Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Robb Heineman

Robb Heineman, the Wizards President, has quickly become a huge fan favorite, as have the rest of the OnGoal ownership group. From their drinking out of the keg at the Colorado tailgate, to Heineman's posting, and hint dropping on bigsoccer.com, OnGoal is quickly setting a standard for ownership relations with it's hardcore fan base.

It's Heineman's latest post on bigsoccer that I'm interested in talking about today.

I'm not the one flying, but a flight does land Thursday. Not a designated player, but what I think will be another really nice piece of scouting by the guys. With as well as all these guys are playing in the midfield and up-front it will be tough for this young kid. We'll see....He's a real Defender of Justice.
This first paragraph is laced with hints on the new Argentine that was mentioned in a recent MLSnet article that I mentioned here. It looks like the player is definitely on his way for at least a trial. Combine that with Idan Shriki and Daniel Osorno, the Wizards could have 3 new attack minded players coming in soon. Judging from the hints, it looks like the player is from Argentine club, Defense and Justice You can find a list of the current forwards and midfielders for Defense and Justice on this site. The question is, which of these players is the one that is coming to KC? The midfielders and forwards range in age from 30 to 21, but I'd venture to guess that it's one of the 3 or 4 guys born between 80 and 84 that we are interested in. The question is though, which one? I'm looking around the net for any mention of the move, but so far I haven't been able to find anything.

Competition is always a good thing, so it'll be interesting to see how this goes down. Personally though I'd like to see someone brought in to challenge our defenders for their position, but that doesn't fit with Onalfo's attacking style system.

I wish I could tell you more about the stadium, but all I can say is we feel really good about the three sites. From a design perspective, it's an evolving thing, but expect something in the neighborhood of 18,500, 30 suites, some really cool fieldside seating, a great area for the Cauldron and all the other supporters' groups that are spawning, a dedicated youth soccer area, a design that's very integrated to the surrounding retail and if all things come to fruition, a really cool roof design.
This was the other part of his post I wanted to talk about. In a later post he did say that the 18,500 seat stadium would be expandable, so that it could go to nearly double the size. I think 18.5K is a good size for a soccer specific stadium in Kansas City, Kansas City has never shown the ability to constantly pull in 20K, so I think it's a good idea to keep the capacity below that for the foreseeable future.

The other big hint dropped in this paragraph is the end of the first sentence. The fact that there are 3 sites for possible location of the stadium. Everyone knows that Bannister Mall is one of the possible locations for the stadium, that's been public knowledge for a while now. But what are the other 2 locations that Robb is referring to? Overland Park? Riverside? The Great Mall of the Great Plains? Downtown? The West Bottoms? Drop me a comment letting me know where you think the other 2 locations are that Robb is referring to in his post.

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