Stoppage Time Special: The Time is Now with Co-Founder Chris Martinovic
May 08, 2024
USL Arkansas
Welcome to this week's Stoppage Time special of the Pitch to Pro Podcast! In this 5-7 minute highlight reel, we feature the best moments from our previous episodes, focusing this week on Episode 2 with special guest Chris Martinovic, co-founder of USL Arkansas. Dive into insightful discussions and key takeaways from our chat with Chris, covering the exciting world of soccer and his experiences in the USL. Don't forget to visit our page for the full episode and subscribe for more content like this from wherever you listen to your podcasts. Join us as we explore the journey from the pitch to professionalism, one episode at a time!
Welcome to this week's Stoppage Time special of the Pitch to Pro Podcast! In this 5-7 minute highlight reel, we feature the best moments from our previous episodes, focusing this week on Episode 2 with special guest Chris Martinovic, co-founder of USL Arkansas. Dive into insightful discussions and key takeaways from our chat with Chris, covering the exciting world of soccer and his experiences in the USL. Don't forget to visit our page for the full episode and subscribe for more content like this from wherever you listen to your podcasts. Join us as we explore the journey from the pitch to professionalism, one episode at a time!
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Stoppage Time edition of the Pitch to Pro podcast. This is a highlight reel of some of the best moments from the show so far, and every other week we will be bringing you a special five to seven minute segment featuring the best stories, tales and moments of the podcast.
Speaker 2:
And so we met and I said, warren, you know I really have a. I feel like the community can get behind this. I'm getting so much positive feedback. I have a lot of soccer network connections. Usl is very supportive of what we're doing. They want a team here.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
They see what this smart community can be and but but I don't really know how to actually do this Right. So I was really open with him and he was great. He gave me a couple of pointers immediately. A lot of it was about the location, right, it really, really was a lot about the location.
Speaker 3:
It's such a niche skillset right Like launching and starting a professional sports team. Not many people. It's such a small community, like there's so many sports teams all over the world, but it's such a small community of people that kind of have that drive and passion and find themselves in positions to be able to do it. And you know you being one of them, with Warren and his background and his story, which we'll talk about. Um, but just super cool that you know again, love the game, it'll love you back. Another example of of you know kind of finding yourself.
Speaker 2:
That contact was only because I love the game. I was trying to help spread the game more, give more opportunities, and that's how it actually came about. And so when Warren and I met, warren was at the time still the president and operating the day-to-day operations for the San Diego Loyal, which is the last club that he founded. We call him a serial founder. Serial founder and he gave me some great advice and said hey, I'll hear to help. Let me know when you do, but I can't leave what I'm doing in the middle of this project. I think at that time they were only in existence for maybe a year, so they were literally in their launch phase of it, and so we stayed in touch and kind of years went by. We crossed paths a little bit, kept updated about the different locations that we were looking at. Warren almost immediately started mentioning, though, pinnacle Hills back then. Yeah, I mean, he really was very single and we, you know, I said I don't know, there's just not a lot of land there. Yeah, you know, because at the time we were looking for 20, 30, 40, 50 acres, right, so you kind of limit your opportunities of where to go. Uh, we thought it also be great to have some fields around it and maybe it's a athletic complex with stadium. And we had we had some of those discussions with different, different um land opportunities. But, um, you do limit your, your opportunities. You also then also limit your access to population and how close we can be to fun and exciting things that are provided by downtowns and their entertainment districts. So he was talking about that really early on. So we fast forward and we keep working a few different angles in Northwest Arkansas connecting with communities, connecting with people, building more support. The other big step change that happened at that time was we started working with Steve Lane at Collier International and that was a really tremendous decision on our part to bring them in, because they were able to do a real market analysis of the entire market from Northwest Arkansas and Centerton, bentonville all the way down to Fayetteville.
Speaker 2:
Right Now, you obviously want to be somewhat centrally located. That helps. It's not mandatory, right, but it helps to make it easy. You want to be close to a highway. Again, you could survive, maybe if you're not that close, but it's always better, it's always easier. You could survive, maybe if you're not that close, but it's always better, it's always easier.
Speaker 2:
There's been proven, and Warren has done this and we've seen in other teams that have been successful. And so Steve Lane was really the kind of the vehicle to actually get to where we ended up in Pinnacle Hills and that was we narrowed it down to like a final 15. Yeah, and through that 15, we started looking at metrics where we had great community engagement, we had access to all different walks of life in Northwest Arkansas and we just kind of kept coming back to Rogers and Pinnacle Hills. Rogers and Pinnacle Hills and that was kind of the biggest game changer, because you can do a lot of other things wrong. You can't make up for being in the wrong location. Yeah, and we've seen it with other clubs that haven't operated successfully. Almost always it's always been because they're not in the right location, right.
Speaker 3:
Well, and something that Warren's said several times that always sticks out to me is you need to be at a place where people are already used to coming, and they already are. There's instances and examples of where pro clubs or teams have built a new stadium that is, you know, a big kind of swath of land, but it's come with a whole host of other development around it at the same time, and it's not we build it and hope that they will come, kind of strategy Right, and it's really the. The kind of way to not ensure your success but give yourself the best chance of success is putting yourself in a place where, there, you know that people are already used to coming for entertainment and entertaining themselves, and that's why we love our location so much. And you know we'll talk all day about it. But, um, you know, that was something that that really stuck out and I think people get that right in the reaction that we've gotten so far.
Speaker 3:
Um time, I don't. I have never come across a person yet and as soon as we cut this, somebody's gonna chime in but yeah, I'll knock on wood here, but every single person has said, yeah, unbelievable location, absolutely killer. I can't believe you guys got that. That's gonna be so great. I can't wait to go to games there.
Speaker 2:
It's gonna be the perfect spot from from soccer fans and non-hockercer fans as well.
Speaker 2:
Exactly, exactly, yeah. And so while we were doing that and getting close to that property, I was also trying to learn a lot on my own and talking to other folks in the league that operate teams in other markets sometimes bigger markets, sometimes smaller markets just to educate myself and really keep progressing and figuring out how to actually maybe pull this thing off. Right now we're starting to get some ideas that this could happen. Right the beginning it was a pipe dream. Now we're at the point where there's a momentum here we're starting to talk about a really great location starting to pull some good people into the process. Um, so now we're, let's say, two and a half-ish years in, and at that point I did some trips.
Speaker 2:
I went to different markets. I went to Greenville, south Carolina, which is actually a really lovely place. If you've never been, it's really awesome. I've played a year there, yeah, growing region of the country, and again, the game had connected me from New Jersey to a former US national team legend, one of the pioneers of US soccer named John Harkes, who's the current coach of the Greenville Triumph, a USL League One team, very successful team as well, very successful coach Tremendous background that he has, and we got connected to my friend Rob McCourt, who was my old coach at the USL when I played with the New Jersey Stallions, and Rob and John are two Kearney soccer guys and Kearney is like soccer town USA it always comes back to New Jersey.
Speaker 3:
It always comes back to.
Speaker 2:
Jersey. So John was just tremendous though we still stay in touch to this day and just gave me so many different pointers and watch outs and things to work on and things not to focus on that I thought were important. Yeah, like I started thinking about what the stadium would look like and John's like there's, there's 4,000 steps before you actually get to that. Like get there, you know, focus on the, the critical elements here is getting the right location kind of reinforce some of the things that Warren was saying.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for joining us for this stoppage time special of the Pitch to Pro podcast. If you've enjoyed the conversation, you can click watch the full episode here. Be sure to tune in next Thursday for a new episode of the Pitch to Pro podcast, the official podcast of USL Arkansas, Available on YouTube, Instagram and everywhere you get your podcasts.
