In this market, WPS means won’t play soccer

In case you are like most soccer fans and had forgotten already, the Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) is slated to start next spring. But not locally anymore.

The league made it official this week that Dallas Sting owners Brent Coralli and Jack Hanks aren’t ready for the big leagues.

No women’s pro soccer will be here next year and, really, what are the chances that it happens in 2010?

Coralli didn’t return phone calls this week, and neither Coralli nor Hanks has done so in two years of attempted contact.

The WPS issued a release about the Dallas team Friday:

"Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) plans to launch with seven teams in 2009.A Dallas team will not participate in the inaugural season. The rights to the Dallas market currently reside with the league, which is attempting to secure a suitable Dallas stadium deal, likely for 2010.

"If a viable stadium deal is secured either by the league or by any prospective WPS investors in the Dallas market and the league approves an ownership group, the rights to operate a Dallas team can be assigned to those owners, at which point the great soccer fans of the Dallas and Fort Worth areas can again look forward to having a WPS team to call their own."

Facility issues, eh? What about Pizza Hut Park?

Apparently, the Sting folks couldn’t work out an agreement with the Hunt family.

FC Dallas ownership can’t be expected to cut the Sting some crazy deal in the name of fellow soccer love.

Besides, what kind of team or league begins its existence by looking for a handout?

The Sting club needs to build its own 6,000-seat stadium and could do well for itself by constructing an intimate facility in the Grapevine-Southlake area.

If the money men are coming up short then, they’re not really money men, are they?

And that’s the problem. Any potential soccer owner in the United States needs to have bags of start-up cash followed by piles of I’m-going-to-lose-my-shirt-for-five-years cash.

It also needs savvy leadership.

In Chicago, the WPS team is led by one of Major League Soccer’s all-time great general managers in Peter Wilt, the former and still greatly missed Chicago Fire boss.

The Red Stars have direction, a great logo and name, a facility, a coach (which they hired back in May) and are ready to play come April.

Funny how it works that way.

The Sting guys never brought in anyone with the experience, connections or the common sense of Wilt.

It was doomed from the beginning.

If it makes it any easier, there’s a new men’s pro indoor league starting up, with the Texas Outlaws playing in North Richland Hills at the NYTEX Sports Centre from November through March. By the time their season is over ... well, perhaps by then, the Chicago Red Stars will be on TV.