By Garrett Dvorkin | Baltimore Business Journal
Maryland is getting a Premier Lacrosse League team, and league officials hope to attract local sponsors to support the team.
The PLL recently announced that it was adding cities to its eight lacrosse clubs. Baltimore may have missed out on getting a team with the city’s name attached, but Charm City could still be the home base of a team. Maryland received a team that will be known as the Maryland Whipsnakes, and Paul Rabil, co-founder and president of the PLL, said the plan is to eventually have the Whipsnakes set up a facility somewhere in the state, possibly in Baltimore.
Rabil said the league will look to either purchase an ownership stake in a facility or build a stadium of its own somewhere in Maryland. He also said the move will help the league bring in more local companies as sponsors. He hopes businesses across the state will want to sponsor and support Maryland’s newest professional team.
“What we are excited about doing now is being able to commercialize individual teams with local market companies,” Rabil said. “That was more difficult to do when we just had Cannons, Atlas, Redwoods and Chaos. Now that you have Carolina, Boston, Maryland and New York, you can go to brands, community organizations and leadership groups in the area. I think from a business standpoint it has created a lot of opportunity.”
The PLL is heading into its fifth year, and Rabil decided now was the time to enter a new phase for the league. The PLL, unlike the NFL, NBA and MLB, didn’t attach cities to its teams and had teams with names like the Archers, Waterdogs and Whipsnakes. Rabil and other executives, however, decided this is the year for that to change and that the PLL is ready for traditional sports teams with cities or states attached.
“One way that you unlock the causal sports fan is by the association of a home market, the universal language of a team sport,” Rabil told the BBJ in July, when it was first announced that the PLL would add cities. “That is how people have traditionally consumed sports in North America.”
The eight PLL teams and their home markets are the Boston Cannons, California Redwoods, Carolina Chaos, Denver Outlaws, Maryland Whipsnakes, New York Atlas, Philadelphia Waterdogs and Utah Archers.
Rabil said that while Baltimore is a city deserving of a team, the league really wanted to capture the lacrosse hotbed that is Maryland.
“The powerhouse of the corridor of Baltimore to the DMV through Annapolis, all of which historically have had professional lacrosse teams, we wanted to make sure we serviced the fan base that is in Baltimore and encompasses the state that’s official team sport is lacrosse,” Rabil said.
Rabil said that while the PLL has grown in many facets, including viewership, merchandise and ticket sales, the league has had trouble getting local and regional companies on board. The league runs off of a touring model, meaning all the teams travel to one location every weekend to play all their games. That model means the league can appeal to a wider audience, but it was hard for companies to reach local fans if the PLL wasn’t coming to their city that weekend.
The PLL now must make sure that these local markets start to accept the teams that were given to them. Rabil said the best way to make that happen is “to be there.” He said moving forward the PLL wants each team to have a headquarters inside its market and have the coaches and players live there, too. Rabil also said eventually he wants the teams to have a home stadium.
“Our future plan to look downstream is to not only open up facilities in these markets but have a stake in a stadium, whether it is a stadium we build or a stadium we partner in,” Rabil said.
The PLL will remain a touring model for the foreseeable future, and Rabil said home teams will play two games when the traveling league comes to a team’s home. Now that Maryland is a home market, Rabil said it has opened up more venues for the PLL to play in.
Rabil said that Homewood Field at Johns Hopkins University has been great for the PLL so far, having sold out events yearly, but that other stadiums like Audi Field in Washington, D.C., Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis as well as the venues at Towson University and Loyola University are options, too.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Premier Lacrosse League