Home Team 

"She runs people ragged," says WBTV anchor/reporter Jon Robinson, who once suited up as a University of Maryland point guard under Lefty Driesell and who has played Stinson at the Central YMCA. "For guys, she poses an interesting dilemma. You think, "Well, she's a girl so I can't D (defense) her up like a guy,' then she schools you and takes you to the rack. You realize you have to play hard or she's going to make you look bad.

"I've also played with a couple of girls from Davidson who are the same way," he adds. "They're good. You have no choice but to play them hard. They aren't girls; they aren't guys; they are basketball players."

If only Robinson, 41, could be hired by the Sting as a missionary to the masses of men who not only don't appreciate women's basketball, but actively trash it. You hear it on the airways of WFNZ sports talk radio and in the chit-chat at cocktail parties and tennis clubs. The rap on the women's game is this: too many lesbians involved (players and fans), the play is below the rim, the pace is slower than the men's game, and in general, it's not quality basketball.

The disconnect with the average male sports may be the biggest difficulty the Sting faces as they struggle to build a fan base after nearly six seasons of WNBA play. Males represented only 25 percent of the Sting crowd in 2001, based on a WNBA survey. And a fair number of those males are young people, given that the survey also found that 37 percent of the Sting spectators are 17-and-under. So adult men, the demographic group usually most apt to attend sports events in the US, are fewer than a quarter of the crowd at Sting games.

The WNBA as a whole suffers from the same male disconnect. In the 2001 survey, the WNBA found the average crowd in the 16-team league is even more male dominated: 78 percent female, 22 percent male and 28 percent 17-and-under.

The Sting also has battled to attract more women fans and to build its presence in the shadow of the troubled Hornets, who used to run the team.

A "Save the Sting" campaign emerged last spring when the Charlotte Hornets were about to leave for New Orleans. The WNBA said it would run the team this season and consider letting the Sting stay on without an NBA affiliate. But the Sting would have to show increased attendance and/or corporate support to keep calling Charlotte home, WNBA officials cautioned. In 2001, despite winning the Eastern Conference title and going to the championship series, an early season losing streak pushed the team to next-to-last in attendance (tickets distributed) per game among 16 WNBA teams. The Sting averaged 6,595, while the league average was 9,075.

So now, only one week from the end of the Sting's 2002 regular season, what is the verdict? Is the team likely to stay?

The answer is yes, but its long-term fate is far from sealed and its near-term structure is far from clear. Will the Sting eventually be run by a private ownership group? Will they roll under the wing of an NBA expansion team that seems destined for the city? Or might a private ownership group work in conjunction with a future NBA team to run the Sting? All those possibilities are on the table, according to Sting President M.L. Carr, and the team will likely be in Charlotte for at least another year.

"We have been encouraged by (increased) support from the business community," says WNBA Chief Operating Officer Paula Hanson, who is overseeing the Sting this summer on behalf of the WNBA. "We haven't established any numbers, saying you have to average X amount of attendance or corporate support. What we're really looking at is evidence of growth over this summer, then we will assess things."

Says Carr, "I believe because things are going in the right direction, the Sting will wind up staying."

That "right direction" is largely because of Carr, who has signed a bevy of small corporate sponsorships since joining the team June 1, the day the Sting opened their season against the Los Angeles Sparks.

"He came into the market and picked up the phone," Hanson says. "He's done everything we imagined and more. He's pounding the pavement."

While sponsorships aren't going to make the team rich or even break even (a $2 million loss is projected), the new support reflects a "look, see" attitude, Carr says. Most of the new affiliations -- which include Bank of America, FedEx, Goodrich, Harris-Teeter and Wachovia -- are in the $10,000 to $30,000 range, an entry level created this season. Before, sponsorships were $36,000 to $100,000.

"We believe the level of participation will definitely increase next season," Carr says. "This is a new day for the Charlotte Sting."

Depending on the Hornets' sales staff to sell the Sting the last couple of years has been problematic, Carr says. The Hornets' sales staff, which was charged with marketing the Sting as well, had to work more on the Hornets as they became a harder sell, Carr says. Furthermore, the salespeople gravitated to the Hornets' more expensive packages because they received more compensation on them.

Charlotte businesswoman Maryann Gilmore, who tried repeatedly to coordinate with the sales staff on a Sting promotion with Senior Directions newspaper, only became frustrated. "We wanted to do a Senior Night," says Gilmore, "but they would come to us so late. It's going to take a broader marketing effort."

Not only was the Sting an afterthought, they were too often lumped with Hornets' promotions, not sold on their own merit.

"The Sting was a throw-in," Carr says. "We're not a throw-in. This is a legitimate business. We want to partner with companies to have an impact on their business."

Whether Sting officials can convince companies to back them long-term is up in the air. Not only is there prejudice against women's basketball, the stagnant economy has dramatically reduced corporate sponsorships across the country. While the Sting may have a brief window of opportunity to grab some of the dollars companies once spent on the Hornets, another NBA team could be playing here in 2004, adding more competition for the corporate dollar.

An official with one sponsor said that his/her company signed up for an entry-level sponsorship this year strictly because senior executives of the organization wanted to do it out of community pride, to help keep the team here.

"The Sting do a good job," the source says, "but we only put our foot in the sand for a few things and we (already) have (major) commitments."

Great Play, Small Crowds

Though marketing the Sting has been uneven, the team has hardly been kept under wraps. It was one of the league's original eight franchises, has reached the playoffs all but two seasons (1997, 2000) and won the Eastern Conference title last year in one of the greatest pro sports turnarounds in history. After a 1-10 start, the team won 17 of its next 21 games to make the playoffs. Then Charlotte upset both Cleveland and New York to reach the WNBA Championship Series against Los Angeles.

Such success, coupled with returning all their starters and coaching staff, should have set the Sting up for strong fan support this season. But it hasn't happened. Oddly, the team is about where it was last year at this time in attendance. According to the WNBA, the Sting has averaged 6,255 in attendance (based on tickets distributed per game) through July 27, ranking them third-from-last among 16 league teams and placing them more than 2,500 off the league average of 8,786.

The turnstile count at the Charlotte Coliseum shows an average of only 4,047 actually attended the Sting's first 14 home games (there are 16 total for the season).

The WNBA's Hanson thinks Charlotte lags in attendance and corporate support primarily because of the Hornets' troubles.

"The Sting did fairly well the first couple of years," she says, referring to when the Sting was in the upper half of the league in attendance. "The last couple of years with the Hornets are not typical. The Sting has gotten lost in the shuffle for a while."

But Max Muhleman, a national sports marketing expert based in Charlotte, doesn't believe the Hornets' woes were the main thing holding back the Sting.

"I think it's an assumption that women's basketball isn't as interesting as it is, or is not interesting at all -- that it's a second-grade product," Muhleman says. "That's not true, and they need more people to sample it. My company bought eight season tickets, and we use them ourselves and give them to clients. Generally, people are surprised at the fact the game is worth watching. One guy I took said he thought the Sting ran more plays in one game than the Hornets ran all last season."

Carr's passion for selling the Sting is attributable in part to enhancing the chances of his ownership group landing the expected NBA team in Charlotte. The NBA's David Stern carries the most weight in selecting new NBA owners for Charlotte, and he's made no secret that he views the WNBA as an important part of his legacy as commissioner. Given that, do you think Carr would say no to NBA officials who asked him to run the Sting, especially since he planned to come to Charlotte anyway to work on the NBA bid? Hardly.

"He is helping a property we believe in," says NBA spokesperson Tim Frank. "He's working hard and doing a good job. That's encouraging. He's proving to us he can do the job (of running a team), which never hurts."

But Frank and Carr both note that successfully running the Sting will only be "a" factor in whether the nine-person ownership group Carr is affiliated with gets the NBA nod. How important will it be? "There are too many factors to try to put a figure on it," Frank says.

To be as successful as Carr has been in getting sponsorships in such a short period of time -- he's only been on the job just over two months -- it's obvious he isn't just going through the paces. He's become an apostle for women's basketball. If a private ownership group is established, he's said he would like to be a part of it, or he'd love for his NBA ownership group to run the team.

Carr, who played for the Boston Celtics in the 1980s and is from the tiny town of Wallace in eastern North Carolina (Duplin County), says his fervor for promoting the women's game comes from "having been around women who play." When he cites one of his favorite players -- Nancy Lieberman -- anybody who knows the women's game realizes that Carr, who played collegiately at Guilford College, has followed the women's game as far back as three decades, when Lieberman starred at Old Dominion University in the late 1970s.

He calls the lesbian issue "a copout" and says it hasn't been a major deterrent to marketing the Sting.

"Do you not go to work or other places you want to go because there are gay people there?" he asks.

Women's basketball equals or betters the men's game in all but eye-popping athleticism, Carr says. "We are conditioned to the "spectacular' -- what they show on ESPN SportsCenter -- but what the women play is basketball in the purest form -- the game men played before it was above the rim," he explains. "The women's game is about ball and body movement. . .finding the angles, as (Celtics' great) Bill Russell used to say. There is an enormous amount of passing, while in the NBA there is a great amount of one-on-one isolation. A WNBA team often makes four, five, six, seven passes before a shot goes up, and there's more teamwork."

WBTV's Robinson -- who played with Sleepy Floyd on the Gastonia Hunter Huss High team that won the state championship in 1977 -- agrees with Carr.

"The quality and purity of the women's game is unparalleled and the perception that women don't play at as great a level as the men is completely unfair," he says. "Anybody with 6-9 height and great hops can dunk, but not everybody can play the fundamentally sound way women do. I think Andrea Stinson is phenomenal."

Where are the women?

The Sting also would benefit if more women came to games.

"We were disappointed initially with that (female turnout)," says the WNBA's Hanson, "but we realized that women have so much going on in their lives, especially in the summer with kids and vacations. That's one of the reasons we came up with flex books (ticket packages), which allow people to attend, say, any 10 games of their choice. We've had a very good response to that." But many women also aren't aware of the quality of play and haven't been to games.

The Sting has to find ways to educate fans to the quality of the game. "We have not done a good enough job introducing people to the product," Carr says.

"It is an education process," says Jeff Beaver, executive director of the Charlotte Regional Sports Commission. "People need to experience it. It's easy to sit back and diss something without being involved."

With the progress in corporate interest in the Sting, they are likely to be around at least another year, but the question remains about who is going to run the team. The WNBA has used this summer to begin learning about how a non-NBA entity could run a WNBA team, given that there are places around the country interested in the concept. But league officials say they haven't determined what level of investment an outside group would have to make and how it would operate.

Poppy Holzworth, a senior vice president at Salomon Smith Barney in Charlotte, is a Sting supporter who has worked closely with Carr to boost corporate support. She has identified a single person as well as a group of men and women she believes would be interested in owning the Sting. But she hasn't approached them.

"Things aren't far enough down the line," she says. "I think we have wonderful potential here in Charlotte. I think local ownership is important because you have people from the community backing you."

She thinks the WNBA is leaning toward a local ownership model, but the WNBA's Hanson says the WNBA has "no preference" at this point. "We're in the process of exploring things now," Hanson says. "When the season is over, we will look at it. We're doing due diligence this summer."

The bottom line is that fan and corporate support have to grow over the years ahead for the Sting to stay in Charlotte long-term. As more cities clamor for WNBA teams -- San Antonio could have one next year and Detroit was rumored in mid-July to be relocating there -- there will be more and more pressure on existing teams to do well or face a move. The WNBA can't expand but so much. To get a good national TV package, it has to squeeze its season into the summer, when there's little competition. When new teams are added, the schedule has to be longer.

Reaching the average male sports fan, who hardly thinks twice about spending money for most sporting events, is a key for the league and the Sting. The sports commission's Beaver is a good example of a guy who loves basketball but who thought the women's game was poor quality. He had never been to a Sting game until three seasons ago when he took the commission job. He was pleasantly surprised when he attended his first game.

"I made the comment to my wife," he says, ""This is one of the best-kept secrets in Charlotte.'"

Secret? Not really. Just for those who haven't given the Charlotte Sting a "look see."

The Charlotte Sting's three remaining regular season games are August 9 at Minnesota (8pm), August 11 at New York (4 pm, WAXN TV) and August 13 at home against the Washington Mystics (7pm).