SOCCER INSIDER: Local women's team needs a home of its own

In less than a year's time the new Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) league will launch, but the local club is already offside.

Soccer history has proven that a pro club cannot survive without one key component -- venue control.

The Hunt family learned this lesson with the NASL and amid the Cotton Bowl days of FC Dallas.

Apparently the owners of the Dallas Sting club (Brent Coralli and Jack Hanks) haven't studied local soccer history, as they appear set to make the same mistakes that have doomed many a sports club in this market.

The new league is slated for an April 2009 launch, and a Sting official said it will be doing so most likely at Frisco's Pizza Hut Park, home of FC Dallas.

Here's a quick history lesson.

The Sting club was founded in 1973 and grew into one of the nation's elite girls soccer clubs.

Coralli and Hanks both had daughters play through the local ranks and then on into college.

The duo purchased the Sting and changed it from a nonprofit entity into a private business, and they'll add the professional team to the healthy stable of youth teams next year.

Sting CFO and spokesman David Messersmith said that in the next 30-45 days the WPS will try to allocate U.S. national team players among its eight clubs.

If the WPS can't get the allocations together, he said, they'll put everyone into a draft following the Beijing Olympics in August.

What the Sting bosses need to do next is build an 8,000-seat venue in a central location such as Grapevine or Arlington. Messersmith said the club was trying to build something of that nature in McKinney, but it doesn't look like it will happen.

"The answer is clearly no," Messersmith said when asked whether it really served the clubs' best interest to be a tenant in someone else's facility.

"You're always better off if you have your own facility. But it also comes down to a way to finance that facility.

"Just like the Hunts had to wait for a while in order to make a deal work out for them to where they could own their own facility instead of leasing the Cotton Bowl, we're kind of in the same boat.

"It just requires too much capital up front to build a facility at this point."

If Coralli and Hanks can't afford the $20 million necessary for a suitable 8,000-seat stadium, then they don't have the means to run a top-tier professional club.

The Hunts kicked in $30 million of the $85 million to build the 20,000-seat, 17-field Pizza Hut Park complex.

It's all about a money tree, which can't be harvested if the Sting bosses don't own the orchard.

Here's a prediction: By April 2012 Clark and Dan Hunt will rescue the women's pro team and rebrand it the FC Dallas Lady Red Stripes.