Michael Alter had never met a professional woman basketball player, and “WNBA” was just four letters to him.
“It was far removed from my world,” he said. “It just didn’t register with me.”
But Alter, a 44-year-old commercial real-estate developer from Winnetka, was inspired after meeting such stars as Rebecca Lobo, Sue Bird and Lisa Leslie and impressed by their skills as they gave current and retired NBA players all they could handle in a shooting contest at the 2004 NBA All-Star Game.
“I wondered how we were missing out on that,” Alter said. “It was embarrassing to me that this was going on and Chicago wasn’t part of it. That wasn’t right. That was my first kernel of thought about it.”
Twelve months of research, advice-seeking and palm-pressing later, Alter was awarded a Women’s National Basketball Association expansion franchise, on Feb. 8, 2005. His All-Star Game inspiration grew into the Chicago Sky, which will play its inaugural game Saturday in Charlotte and its home opener on May 23 against WNBA defending champion Sacramento at the UIC Pavilion.
The building of a professional sports franchise from scratch “involved much more than I thought,” Alter conceded, “even knowing what questions to ask.”
For the last 15 months, the Tribune tried to ask pertinent questions as the Sky granted access to animated marketing debates, arduous planning sessions, its “war room” on draft day, assorted road trips and unexpected side adventures.
We went along as team officials scoured opposing teams’ arenas for inspiration, gritted their teeth over sponsorship issues and arena headaches, debated the virtues of earthbound superheroes versus soaring eagles on draft day and made their mascot candidates literally jump through hoops.
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And now, it’s showtime for the fledgling franchise.
An interesting cast
The Sky’s cast of characters could be your next-door neighbors, beginning with the suburban kid of an owner who was a talented forward at New Trier High School in the 1970s, and the team president/CEO, a former college athlete who also taught school.
There are genuine women’s basketball fans like office manager Sara Parker, who happens to be the mother of Tennessee standout Candace Parker, the Naperville product who was the most exciting pro prospect in the college game as a redshirt freshman.
And then there are players like three-time WNBA All-Star Nikki McCray, 34, who after an illustrious career that includes two Olympic gold medals is trying for one last shot with the Sky. There’s Stacey Dales, an ESPN analyst returning to the game she loves after becoming disillusioned with her former team two years ago, and Stacey Lovelace-Tolbert, one of two mothers on the team who has played in five foreign countries as well as in the WNBA.
Alter found players with stories like these irresistible, and his trip to the 2004 NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles got him thinking about a team in Chicago.
“Initially what attracted me was that the women’s passion and commitment were so inspiring,” he said. “I’m not a sports geek. I’ve never been into stats. But I’m a huge believer in the power of sports and its ability to bring people together, impact a community and teach life lessons. As I thought about [buying a franchise], I thought about what it might mean to Chicago.”
On the flip side, however, was a savvy businessman who got his undergraduate degree from Harvard, his law degree from the University of Chicago and has more than $700 million in commercial real estate under development across the U.S.
“I was very conscious of not approaching this as some sort of philanthropic enterprise,” Alter said. “I really wanted to make sure this was a viable business, that we could create something long-lasting and powerful, not just on the court. If I was not convinced of that, I would not have moved ahead.”
In April 2004, Alter began to research the possibility of buying a WNBA team. He enlisted former high school teammate David Brenner, who had worked in promotions for the Bulls and is now president of Paragon Marketing Group. They spoke to NBA Commissioner David Stern to, among other things, get a sense of how much the endeavor would cost and were told the franchise purchase price was $10 million.
“I thought we were going to have David Stern for about 15 minutes, and we ended up talking for three or four hours and missing our flight back to Chicago,” Brenner said. “He really wanted to have a successful franchise in Chicago.” By the end of October, “I knew I was going to do this,” Alter said.
Weeks later, Alter traveled to China on an NBA goodwill trip as a guest of law-school classmate Adam Silver, then president of NBA Entertainment and now Stern’s deputy commissioner and chief operating officer. Tom Fox, vice president of sports marketing for Gatorade, was also on the trip and offered a suggestion when Alter mentioned the need to find someone to run his new operation.
“I have exactly the person you’re looking for,” Fox said, and upon landing, he put through a call to the woman he had in mind.
Mutual acquaintances would later call it the stars aligning when Michael Alter met Margaret Stender. Her love of basketball, coupled with a desire to build something new and inspirational for young girls, made the Sky a dream job for Stender, 49.
Months earlier, she had written herself out of Pepsico’s plans when she engineered a major reorganization. Now Stender put together a power-point presentation to illustrate her interpretation of Alter’s vision and simply “blew me away,” Alter said.
Beginning with outsourced marketing help from Brenner’s firm and a handful of telephone operators taking ticket orders, a team with no name gradually began taking shape. Over the next 12 months, Alter, Stender and Dave Cowens, the Basketball Hall of Famer they hired as coach and general manager, would assemble a staff, a team and a plan for the future.
More than that, they would build what Stender and all good marketing minds refer to as “a brand.” The team that would come to be known as the Chicago Sky would not only represent the WNBA and the city of Chicago but an entire philosophy as well. It had to.
No ties with Bulls
Though the WNBA has made strides since its inception in 1997, it is bound by certain immutable realities. It can be a tough ticket to sell, particularly with a spring/summer season in a town whose numerous attractions include the defending World Series champions and another inexplicably popular baseball team that routinely draws 3 million fans.
And, unlike 11 of the other 13 WNBA franchises, the Sky would be on its own, operating independently of the city’s NBA team, as Washington and Connecticut do.
The WNBA approached the Bulls about fielding a team before the league began play in the spring of 1997, but they made it clear they were not interested, saying it would be too draining on their staff in those championship years that stretched into late June.
In 2001, three years removed from their last championship, the Bulls initiated a “season-ticket drive” to gauge potential interest in a WNBA team. The stated goal was 7,500 applications at $100 each, but the campaign was called off after fewer than 1,000 were received.
“In our case,” said Steve Schanwald, the Bulls’ vice president of marketing, “the business model didn’t make sense because we could only devote at best 50 percent of our time to this. Michael and Margaret are going to be able to devote 100 percent of their energy, and that’s what’s going to give it a fighting chance to do well.”
The WNBA is counting on it, having created a new ownership model in 2002 to allow non-NBA team owners to purchase franchises.
“A private ownership group like Chicago shows we’re not forcing anything down people’s throats–these are people who believe in the product,” said Connecticut Sun general manager Chris Sienko, whose team is owned by the Mohegan Indian tribe, among the world’s largest casino owners.
In the end, the Bulls’ rejection may be a blessing, Stern said.
“What we’re finding is that if a group of folks have an NBA team to deal with . . . we don’t get the intensity of focus and dedication we get from a singly focused group,” he said. “It’s not anybody’s fault, it’s just reality.
“There are a lot of choices to make between two teams, and if one is worth $400 million and one is worth $10 million, you tend to get a disparate effort. We landed in a good place in Chicago, with people who have a real focus on the women’s game.”
The Houston Comets have a staff directory that numbers 188, which is fairly typical for the WNBA. The Sky’s 20-member band of loyalists toils tirelessly, small-budget realities rarely getting in the way of thinking big.
`Selling aspiration’
Ready. Set. Soar. Today these are the words found on Sky brochures, stationery and advertising.
Stender sat in her dining room one afternoon in February of ’05 with an informal group of her marketing friends. They came for lunch and stayed until the early evening, exchanging ideas on what the team should be called and how it would look and feel. They were not necessarily sports people but business people who had experience creating products and attracting consumers.
“The whole day was spent trying to figure out what the brand was going to stand for and what kind of symbols would be reachable and touchable,” said Sue Wellington, former president of Gatorade, minority owner of the Sky and a friend of Stender’s for 27 years.
They came up with some joke slogans along the way, such as: “We’re Dreaming Big And Have No Money.” But if a brand is a promise to the consumer, as Wellington explained, Stender was the perfect person to sell that promise.
“She’s not just trying to get people to watch a game,” Wellington said. “She’s selling aspiration.”
Stender is the divorced mother of 12-year-old Nick and 6-year-old Kathryn. She played basketball, field hockey and lacrosse at the University of Richmond, becoming the first female athlete to receive a scholarship for 1977-78, her junior year.
“It was a paltry amount, but it was symbolic, and it meant a lot to me,” Stender said.
After graduating with a degree in education and adding a master’s in business administration from Virginia, Stender paid it forward, so to speak, going to work as a PE teacher at a prep school in Norfolk, Va. She later became the athletic director and altered the curriculum to increase sports opportunities for girls.
After jumping into the corporate world and spending 21 years in management and marketing with Fortune 500 companies, Stender described a “pre-midlife crisis.” She had learned a lot from corporate life, but it was not where she saw herself long-term. Fortunately, she had the financial security to figure out where that would be. A Chicago resident since 1983, she spent the summer of 2004 with her kids and investigated the possibility of starting a charter school.
“I wanted to do something very Chicago-focused and socially responsible,” Stender said. She wanted to be involved with the WNBA franchise “more than anything,” but only if there was “incredible alignment with ownership.”
There was. Alter, Brenner says, “is the antithesis of what you think a really successful person would be.” Alter formed a non-profit national service program for young adults in 1994 and runs a literacy program for Chicago Public Schools.
“He is not about flash and all about substance,” Brenner said. “He doesn’t speak unless he has something to say. He is very caring toward people, toward the environment, civic causes, causes he believes in. He puts his money where his mouth is and his time into it.”
Multitasking whiz
Perpetually soft-spoken, Alter is the picture of calm amid a constant crunch of self-imposed but very real deadlines. Stender is a marvel of multitasking efficiency. “I couldn’t have invented anyone better, more dedicated to this than Margaret,” Alter said.
One afternoon, fighting off flu symptoms, Stender sat at Logan Airport in Boston working her Blackberry during a four-hour flight delay, intermittently closing sponsorship deals, chatting with a reporter and checking in with her kids.
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All in the normal course of the day for most working mothers, perhaps. But Stender is not merely balancing a job and home. She is taking almost sole responsibility and a bulk of the workload for a major enterprise, a task for which there is no blueprint.
“This is not a 9-to-5er by any stretch of the imagination,” Wellington said. “She has to be a jack of all trades. I’ve been on the phone with her six times in one day. One time she’s going to the mascot tryouts, an hour later she’s going in front of a major sponsor, and the next time she’s meeting a potential season ticket-holder.”
But if anyone is up to the task, Wellington says, it’s Stender. “The woman ran a 3:16 in the Chicago Marathon,” Wellington said. “She’s capable of superhuman things. She’s got staying power most of us don’t. But May 20 is the day, the day the weight of the world will be lifted off her shoulders.”
She can only hope.
Time, it turns out, flies
There was laughter in the lobby of the Indianapolis hotel. Laughter and darkness, apparently caused by one little blow dryer owned by one unsuspecting sportswriter.
No one wanted to be a snob. But it was a safe guess that Stender was accustomed to staying at significantly finer establishments than this.
It was May 22, 2005, and the journey had scarcely begun. Chicago’s WNBA franchise did not have a name, a coach or a single player. It still was looking for investors, had yet to secure major sponsors, had no television or radio deal in place and was to play in an arena, the 6,500-seat UIC Pavilion, that was not close to professional standards. And frankly, there were hot-dog stands with bigger workforces.
What Alter, Stender and a handful of others did have was passion and energy and a grand vision of inspiring children, invigorating adults and captivating a new audience that could not yet know it was to be captivated. They also had a sound business model and a full year to implement it.
It seemed like plenty of time.
Someday, perhaps, they will be able to laugh at that misjudgment.
SKY HISTORY
(SO FAR)
2004
FEBRUARY: Michael Alter, a real-estate developer from Winnetka, attends the NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles and sees WNBA players in action for the first time.
2005
FEBRUARY: NBA Commissioner David Stern announces Alter has been awarded the Chicago WNBA franchise starting with the 2006 season. Margaret Stender, a former executive at PepsiCo and Quaker Oats Co., is hired as president and chief executive officer. The UIC Pavilion is the team’s new home.
MAY: Dave Cowens, a Hall of Fame NBA player and former NBA coach, is named coach of the team.
SEPTEMBER: The Sky’s name is revealed, along with a logo, team colors and uniforms.
NOVEMBER: The Sky begins to put together its roster by taking 13 players in the expansion draft.
2006
APRIL: The Sky’s first pick in its inaugural WNBA draft is Temple’s Candice Dupree.
MAY: Sky Guy, the team’s mascot, is introduced. The regular season begins with a game Saturday in Charlotte.
SKY DOSSIER
THE LEAGUE: Fourteen teams in two conferences. The Sky will play in the Eastern Conference.
THE SCHEDULE: A 34-game season, with 17 home games at the UIC Pavilion. The Sky opens Saturday at Charlotte and plays its first home game May 23 against Sacramento, the defending WNBA champion.
TV: Eight home games will be on WTTW-Ch. 11, six will be on WCIU-Ch. 26 and the May 30 game against Los Angeles will be on ESPN2. Some games also will be available on NBA TV. No games will be on radio.
TICKETS: The UIC Pavilion will hold 6,500 for Sky games. Tickets are available by calling 877-329-9622 or through Ticketmaster.
THE SERIES
CHAPTER 1
SUNDAY: The perfect storm that led to Chicago’s newest WNBA team.
CHAPTER 2
MONDAY: A party is planned, but whom to invite?
CHAPTER 3
TUESDAY: Serious funny business: How to hire a mascot.
CHAPTER 4
WEDNESDAY: The players play–and sell–the game.
CHAPTER 5
THURSDAY: In search of fans: Will hard work pay off?
ABOUT THE SERIES
For the last 15 months, Tribune staff reporter Melissa Isaacson has had virtually unfettered access to Sky decision-making, from the crafting of a mascot to the drafting of players–and parts in between. Staff photographer Heather Stone has been along for much of the building process, too, capturing many intimate moments that have added up to a new team out of, well, the clear blue sky.
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