http://laxmagazine.cstv.com/sports/s-pr ... 06aab.html
When Philadelphia won its second championship in three years at the Home Depot Center in Los Angelese, it marked the conclusion of the sixth season of Major League Lacrosse play.
In order to gauge how the league viewed itself, the possibility of further expansion, and the real possibility of direct competition, among other issues, we held a question and answer session (via email) with MLL commissioner David Gross.
LMO: Major League Lacrosse just finished up its sixth season. If you were to stand up in front of the collective body of MLL fans and give a "State of the League" address, what would the most important issues you would focus on?
DG: The main things we'd address with our fans are patience, attendance and partnerships.
The MLL is headed in the right direction as 2006 was a very important season for the league where we added 4 new teams and created a western conference. That said, we have a long way to go and are really still in our infant stage. Like any young business we will have our share of growing pains, but for a sport of our size and age we are progressing in a manor that we hope pleases everyone. All of our stakeholders (fans, players, sponsors, founders, team owners, etc) need to be patient and give the league a chance to take hold.
If you look at the history of sports, so many leagues have tried to make a big splash only to disappear in a short period of time. Two other leagues (XFL and WUSA) also began in 2001, the same year as the MLL. Both of those leagues had spent a ton of money on a huge launch, but weren't able sustain interest and folded quickly. We realize that lacrosse is niche sport and it's going to take time to build the fan base. For us to simply spend a lot of money to create hype won't sustain us. We need to continue building our fans at the grassroots level by having our teams out in the community and by being as creative as possible in attracting fans.
Adding 4 teams in one season was a big step and we felt that expansion went as well as we could have hoped for. We added some great operators, the teams for the most part were very competitive and players and fans embraced the fact that we were now a truly national league.
Attendance is the building block from which everything else will grow. The most important aspect of the off-season for the teams and the league is to work on getting more fans to the games. We have a great product, with the best players in the world. We need to find a way to make our events compelling enough that more people will plan to catch MLL action in the summer of 2007.
Part of growing fan interest is to create exposure through various media streams. Besides our national Game of the Week on ESPN2 this past summer, 6 of our teams had games broadcast in their local market. We had our first online fantasy lacrosse league for fans this past season and were pleasantly surprised by the number of people who played and by those who got involved from outside the lacrosse community. We received several e-mails from people who started playing fantasy lacrosse because they compete in several fantasy sports, who turned into fans as they started following the games on ESPN2 and via our live box score on the MLL site via Pointstreak. Greg Bice and Trey Whitty did an outstanding job blogging about the MLL on ESPN.com and we made a concerted effort to keep the MLL web site fresh and active. The MLL site also featured fan blogging and diaries from Trevor Tierney and Ryan Boyle during the Warrior World Games this summer. This combination of activities led to us having a 49% increase in unique visitors to majorleaguelacrosse.com during the season.
One thing that we're very proud of is our stable of partners. Many other leagues are envious that the MLL is partnered with Bud Light, New Balance, Warrior, Cascade, Gatorade, Tommy Hilfiger, Starbucks and Under Armour. These are great brands to be associated with and they are all tremendous supporters of the MLL. When the league first started most of our sponsors only wanted to sign one year deals. They like what they've seen and for the most part are now signing multi year extensions.
We are also starting to see some great activation from our partners. Just this past season Cascade created pink helmets that our MLL All-Stars wore in the game against Team USA. These helmets were worn to help raise breast cancer awareness and funds to battle this disease. After the All Star Game all the helmets were auctioned off and 100% of the proceeds went to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
Another example of this is the MLL semi finals. Bud Light chose to air the games on budlight.com. This was the first time that Bud Light aired a full sporting event live on their web site and we were thrilled that they choose the MLL as their test partner. It offered our fans the first opportunity to watch the MLL semi finals live.
All of this is the start of a solid foundation that we will continue to build on. We know there are several aspects of the league that we need to improve, but if people give it time and support us, we will get there.
