Before the Thunder moved to St. Paul 5 years ago, I was told the team had taken numerous fan polls through the years. Time and again the results showed overwhelmingly that the majority of ticket buyers wanted to see the team move into the city. The very successful guerrilla marketing campaign called, "Soccer in the City" was launched. The team moved to James Griffin Stadium, home of St. Paul Central High School as well as the playing field for numerous college and high school teams in the city. James Griffin Stadium, with all of it's obvious flaws, also had its merits. Recently, the campaign turned into "World Class Soccer in St. Paul."

So, is a sudden move away from James Griffin Stadium, out of St. Paul, and 20 miles north to suburban Blaine a good idea? Here's what I've been thinking.

Presently the team has lots of marketing materials that will have to be ditched or at least modified, including audio and video ads. They will also have to abandon sponsors such as O'Gara's Bar, who were the post game party headquarters for the Thunder. The team had recently jumped through administrative hoops to be allowed a Thunder Alley beer and drink tent in property next to James Griffin at Dunning Field. Those partnerships took months of fostering and will now be have to be dropped. New partnerships will have to be found. By the way, is there night life in downtown Blaine? And where is downtown Blaine anyway? For that matter, where is a good bar/resturant to have a post game party in Blaine?

I also wonder what the team will tell folks who live in the southern suburbs and purchased season tickets for The Jimmy? Now you're going to be driving through city traffic and up to Blaine? There's no doubt there are people that will now return to see the team play because it's closer to their homes in the northern suburbs. I work with plenty of people who live in the northern suburbs and rural areas that won't set foot in the city. If you listen to the interview I did with Peter Johns, new marketing director for the Thunder, you will hear that the new ad campaigns had to do with the whole "Urban" feel of things. Marketing research advised the team to move toward "Urban Seekers." Now the whole urban campaign theme is out the window. You can't be urban when you're 16 miles north of downtown Minneapolis. 

Also, The Thunder had worked hard to foster relationships with ethnic groups such as the paper La Prensa, along with a Spanish speaking radio station. I could be wrong and I hope I am, but I don't see how a move to Blaine will help those ties to the Spanish speaking community. It just seems to me that many of these relationships that team has worked hard to create will now have to be undone and then redone again in the future.

Don't think for a minute that this didn't have to do with the bureaucracy of the St. Paul School board and more so the Athletic Directors. By the way, St. Paul Schools just lost out on at least $100,000 of improvements the Thunder were going to make at James Griffin. A new $65,000 scoreboard and a new press box to be installed later in the season will now be dropped and an even nicer scoreboard will be installed at NSC. The city of St. Paul will also lose all the business the team brought into bars, restaurants and all related business that were frequented by fans traveling to a Thunder game. From my understanding, the Superintendent of the St. Paul Schools, Dr. Meria Joel Carstarphen was more than cooperative. In the end, the bigger issue may be the problem of a business trying to deal with a school board that is run nothing at all like a business. Quick intuitive business decisions may be incompatible with the drawn out meetings and studies of implications that characterize large school districts. So, in the end, the frustrations were just too great for the Thunder. They have felt the need to move on, and quickly at that. That is where I'm having the most problems with this move.

It seems to me the team would have been better off sticking things out for this year and then making the move in the off-season. Last winter the front office said they would not be returning to James Griffin and were leaning towards a move to Hamline University's Klas Field. In the end, the team decided not to move to Klas Field but to return to James Griffin. I've been told that NSC has been very cooperative in this recent negotiations. If that is true, wouldn't they have also been cooperative last winter when this switch would have made more sense? I worry about the fallout this bouncing around may have to the casual Thunder fan and how they may perceive this shifting of ad campaigns and locations. The Thunder have have made some very bold decisions since being taken over by new owners Henk Habbers and Dean Johnson. Quick decisive moves are the way of good business men. But that is not the way of most common folks and I wonder if this lack of stability will come back to bite the Thunder in Thor's behind.

Lastly, I will just plain miss James Griffin stadium for what it was and what it did for the support of the team. With the team's move to The Jimmy the Dark Clouds supporters group grew and the team's very loyal fan base grew as well. It is true that the overall attendance dropped during those last years. That was primarily from lack of cash from former owners who claimed they did not have the capital to spend on advertising and player salaries. We all know the team's performance has been miserable at best the last three years. Even the Thunder front office acknowledges that the team's loyal fan base improved with the move to St. Paul. The fact that the stands were so close to the field made a huge difference in creating a better fan experience and a more intimate feel.  The field at the National Sports Complex never had any sort of atmosphere whatsoever. The Olympic sized track and the slow sloping stands kept fans a long way from the field. The chain link fence bordering the field was covered with advertising banners that created a hockey like experience where fans couldn't see action along the touch line on the near side just like the boards on an ice rink. But on the contrary, the field turf at James Griffin, it's football lines and narrow width is miserable, while NSC has one of the widest and best maintained real grass fields in the USL.

So for me, it has always come down to the urban experience and intimate atmosphere vs. wonderful playing surface and ambiance cold as ice. The fill turf field with it's football markings and touch lines so narrow that they had to get special exception from the league to play there, made the field almost unbearable at times. It wasn't really a surprise that in the last 3 years, the team had only one Fox Soccer Channel live USL game telecast from James Griffin Stadium. Football lines and a narrow field did not serve the viewing experience well. Watching the quality of the team this year makes me long for a wider field for these high octane, attacking players. According to the Thunder front office, the team will be tearing up the track and moving the field closer to the stands. There will be approximately 16' from stands to the touch-line. Also, seating will be added on 2 of the 3 remaining sides, creating a field with bleachers on 3 of the 4 sides, all within 15 to 30 feet of the touch and end lines. Hopefully, that will start to create a new ambiance. And I'll be right there supporting and trying to create that atmosphere that we had at The Jimmy.

So it's goodbye to James Griffin and hello to the new NSC field. I was told that the Thunder have rights to name the stadium. Let's hope they come up with a good name. I doubt we will ever come up with a nickname as good as, "The Jimmy."