Transparency...well maybe translucency

For those who have been fans, staff or followers of teams i've run in the past, you already know that i believe strongly in the importantance of transparency in an organization. It builds confidence, faith, understanding and interest.

i responded to an email from Chicago Investor/Director Gary Weaver recently with a quick update from my BlackBerry. i thought it would be of interest to share the update with readers of this blog to give you a glimpse into what's going on behind the scenes at Chicago Professional Women's Soccer. Then i went to edit out items that may be proprietary or need to be kept confidential for the time being. After the edits, it looked like a redacted Top Secret Government file.

Well, here it is anyway. i hope reading between the edits will still give you a sense of the level of activity occurring behind the scenes right now, still more than a year out from opening day:

"Gary,

Things are really picking up. Met with ***** on Tuesday regarding Operations Director position. Good meeting and we put the ***** options on the table.

Two good interviews with coaching candidate *****, we believe ***** is the best choice. We expect to draft terms for *****'s contract offer soon.

Five big promos/events on the short term horizon:

1) Advisory Board Meeting Tuesday (20 or so attendees expected out of 30 or so on the Board)

2) Name the Team Promotion Launch (March 1st)

3) Kids Club Promotion Launch (March 1st)

4) IWSL seeding meetings (six of them) with 900+ coaches March 1st.(where we plan to kickoff our Kids Club and Name the Team Promotions)

5) IYSA Expo March 8th.

Additionally, we have the Managers Meeting Tuesday, ***** discussions and ***** is coming to Chicago *****.

On the sponsor front, we hope to have ***** as an in kind promotional partner by the end of next week. This is important as it should lead to several good cash sponsors and plenty of free promotion. We have four potential vendor sponsors as part of the ***** deal: ***** batteries, ***** bandages and two new products - ***** (a portable *****) and ***** (a unique self warming *****). Making progress on medical partners. *****, which has committed verbally to provide all our non-doctor medical staff, is helping with our team doctor/hospital search. We hope to bring in ***** through a hospital sponsorship.

Also making progress on staff candidates, camps, printing needs, partnership contracts and Dave called back, so we should have updated financials for Tuesday. We have appearances planned at three June soccer events already and are lining up interns for IYSA expo and summer events.

I continue to help the League on marketing, PR and expansion committees as well. We're getting some traction on expansion candidates in *****, ***** and *****. i am also posting more on my blog to try to build an audience, which will hopefully serve as a good way to keep our constituencies informed on our progress.

I think that's all for now :)

peter"