In an interview on the Philadelphia Union website on Jan. 3,
Philadelphia Union CEO Nick Sakiewicz said building a practice facility was “a
top priority” for the team.
That priority is about to be realized.
Asked on Thursday for an update on the teams construction
plans for the training facility, Sakiewicz told PSP, “Actually, today we’re
beginning the set up, getting ready and preparing the site for the equipment to
roll on. There are some precautions and things we need to take for water
drainage and supporting it properly, but, yeah, construction is going to start
today.”
Sakiewicz said that the expectation is that the fields will
be ready by the end of October.
“My construction group tells me it’s a six to eight weeks
project to get the fields put in,” Sakiewicz said. “All the sod is ordered,
everything’s all teed up and ready to go. We’re hoping to have fields by the
middle to end of October.”
The Delaware County Times reported in February that the
practice facility would be constructed in Lot B and would consist of “two grass-surface, professional-grade soccer
pitches.”
A Union spokesperson told PSP on Thursday that additional
land has been purchased by the team to relocate those parking spots in Lot B
that will be replaced by the practice facility (see image below). The
spokesperson said an email will be sent to all season ticket holders next week
describing the changes and how season ticket holders will be affected by them
going forward.
Sakiewicz also said the team is currently “in some pretty
high level discussions with a potential naming rights partner for the
facility.”
After construction of the practice facility is finished, the
team will begin renovation of the two-story annex building next to the Wharf at
Rivertown, the former PECO power generating plant where the Union’s offices are
currently located. When the renovation of the now vacant building is complete,
the Union offices will move there, although Sakiewicz said this project is on
“a much longer timeline” than the construction of the new training facility.
Chester’s been fine
If you research reporting on the Union’s plans to build a
practice facility in the shadow of PPL Park, it is easy to come away with the
impression that the facility has often been in the middle of the Union’s
sometimes contentious relationship with the City of Chester.
A month after describing the practice facility as a top
priority on the Union website, Sakiewicz told Philadelphia Business Journal
that the team hoped to break ground “in the spring.” In a conference call with reporters on Feb.
5, the Union CEO reiterated that building the facility was a top priority and
said that the construction plans were “fully developed and vetted.” However,
“new parking taxes” and “special purpose
taxes,” as well as the city of Chester’s decision to allow independent parking
lot operators to open lots near PPL Park, had created what Sakiewicz described
as a “generally unfriendly business environment.” As a result, the team was
looking at other locations in Delaware County to build the facility. Instead of
beginning construction in the spring, now there was no specific timeline for
construction, although Sakiewicz expressed his hope in the conference call that
construction would start sometime in 2014.
Sakiewicz’s comments clearly caught the attention of local
politicians and, less than two weeks later, the Delaware County Times reported
that the city and the team were working to build the facility in Chester.
Sakiewicz said in the report the plan to build the facility in Lot B was “off
the shelf and back on the drawing board.”
While Sakiewicz’s hopes at the time that the facility could
now be completed “by the middle of July” proved to be too ambitious, he
downplayed in his interview with PSP the
effect the sometimes rocky relationship between the city and the team had in
delaying construction.
“Actually,” Sakiewicz said on Thursday, “the city’s been
fine because the delays mostly — I wouldn’t even call them delays, it’s more
that we’ve been sorting through exactly what our strategy could be on our
practice facility.”
Pointing to YSC Academy, home of the Philadelphia Union
Academy, Sakiewicz explained, “Over the last few years, we were trying to sort
out a strategy where we were trying to figure out whether it was smart to have
everything all in one place as a singular training facility or have multiple
locations, and what was the long-term future of the property that we control
down by the stadium.
“So we were all weighing different options, and that takes a
little bit of time,” Sakiewicz said. “The city’s been fine with it, we’re all
permitted and ready to go.”
For the long-term
In talking about the construction of the training facility,
Sakiewicz emphasized it’s place in the team’s long-term planning and vision.
“It’s not just a matter of making a decision,” Sakiewicz
told PSP. “Once you build this thing it’s a long-term proposition. So we were,
in addition to developing the project — getting permits and getting funding,
and fundraising, and all that stuff — we were also developing our strategy on
what would be the absolute best for the long-term thinking for the Philadelphia
Union. What we landed on was to build the first team training grounds right
next to the stadium. We have more plans down the line to build additional
buildings there in addition to the Wharf annex, and there’s a multi-phase plan.
It took a little while to get there but the team was in fine condition
practicing at the stadium almost every day, and then we had some nice fields
that we practiced on, so it was a long-term strategy that we’re finally getting
in the ground on.”
Sakiewicz explained, “Everything that we do, we think about
it in a very thoughtful and strategic way about how we go about it. The
practice facility in relation to your youth academy, in relation to the high
school which we have, in relation to our minor league system — Harrisburg,
Reading — all the moving parts of youth development that’s at our core.
“So, it’s not as simple as just waking up one day, plotting
a piece of land, and saying, ‘Let’s build a training facility here, and, you
know, stop messing about.’ We don’t mess about here, we think about it very
strategically, very carefully, because, once you build it, you can’t move it.”
Ambition in an era of
expansion
While bolstering the team’s roster with better quality
players is a never ending project, infrastructure improvements such as the
practice facility are for many fans a symbol of the team’s seriousness off the
field, particularly in a period of dramatic expansion in MLS. Simply put, the
stakes are higher than ever and the Union needs to compete both on the field
and off it in the realm of public perception. Beginning construction of the
practice facility improves the team on both counts.
“I’ve been in this thing since absolutely Day One when we
came off of the World Cup in ’94 to start it, and I’ve never seen such dramatic
and dynamic change in the quality of the on-field product, to the stadiums, to
the expansion of more teams, to the knowledge of the fanbase, as I’ve seen in
the last five years,” Sakiewicz told PSP. “I gotta tell you, the dramatic
changes every year in the quality and relevance of the league has been
extraordinary.”
Sakiewicz described how, in some respects, the Union has
been at a competitive disadvantage in the area of public perception because,
unlike the other teams that have begun play in the league, the team “literally
was started from scratch five years ago.”
He explained, “Many of the other teams came from big
organizations or existing clubs. Portland Timbers, Seattle Sounders, and
Vancouver Whitecaps are brands that are 40 years old and played in the league
below us, and had infrastructure and fans. Montreal and Toronto, those clubs
were part of bigger organizations that were in market for quite some time.
Philadelphia Union, we truly are only five seasons in and started from a blank
sheet of paper, so, I’m very proud of the progress that we’ve made, and we’re
now competing for our first national championship trophy coming up here in
September, and making good progress in all of this stuff.”
While he is pleased with the team’s progress on and off the
field, Sakiewicz stressed that the team’s ambitions are far from satisfied.
“We still have a long way to go,” he said. “We want to win
in Philly, we want to win championships. We’re a very ambitious club that
expects excellence and continue to work at it every day to make sure that we
achieve that. We want to be, some day in our future, we want to be known as one
of America’s most admired soccer brands, and that doesn’t just sit on one
thing, that sits on multiple things: great academy, great stadium, great
fanbase, win some trophies along the way. There’s all sorts of pillars that
hold up that mantra, and we’re an ambitious club and our fans are ambitious. We
want big things.”
Source: Philly
Soccer Page
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