Tampa Bay Rowdies Update

Our staff has enjoyed meeting many of you at our season ticket depositor event, Rowdies Day at USF Soccer Stadium, our youth camps and clinics at the YMCA, United Way and Boys & Girls Club, and the other community events we have participated in.

Our organization has been working tirelessly behind the scenes laying the groundwork and infrastructure of the team, preparing ourselves to be a model franchise for years to come and deliver the absolute best possible fan experience.

Through speaking with you at these events and via the emails we have received, we know that many of you are anxious for more information on the team’s development. As a fan, we understand it can become frustrating hearing rumors and waiting on official confirmation and announcements. Unfortunately, with any business, we are not always able to release information until certain times or until deals are completely finalized. However, we remain on our planned course for the rebirth of professional soccer in Tampa Bay and we certainly want to keep you as informed as possible.

With all this in mind, we have taken several of your questions to team Owner and President Andrew Nestor in our first official TBR Mailbag session. We hope this will give you some insight into the process of starting a franchise and the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes. We invite you to write in with questions to mailbag@tbrowdies.com. Our staff will be answering questions on a bi-weekly basis.


Q: What's the deal with the stadium? I haven't heard much since the town meeting.

Andrew Nestor: After the Board of County Commissioner’s land use hearing, we told the public that we would be playing in an existing venue for our first season. Since our hearing, we have been privately working on a short-term stadium solution and long-term home for a new stadium.

We are very close to announcing where we’ll be playing in 2010. We’ve been weighing the options of several venues to make sure we deliver the absolute best fan experience for Rowdies games and ensure a stable future for the team. What I can tell you now is that it will be a stadium with a professional environment … there will not be anything amateur about it. We have some great options and are looking forward to making an announcement that will excite our fan base.

As for our planned new soccer stadium, we are doing diligence on an ideal, centrally located site. Developing a stadium is obviously a long and sensitive process and so far requires confidentiality to ensure that all aspects of the project can be properly worked out. We have no desire to build a stadium in a remote, non-central location. Our plan has always been to build a small venue, appropriate for soccer, which can be an asset and focal point of the Tampa Bay community.

I hope that our fan base can recognize the amount of effort and resources that we’ve poured into this process. We have been working on a stadium for about a year and a half working with a world class architectural firm based in Washington D.C. The plans and vision we have for the stadium has not changed and we believe our project will be a great development to help capture the essence of Tampa Bay culture and be a catalyst for economic and social development.


Q: When are you going to be signing players and a coach?

AN: We have been working on building our team for a year and half now, starting before we publicly announced the team. Our first hire was Perry Van Der Beck. Perry, former Rowdies star and MLS head coach, is the team’s Technical Director. His direct involvement with our pro team is scouting and player evaluation. Perry will also work on our player development / academy programs and community outreach programs.

I will serve as the team’s general manager. The role of the general manager is to work with Perry and our head coach on developing the team’s core sporting philosophy that will dictate the type of players we sign and our training curriculum for player development. Perry, our head coach and scouting staff will then recruit appropriate players for our club. My job is to take our soccer staff’s evaluation of players (quality, age, team role, etc.) and negotiate player contracts.

To date, we’ve attended several player combines. We are also working on development of a reserve team that will be located in another part of the country. This team will serve as both a feeder system for prospects and a reserve club for players that need rehab or talent development before joining our USL-1 club.

The past couple of months have been spent meeting with agents from around the world and researching players and contract specifics. When developing a team and negotiating contracts, it’s extremely important to study the marketplace and develop benchmarks for player valuation. It’s also important to recognize our team’s exact needs and find the right roster balance of veteran’s, stars, and prospects.

We are currently building a “wish list” of veteran players that we’d want as cornerstones for our new club. There is also a great pool of young, established players that will help us win. We feel confident with our connections, the right staff, and proper team building, we can be a winning club.

We have a short list of potential head coaches and we are currently having discussions with those candidates. Our head coach candidates have significant playing and coaching experience including managing for national teams and English Premier League academies and playing for top clubs around the world.

As for signing players, we can’t really sign good players until the fall as the majority of the players we will sign are currently playing for professional clubs and still in season under contract. For players that are not currently under contract, we will scout those players at future combines held in December and January leading up to the MLS Super Draft.

Q: My friend has a tryout with the Rowdies and I'd like to tryout as well. Are there any open combines coming up?

AN: We have decided to host four select, invite-only combines. I’m proud that we’ve given ourselves ample time to develop our program in a manner that we believe can set us apart from the rest. We are currently receiving player profiles / resumes from players and agents. We are also actively scouting prospects. After evaluating submittals, we will invite players to our combines. No one has been officially invited to tryout yet.

We plan on hosting two combines in Tampa, one is California, and one in the UK. We’d want nothing more than to discover great local talent, so players with solid credentials should certainly submit their info via our website tbrowdies.com.


Q: When are you going to premiere the new jerseys?

AN: We are still working on our Kit / Apparel partnership. This is complicated by the potential for a league-wide sponsor. Once that is settled, we will finalize the design decisions specifically for our club.