddenly having to figure out whether they actually want an expansion team with zero stars instead....which is a very different decision.
Post a Comment