Time to catch up

The holidays are a good time to catch up. Catch up with old friends, with family...and with work. i'll be doing all three over the next couple weeks. My wife and i will celebrate Christmas with hers, mine and ours on Tuesday, Sunday and Monday respectively. Wednesday will be an annual get together of high school friends to play street hockey and pretend we're young again.

Before and after though, it's quite quiet and allows time to catch up on a number of work assignments that have been put to the side recently. We're working on establishing relationships with a number of soccer organizations and i will use some of the quiet time to work on those proposals.

We have also hired our general manager and will make that announcement after the holidays. In the meantime, the new GM has been facilitating a search for our first head coach. While the coach will likely not start working until the middle to end of next year, we believe it's important to have the head coach identified and signed early in 2008. The first domestic players could be allocated as soon as next month and we want the coach to have significant input into the acquisition of our first domestic and international players.

While outwardly things appear quiet, we're actually pretty busy. Earlier this week, i had good meetings with Toyota Park General Manager Dan Garnett, US Soccer Executive Director and Secretary General Dan Flynn, an international coaching candidate and our marketing firm. Later this week i'm meeting again with our marketing firm, our new GM, a candidate to lead our ticket sales efforts, FC Indiana's Anton Maksimov and we're giving a Toyota Park tour to several international soccer players as well.

Even in the quietest time of the year, we're busy laying the foundation for the future of professional women's soccer in Chicago.

Happy Holidays,

peter

Ps: while at Toyota Park i stopped in to say hi to Fire GM John Guppy. John was meeting with Chris Armas and preparing for a couple head coach interviewsof their own. John was kind enough to ask me my thoughts. After commisserating on having your coach taken by NY and blasting the Red Bulls for tampering i told John and Chris that i thought Denis Hamlett certainly had paid his dues and has the relationships, knowledge and ability to continue the progress that Juan Carlos Osorio made. i also told them that i liked John Spencer and Jesse Marsch and that i was sure they would make a good decision.