TORONTO – Nick Sakiewicz is determined to grow the sport of lacrosse. The newly named commissioner of the National Lacrosse League is still learning the sport, but he’s ready to apply the lessons he’s learned in more than 20 years as an executive in Major League Soccer, most recently as a founder of the Philadelphia Union franchise.
Sakiewicz, who’s in Toronto on Thursday to watch the Rock’s home opener against the Rochester Knighthawks, knows what his mandate is as NLL commissioner.
“Big picture: we have nine teams, we want to grow the league,” said Sakiewicz in a phone interview with The Canadian Press on Wednesday. “We want to make it a bigger footprint, spread the game into more markets so that can help us drive a better television footprint for broadcast partners. We want to enhance our broadcast partnerships with FOX, ESPN and TSN. We want to take those to another level and enhance those and be more relevant on linear TV.”
Sakiewicz, who was announced as commissioner on Jan. 9, also pointed to a need for an improved website, create a mobile app and make better use of online videos to better market the NLL to young fans.
Although the nine-team league, which has Canadian franchises in Toronto, Saskatchewan, Calgary and Vancouver, hopes to expand, Sakiewicz doesn’t want the NLL to make hasty decisions.
“We’re not going to expand for the sake of expanding,” he said. “We’re not just going to put notches in our belt like we’ve got another team in another city. We’re going to be very careful, very strategic, we’re going to bring in owners that are every bit as committed as the nine that we have now and make it a real exclusive club of good owners, great markets and venues that we can play the game in.”
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Franchise relocation has been common in the NLL. In the off-season, the champion Edmonton Rush moved to Saskatchewan, playing in Saskatoon, while the Minnesota Swarm moved to Georgia. In the 2014 off-season the Philadelphia Wings one of the league’s original teams moved to Uncasville, Conn., and became the New England Black Wolves.
READ MORE: Saskatchewan Rush open season with win over Calgary Roughnecks
Sakiewicz wants to put a focus on three necessary qualities of any new franchise: a committed owner, a good venue and a strong local fanbase. He believes this will increase franchise stability for existing franchises and also a pre-requisite for any expansion teams.
“It goes back to those three things I talked about before: a great facility that’s a reasonable place for an owner to operate in, a committed owner in the marketplace that’s passionate about his team and his community and a market that will support it, a market that has lacrosse fans,” said Sakiewicz. “If those three things are in place you don’t have to worry about relocation.
“Each of those relocation cases, one of those three pillars was missing.”
Sakiewicz joined MLS as an original founding executive in 1995. He helped launch MLS in 1996 as its first vice president of commercial sponsorship sales and went on to lead two inaugural MLS teams from 1997 to 2006 in Tampa and New York, serving as president and general manager for both teams. In 2006, he helped found Keystone Sports and Entertainment by assembling the investors who would eventually become the ownership group of the Philadelphia Union.
Now that he’s transitioned to the world of lacrosse, he wants to learn from his experience with MLS.
“Out of the gate with MLS we all kind of assumed that the soccer fans would come to games and that was a really bad assumption because they did in the first year and then they didn’t in the second, third, fourth, tenth, whatever,” said Sakiewicz. “That’s because we kind of took the soccer fans for granted in the early days and you can’t take them for granted. I don’t know the history of the lacrosse game but we can never take the lacrosse community for granted.
“We have to make sure we’re in the community, we’re investing in the community and we’re creating relationships with the lacrosse community so that they feel their team is theirs.”
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