Atlanta Is First To Build Stadium Designed for WPS

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (January 26, 2009) – Women’s Professional Soccer and the Atlanta Beat today announced that Sunday, May 9 will be the home opener for the expansion Atlanta Beat as the team will play host to reigning 2009 WPS Champions Sky Blue FC (New Jersey/New York) at its brand-new stadium in Kennesaw, Georgia.
 
The contest will be nationally-televised on Fox Soccer Channel as part of WPS Sunday on FSC at 6pm ET/3pm PT.

“We are excited to make this announcement,” said Beat General Manager Shawn McGee.  “The opening of the world’s first women’s soccer-specific stadium of this magnitude means a great deal to both soccer in the Southeast and to women’s sports on a national scale.”

The stadium, which holds 8,300 fans “will really be something special,” said Beat Owner and Chairman T. Fitz Johnson. “We are bringing in the defending champions, which will immediately test our squad and provide a great show for our fans.”

McGee “expects a packed house and a captive audience for those across the country watching on Fox Soccer Channel.”

“This will be an important and historic day in the continued growth and development of our league,” said WPS Commissioner Tonya Antonucci. “A stadium built specifically to play host to the world’s best soccer league for women with the atmosphere and fan-friendly characteristics that we look for in a venue. Huge credit goes to Fitz Johnson and the Atlanta Beat organization for their vision. Soccer fans everywhere will be circling May 9 on their calendars.”

The new stadium on a "WPS scale" is indeed welcome news. Our post-season analysis of WPS's first season and our recommended strategies for future success focused significantly on venues.

Just as MLS, which began play primarily in "cavernous" American football stadiums has gone on a building spree by which most clubs now have "soccer only" stadiums built specifically for MLS in the 20-25,000 seat range. WPS began play in relatively "cavernous" MLS stadiums.

While we would like to believe that women's pro soccer in the U.S. can and will draw MLS size crowds eventually, it will be a building process. The first phase of that process needs to involve building size-appropriate stadiums for WPS in the 6,000-10,000 seat range.

While Anheuser Bush Soccer Park in suburban St. Louis, home to St. Louis Athletica, was not designed specifically for the WPS, the 7,000 seat venue emerged as the quintessential design and scale for the world's premier women's pro soccer league. 

The design of a park specifically for WPS in Atlanta has incorporated many of the functional and aesthetic features of Athletica's home venue.  

Both facilities create and allow the dynamics and features that WPS can uniquely offer in its initial stage of development: intimacy, access, scale, aesthetics, and functionality.

The scale of the project keeps fans close in a concentrated area to maximize a sense of community, crowd noise, and to create a sense of success and popularity by ensuring that a majority of the seats will be filled even on a lesser attendance day.

The design of the seating and traffic flow ensures intimacy between fans and each other, and also between fans and players. This also provides passive access to players just in terms of proximity to the pitch and to players entrance and exit points to the facility. WPS can offer fans a much closer view, and many more opportunities to have direct interpersonal interaction with some of the world's best athletes.

The aesthetics and amenities of the facility offer major league quality fixtures, hence reinforcing the world-class status of the league, its teams and its players, as well as providing four star comfort to fans. 

Clubs that play in larger venues (such as Chicago and Los Angeles, in their respective MLS digs) would benefit from building or adapting their own facility according to WPS specs.