Photograph by George Sakkestad
On the Road Again:
Clash General Manager Lynne Meterparel spends a lot of time traveling to schools and community events in the Clash van.
Clash GM Lynne Meterparel sets her sights on local fans
With fan base shrinking, owner calls in person who turned Bostonians into die-hard fans
By Sandy Sims
José Clash, the red, frog-faced scorpion mascot for San Jose's professional soccer team, bounced into the auditorium at Willow Glen Middle School on March 18. Students cheered and whistled. Girls jumped up to give him a hug. When the tumult died down, the principal welcomed everyone, and San Jose's fire chief spoke about fire safety. Then Lynne Meterparel walked up on the stage.
Meterparel, the new general manager for San Jose's major league soccer team, the Clash, has come to the Bay Area to accomplish a very big thing--some might even say to perform a miracle.
Her job is to get Bay Area residents to think of the Clash as their soccer team. She has to create a connection between residents and the team as visceral as that of the 49ers, the Raiders and the Sharks--where players are heroes and household names, and fans fill the stands whether the team is winning or losing. Meterparel wants Clash fans to meet in sports bars to watch games or in the parking lot for tailgate parties; she wants kids to don their favorite player's number and scramble for autographs, and dream of some day being an Eric Wynalda or a John Doyle.
All of this needs to be accomplished while soccer itself is still struggling to become a fifth major league sport in the United States and while the Clash competes for the same Bay Area fan base that supports six major league teams.
Meterparel is surprised at the attention the press is paying to her gender. "I guess I'm the first generation of women who grew up in an era when we are all equal," she explains.
Not only is Meterparel the first woman GM in Major League Soccer (MLS), and one of just four women in high positions in men's major league sports, she is also just 30 years old. The question is, can she make the miracle happen?
Well, she's done it before.
She gets the credit for creating a hometown, die-hard fan base for the New England soccer team, the Revolution. An average of 20,000 fans show up for its games, and the fans are sticking even though the Revolution has the worst cumulative win/loss record in the league.
Meterparel received the 1997 MLS Inaugural Commissioner's Award, which is given to a team executive who puts forth "extraordinary effort with exceptional results." She accomplished her results, she says, with what she calls guerrilla, political-campaign, grassroots tactics.
Silicon Valley may be just the place for her to perform her miracle again. This, she says, is the premier soccer-playing area in the United States with 300,000 Bay Area youths playing soccer.
The Clash is only going into its fourth season, and the entire front office staff and the team are young. At 38, Brian Quinn (Quinnie) is the youngest coach in the MLS. The new Director of Soccer, Renato Capobianco, is 35; the players' average age is 24. Even the new owner, Jonathan Kraft, just turned 35 in March. "We are creating something from scratch here," Meterparel says. "It's exciting and scary. It can go either way, too."
The new GM is from Weston, Mass., a small bedroom community outside Boston. When she left New England for California, the town newspaper put out the banner headline "Will coach Meterparel come back?" When she visits home, she says, the people at the dry cleaners still say "We're rooting for you, Lynne."
Meterparel comes from a sports family. Her father is a sports producer who puts Ivy League college games on the radio. Her younger brother is a sportscaster in Charlotte, N.C. "I grew up in the sports box," she explains. "My 94-year-old grandma still wears Nike sneakers and is a huge fan of the Boston Red Sox." Meterparel goes home once or twice a month to see her family. "I've got to keep tabs on Grandma," she says laughing.
Meterparel was one of those kids who in the 1970s began skittering back and forth over makeshift soccer fields in kneesocks and cleats, learning how to play soccer. She also played and coached softball, lacrosse, field hockey and basketball. Like most Americans, though, she didn't make the leap from soccer player to soccer fan.
That is, until 1992.
She was in the Los Angles area, using her degree in photography, film and history from Northwestern University to film parts of the television series Brooklyn Bridge. Through friends she became involved in photographing soccer players who were trying out for the 1994 World Cup.
Among the players she watched were international stars like Alexi Lalas. "I saw a finesse, heart, passion, a spirit in this game that was so exciting," Meterparel recalls. "You know how incredible it is when a quarterback passes the ball, and it winds up right in the chest of the receiver?" she explains. "Well, in soccer they do this very same thing with their feet." She fell in love with soccer.
Meterparel's work till then had little to do with sports. She'd photographed humpback whales in Hawaii; led field research studies in Palau, Micronesia; volunteered on Native American reservations; even won an award for work on environmental issues. Perhaps it was a genetic disposition for loving sports that detoured her right into the heart of a brand new effort to boost soccer into U.S. major league sports.
She volunteered to help the Legacy Tour--the grassroots campaign to get people out for the 1994 World Cup that was to be played for the first time ever in the U.S.. She wound up as the Legacy Tour's national director.
Legacy is where Meterparel cut her crowd-building teeth. "I don't really know how to do this. I just steal ideas from other people," she claims.
After the World Cup, Meterparel's plans were once again detoured by soccer. It was the fall of '95, and she was going to take a trip to Africa to watch her friend Alexi Lalas play soccer. The new Major League Soccer organization was starting up, and the big movers and shakers were at a party for the Revolution. Meterparel was there.
"It's kind of funny," she explains, "I got stuck in this bottleneck at the party and couldn't go in the direction I was heading." She was introduced to Jonathan Kraft, owner/operator of the Revolution (and member of the Kraft dynasty).
"We wound up making small talk about soccer," she recalls. "He asked what I thought about soccer. I don't remember what I said, but it hit some hot buttons--grassroots marketing, getting involved in the community--and he said 'Do you want a job?'"
"After talking with Lynne that night, I knew I'd found our chief sales and marketing executive," Kraft recalls. He explains that too many marketing people go to owners and ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars for ads. Meterparel was different. "She's a grassroots promoter. She has energy, passion, and vision for how to sell soccer to the U.S. She's 100 percent optimism." Meterparel was only 26 or 27 at the time.
Derek Aframe, the current director of media relations for the Revolution, says Meterparel made a team of the whole organization. "Lynne never asked anyone to do something she wouldn't do herself," Aframe recalls. "She'd make important international calls in the morning and stuff envelopes in the afternoon. She'd be out in the streets of Boston at 7 a.m. with the rest of us putting up fliers."
Their guerrilla-political campaign made heroes of the players, and built up a long-term partnership with the community. Foxboro Stadium's soccer crowds grew.
On Jan. 4, 1999, the Kraft family bought the owner/operator rights to the San Jose Clash. The Clash needed help. The fan base was shrinking. Kraft asked Meterparel if she would be the Clash GM. "Just go for six weeks, and see if you want the job," he asked her. She came to the Bay Area and six weeks later she took over as the new GM while the team was still out of the country playing pre-season games.
When the team returned, just a few weeks ago, they could already see the changes. They had new offices on Steven's Creek Boulevard. Peter Bridgewater, the president of the Clash, had taken a new position with the MLS organization in New York.
The team can feel the difference between being a league-operated team and an owner-operated team. Clash forward, Jeff Baicher, says, "It's better now that we have the Kraft family behind us." Robert Kraft came to the opening game and spoke to the team.
Baicher says Meterparel has done a lot to facilitate the communication between the Krafts and the team. Before, the team had a difficult time coordinating with the front office.
"We'd show up to talk with kids, and there'd be four of us and only five or six kids," Baicher recalls. "We'd show up for a media event and the media wouldn't be there or the timing would be off." Now, he says, team players are more willing to go out because the front office is more professional about setting things up.
"I like to empower people," Meterparel says. "I'm like the plumber. I help fix things so everyone can do their job."
Meterparel's grassroots campaign is already in swing. "Every night," says Tom Neale, Clash director of crowd-building, "two or three people from the Clash front office or players are at youth soccer meetings [league, clubs, boards, coaches clinics] all over the Bay Area."
On March 18 Jeff Baicher was interviewed for an hour on KEZR radio. That same day Clash team players and front office people showed up for assemblies at nine different San Jose schools to meet with 4,000 children. The Clash was teamed up with the San Jose Fire Department through the Mayor's Kicks for Kids program to educate children about fire safety and prevention. Team players helped with the education and offered themselves as inspiration that dreams can come true.
Meterparel was at Willow Glen Middle school with Mayor Ron Gonzales and players Ron Cerritos and Eddy Lewis.
When the children poured out of the auditorium, many surrounded the players begging for autographs. Meterparel stood by, watching over the players. Soon Clash personnel were whisked away to prepare for their first game of the season, leaving those youngsters with an indelible image, maybe even of heroes.
The clash website is www.clash.com.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
