That’s the place Purple Stars president Karen Leetzow and CMO Kay Bradley are available.
The workforce for the job
Leetzow served as normal counsel at Nascar for greater than 20 years earlier than spending three and a half years at U.S. Soccer as its chief authorized officer. After seeing soccer’s governing physique by way of struggles over its collective bargaining settlement and equal pay for males’s and girls’s gamers—in addition to an NWSL abuse scandal that straight concerned the Purple Stars—she joined the membership and started utilizing her abilities as a negotiator to make the Purple Stars’ case to legislators.
She identified that 87% of groups within the 4 largest skilled males’s sports activities in america have obtained public funding for stadiums totaling roughly $35 billion since 1970. She spoke in regards to the development potential of ladies’s sports activities within the U.S.—which Deloitte predicts will develop to just about $1.28 billion in worth this 12 months, up 300% from simply three years in the past—and the way groups and leagues ought to be rewarded with funding primarily based on the numbers.
However as a result of the historical past of ladies’s soccer is riddled with groups taking part in matches on poorly transformed baseball fields and injuring gamers within the course of, Leetzow additionally discovered herself negotiating with the NWSL gamers affiliation and Purple Star and Bay FC gamers. She reminded them that the Cubs grounds crew has ready Wrigley for live shows, faculty soccer video games and the Nationwide Hockey League’s Winter Basic, however Leetzow additionally made the argument a bit extra private.
“We did it by specializing in this league needing extra model consciousness,” Leetzow stated. “Now we have among the finest gamers on the planet, in Chicago’s yard—[U.S. women’s national team callups] Mal Swanson and Alyssa Naeher are simply superb—they usually’re taking part in out in Bridgeview and other people can’t get there.”
In March, the Purple Stars employed Bradley, former U.S. Soccer advertising vp, as CMO. Supplementing Havas Chicago’s work on the Wrigley Area sports activities advertising marketing campaign with the workforce’s personal photographers and videographers, her workforce has lower collectively varied content material across the venture and helped manage the fan pageant outdoors Wrigley on Gallagher Means simply earlier than match time.
“We’re going to be a power to be reckoned with in Chicago,” Bradley stated. “We’re taking this chance proper out of the gate this summer season to plant a flag and to say, ‘Hey, issues are going to be totally different … and we’re going to be a workforce that Chicago’s going to wish to rally round.’”
