- September 10, 2024
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When David Laxer was first approached about buying into a new soccer team in Tampa, he was a little hesitant.
He’d been part owner of the Tampa Bay Rowdies for eight years and learned, as he says, that owning a sports team was not as glamorous as it might appear.
Still, the idea was intriguing.
The USL Super League had reached out in mid-2022: it was starting a professional league for women and believed he’d be the right person to own the local team. For Laxer, who co-owns Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, buying in meant he’d be at the forefront of not just a soccer team but a cultural moment.
So Laxer approached a friend he’d known since grade school and who he’d played soccer with for years, a friend who also happened to be the preeminent developer in Ybor City: Darryl Shaw, whose projects include the massive Gasworx redevelopment near the historic neighborhood.
“When this came up I was thinking, if I was going to do it I wanted to make sure we had the right people involved,” Laxer says. “And I knew Darrell was doing a lot with Ybor and having a team centered in the urban core was very important.”
The pair began talking about the prospect and it was “just organically like, ‘Wow. This makes a lot of sense.’”
“We said, let's go all in on this,” Laxer says.
A third lifelong friend and fellow soccer player, Jeff Fox, former chief information officer for BluePearl Pet Hospital, joined the team and about seven months later the men were the owners of a professional soccer team.
On May 13, 2023 the team was officially announced.
That team — the Tampa Bay Sun FC — will play its first game Sunday Aug. 18 in Tampa, taking on Dallas Trinity FC.
For fans, the kickoff will be the beginning of what all hope will be a storied franchise, a team that will rank with the area’s other professional sports organizations and their winning ways.
But for Laxer, Shaw, Fox and team officials it will be the culmination of a year-long process to do something an exceptionally small minority ever get the opportunity to do: Build a professional sports organization from scratch.
It's the early days for women's soccer, very early days, so it's a bit of a leap of faith, But, you know, as you've seen in the papers, women’s sports is rapidly growing. And it's an opportunity to give back to the community.” –Darryl Shaw
It’s a process that’s included hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny details, and probably just as many large decisions. The team’s leadership in the past year has been tasked with finding a place to play, creating a name and building an organization. That, in large part, was done before the first player stepped onto the pitch to practice.
“It's very complex,” says Laxer.
“Every sport is very complicated because there's a lot more that happens behind the scenes, that the fan or the people from the outside don't really get to see. Trying to navigate that and make sure that you have a unified team, being the physical players, but also your management structure, your ownership group and that all those work together cohesively.”
One of the most important decisions the owners made early on was hiring Christina Unkel as president and Denise Schilte-Brown as the head coach. Those hires came in July 2023. .
Unkel is an entrepreneur, attorney, and a former NCAA collegiate soccer player and former FIFA referee. Schilte-Brown was head coach for the University of South Florida women’s soccer team for 17 seasons, leading the team to six American Athletic Conference championships, including five straight seasons with a championship from 2017 to 2021.
Shaw says the two were the key components to moving forward, especially given the relatively short window between the awarding of the team and the beginning of the inaugural season.
With the two women working in those critical positions, the team was able to recruit players and begin building the infrastructure of the organization — finance, marketing, corporate sponsorships and player operations.
“What's the biggest surprise? Just how quickly we had to move to get up and running,” Shaw says in a July 15 interview.
“And it's now the middle of July, we're putting the finishing touches on the stadium and the first game is in, what 33 days, right? It's like we're coming in right under the wire.”
Apart from the ownership group, no one has been more instrumental in getting the team ready than Unkel.
The Sarasota resident first met the owners at a ceremony in Ybor City to announce the team.
Shaw says they were trying to find someone to speak about women’s soccer and a friend recommend Unkel. The owners were so impressed with her presentation that day that they began talking to her and “very quickly asked if she would be interested in running the team,” he says.
“It was a happenstance meeting. She's terrific. I mean, she really knows her stuff.”
Along with her experience as a player and referee, she worked as a broadcast journalist covering the 2019 Women’s World Cup for Fox Sports and the UEFA Champions League and Europa League for CBS Sports HQ and Paramount Plus.
She’s also started and sold a couple of companies and is a litigation attorney.
“There's not many times in life that one gets to create something from scratch, specifically in an industry and more of a purpose-driven category. For me, that's really what this epitomizes,” she says.
“Every single day doesn't feel like work. Some people might think it would be because there's a million different balls in the air and different categories. But for me it just really drives me to know that we can deliver, that I can deliver, something at a high level and what this community deserves.”
While she may not consider it work, what Unkel has done since she began work about a year ago is build an organization from the ground up. There are days in the lead up to the first game she gets home and can’t remember what she handled because there were so much to do.
The day before she sat down for an interview with the Business Observer, she was at Howard W. Blake High School in the afternoon breaking down LED signs.
Throughout the process, Unkel has remained focused by making sure the work is prioritized: it's either fan centric or team centric.
These are her core values and inform the work that’s needed to be done the past year, the traditional administrative responsibilities of creating a logo, getting a team name and finding a stadium. And on the pitch, building a team of 23 free agents, which requires scouting and developing, as well as hiring coaches and the sporting staff.
All of those tasks are incredibly important, Unkel says, but it’s the core values “that really guide this club.”
“A lot of my decisions are building out from just building an infrastructure.”
Unkel says if you take the sports element out of it, the team is “just a pure business.” There is the front of house, which includes the revenue generation team in charge of ticketing and corporate partnerships, marketing and facilities and events. And then there is the sporting team.
She’s had to build all those in the past year and continues to run all aspects of the organization, working in every department and negotiating player contracts like a quasi general manager.
“Those two values, player centric and fan centric, are what helps guide our decisions every day leading up to August 18,” Unkel says.
“How do we secure this team? How do we make this an environment that true professional athletes want to come into? What are the decisions that we make? What is the budget that we set that allow us to bring in high quality talent and give them the resources they need to be able to perform on the field? Which, naturally, creates a winning, championship team.
“And then the fan centric is really focusing on the old model of the customer is never wrong. Truly, who are we doing this for? We're doing this for the community. We're doing this for the fan.”
The fast pace behind getting to opening day belies a core point: owning a pro sports team isn't usually a profitable endeavor. While there are solid revenue streams — tickets, merchandise sales, sponsorships, concessions — the costs are high — player salaries, training facilities, travel.
I would not be where I am today without the lessons I learned in competitive sports. Tampa Bay Sun will be great for our entire community, but specifically for young girls to understand the opportunities that they have to participate in sports, with all the benefits that bring." –Jane Castor, mayor of Tampa and a player on the University of Tampa's basketball and volleyball teams
“Everyone looks at the sports side — it's on TV or it's live streaming, the fans, the support and all that — but behind the scenes there's a lot to go into it," Laxer says, "a lot of moving parts, a lot of economics that you have to hurdle,” he says.
The economics are in this particular case are a difficult to quantify because the organization will not discuss what it paid for the team, what it’s operating budget is or what it expects in revenue.
An example of the high cost of ownership is the one figure the team has disclosed: The team spent $6 million to refurbish the stadium at Blake High School, a project that included adding capacity from 1,800 to more than 5,000 seats; upgrading the locker room facilities; and installing high-end turf approved for professional soccer use by FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.
And that’s just to use an existing facility in the short term as it looks for a permanent place, hopefully in Ybor City, to build its own stadium.
“The financial commitment is significant,” Shaw says. “We did not budget to make money or even to break even. I don't know that there any teams that will. You really have to build that fan awareness, build a brand, build the loyalty.”
Unkel sees it differently.
She challenges “that sports concept” that teams don’t turn a profit because as she sees it the organization is a business and as such needs money to operate and function.
She points to Los Angeles’ women’s soccer team, Angel City FC, which has been valued at $250 million and has seen Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife Willow buy into it. “I think that's kind of the beauty of many of us stepping into this space,” she says.
“I can accept the norm. I can accept tradition that sports doesn’t make money," she adds. "Or I cannot look at it and just create our new future moving forward. And that's what we want to create.”
