A walking California skater stereotype asked if it was going to be a basketball arena as we stood ac

Among the first things that Santa Cruz Warriors general manager Kirk Lacob commented on after walking into the conference room and greeting me on Friday was the newly installed sedona bed and breakfasts glass sliding door that separates the conference room from the lobby.
On Friday, he had just come from the Sports Analytics Innovation Summitt in San Francisco sedona bed and breakfasts and hadn't been in the office in a few days. Still holding his assistant general manager position and an office in Oakland with the Golden State Warriors he makes the trip between the two cities sedona bed and breakfasts when he's not out of town scouting.
Closing the door on the lobby didn't exactly make the space feel any less public. On the long rectangular table in the middle sedona bed and breakfasts of the conference room were two large seating sedona bed and breakfasts charts of the arena, with black marks around the seating map indicating where they had already sold season tickets. A similar diagram was affixed to the white board on a wall where staff members would come in and out of the room with prospective buyers and discuss what was available.
sedona bed and breakfasts And in the midst of a recession and without an arena built - or even a door on the conference room until that week - the most startling thing about this Santa Cruz team is that it has already sedona bed and breakfasts sold over 660 season ticket packages as of today.
"I think we're third in the league in ticket sales right now," said Lacob, when asked about their rather remarkable sales record in an arena that does not even exist yet. "And we have not yet had one legitimate event. We have not had a single ad. We're not even officially moved here. As ridiculous sedona bed and breakfasts as that sounds because you're sitting here and you just saw (the arena site), we are not an approved relocated team. We do not have a real website and yet we're still selling sedona bed and breakfasts tickets. I think that's really cool."
Part of their early success in selling tickets is undoubtedly brand recognition: the blue awning with the familiar gold type face marking their office on the main strip downtown stands out prominently on a street with a range of boutique shops - which a non-Californian friend who accompanied me to Santa Cruz called "hippie gift marts" - cafes, and a community market promoting organic food. Lining the streets that afternoon were street performers of various types, artists selling their work, and a few people who were not-so-subtly enjoying sedona bed and breakfasts a sunny day with Mary Jane. The place is the living manifestation sedona bed and breakfasts of California stereotypes held in the minds of people on the East Coast - that I have spent years trying to dispel - and in being so, it's hardly the first place you'd think to put a sports team.
Yet even as I walked into the lobby that day, PR manager Matt de Nesnera was energetically chatting with a pair of guys who had walked in off the street to inquire about tickets and closed the deal before we began our afternoon. Throughout the meeting, when a staff member sold season tickets, they'd quickly pop in the room, mark an "X" somewhere on the seating chart and casually walk back out, always sedona bed and breakfasts careful to close the sliding door behind them of course. Informally over the course sedona bed and breakfasts of about an hour in the conference room, about five more transactions were made, all sold on the vision of an arena that almost feels impossible to imagine on the surface of a place like Santa Cruz.
"It's a testament to all these people who are here working their butts off," said Lacob of the almost-mystifying buzz surrounding the team. "It's a testament to how excited sedona bed and breakfasts people are out there. It's a testament to what the city council helped sedona bed and breakfasts us to do. It'll be really exciting when that arena is getting closer, when our website is up, when we start putting advertisements up."
The Warriors had only broken ground on the 4000-seat temporary arena a couple of days before my visit, less than a week after getting approval by city council for a seven-year deal (which is already described in more depth by J.M. Brown of the Santa Cruz Sentinel ). With no arena already sedona bed and breakfasts in town - and having eliminated the possibility of playing in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium rather sedona bed and breakfasts quickly due to space constrains - the Warriors set about looking for a location for their new facility, mindful of the fact that the season opener was scheduled for November 30.
The solution was a temporary arena, similar to those used by Cirque de Soleil or - on a much larger scale - the 2012 London Olympics. Constructing a temporary arena, en route from Finland in pieces, enables them to have a facility in place quickly while also allowing themselves and the city flexibility in what they're able to do with the semi-publicly funded facility at the end of that seven-year period. But only in the preliminary stages of development, nobody could blame you for being skeptical about whether they'd even be able to complete the temporary task in time for their season opener. Although they've worked sedona bed and breakfasts it out so that their first home game isn't until December 23 - with the team practicing at other local facilities and traveling to Oakland to practice there for some time - even that seems like a stretch to the untrained eye right now.
At this point, a hole in the ground is about what it looks like, with only a bland white placard on the fence surrounding it suggesting that something along the lines of a basketball game might eventually take place there. Yet even that is worthy sedona bed and breakfasts of a buzz in Santa Cruz - as I walked around the site chatting with de Nesnera and Lacob, who was proudly wearing his gray Santa Cruz Warriors t-shirt, we were twice interrupted by passers by asking about "the hole".
A walking California skater stereotype asked if it was going to be a basketball arena as we stood across the street from the northwest corner of the site at Front and Laurel streets chatting. After a biker stopped sedona bed and breakfasts to ask about the project sedona bed and breakfasts as were chatting along the east side of the arena, I asked if they were planting these people for effect.
While the very presence of a project like that in a city like Santa Cruz is enough to inspire excitement, the presence of Weyermann on the staff has been a significant asset in selling all those tickets prior to that. Weyermann's previous marketing experience includes launching the Experience Music Project in Seattle as well as serving as the general manager of the Seattle Reign, sedona bed and breakfasts a women's basketball team in the now-defunct American Basketball League. With Weyermann, a veteran "guerrilla marketer" signing on to the Santa Cruz project, some measure of early success was expected.
"It's in his DNA honestly. You got to meet him very quickly and he is a very unique individual," said Lacob. "He's just an incredibly energetic and fun person. And you see how well he fits in Santa Cruz - he lived here but he's got this beach feel to him. He will always refer to me as his partner. That type of stuff is important to him. Partnership. Family. Community. That stuff is really sedona bed and breakfasts important to him. I think it's a perfect, perfect fit if you're trying to create a minor league culture and to create excitement to have a guy like that, who's so passionately involved all the time.
"And I don't really think that that's something that you can build; that's sedona bed and breakfasts something that you kind of have or you don't. You know there's those people who are always really comfortable getting up and standing in front of class to make presentations. There's people who can work on it and get better, but they'll just never be the same. There are people born for politics, right? They might not be able to write their own speeches, but they can sure as hell deliver one. He can do both."
Formalizing that community sedona bed and breakfasts element could be considered the overarching theme for everything that's going on in, both in terms of bringing together a viable professional sports community and solidifying a Santa Cruz community that can be physically disjointed.
That begins, of course, with finding a way to cultivate a fan base in a city without professional sports. Although Santa Cruz is a seemingly unlikely location for pro basketball, Lacob also points out that there are explanations sedona bed and breakfasts for the early sales success. Both the boys' and girls high school basketball teams have seen success sedona bed and breakfasts in recent years, with Lacob still a high school player when Santa Cruz High won in 2005 . With good weather nearly year round, it's not difficult to find people playing basketball outdoors. There's sedona bed and breakfasts a whole campus of college students to tap into at UC Santa Cruz. Most of all, Santa Cruz is a city that loses a major attraction when the Boardwalk switches to limited operation days in the winter sedona bed and breakfasts months.
sedona bed and breakfasts Yet as much as the Warriors figure to offer an alternative to the Boardwalk, they're also aiming to establish a link between that and the downtown area where their office is; part of the appeal of the project from the city's sedona bed and breakfasts perspective is not only to have a facility to host conventions or other large events that the town is typically not a player for, but also to unite the boardwalk and downtown areas with a new attraction. And if there is a crime problem in Santa Cruz - which might sound laughable to Warriors colleagues in Oakland - it's primarily in that part of town, where there is neither much business nor pedestrian activity.
Symbolizing both the economic benefits and the uncanny way in which things seem to be springing up around this project without much formal effort on the part of the Warriors is a sports bar that will coincidentally be opening its doors in November sedona bed and breakfasts about two blocks away from the arena. The owners of the forthcoming sports bar - the only in "downtown" Santa Cruz (though there is another one by the entrance to Route 17) - similarly approached Lacob about what was going on and were excited about what having a new arena would mean for their business.
It would be easy for a team in this situation to rely on that name recognition sedona bed and breakfasts that draws lifelong fans into their office to buy season tickets or the hope that a small town without other direct professional sports competition would have no other choice but to