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Atlanta coach Marynell Meadors (Photo by Matt Hennie)
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Atlanta Team Tennis Association, Friday Night Drills, Glenlake Tennis Center. www.atta.org
Hotlanta Volleyball League, Recreational League Tournament, Agnes Scott College. www.hotlantavolleyball.org
Atlanta Team Tennis Association, Open Play Doubles, Glenlake Tennis Center. www.atta.org
Atlanta Team Tennis Association, Sunday Morning Drills, Glenlake Tennis Center. www.atta.org
Hotlanta Volleyball League, Intermediate and Advance Open Play, Agnes Scott College. www.hotlantavolleyball.org
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HOME > COMMUNITY > SPORTS
By: MATT HENNIE
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THE YET-TO-BE named WNBA team in Atlanta this week tapped a college and professional veteran for its first head coach and general manager, putting Marynell Meadors in a place she’s been before — building a winning team from scratch.
The move came just six weeks after the WNBA announced that the league’s newest team would call Atlanta home, some nine years after the last professional women’s basketball team in the city shut down.
But the future, not the city’s failed past with the Atlanta Glory of the American Basketball League, was front and center on Wednesday when team owner Ron Terwilliger introduced Meadors, who has recorded more than 500 wins at four college and professional teams.
“I have Southern ties — I am a hillbilly at heart,” Meadors quipped during the press conference announcing her hiring.
Meadors launched her career at Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, starting the women’s basketball program and notching more 363 victories in her 20-year career there. She later coached at Florida State University.
But Meadors’ experience in the professional ranks also highlights the difficulties facing the 11-year-old league. She logged two years as head coach of the Charlotte Sting, from 1997-1999. But despite bringing success to the team — logging the most wins of any head coach there and taking the team to the playoffs in its first two years — it disbanded several years after she left. In 1999, after leaving the Sting, she directed scouting operations for the Miami Sol. That team dropped from the league, too.
SPORTS FANS IN Atlanta — with the braves, Falcons, Hawks, Thrashers and Georgia Force — aren’t strangers to professional sports. But to fill thousands of seats at Philips Arena, where the WNBA team will play when its season opens in May, means taking a different tack than pursuing the hardcore, male-dominated fans who regularly attend games, Terwilliger said.
“It’s a different audience,” he said. “It is not necessarily the hardcore fans that come to football, soccer and the Hawks. It’s a much more diverse audience and we are going to go after reaching out to that audience.”
The public effort earlier this year to land the expansion team in Atlanta included gay and lesbian volunteers, scores of lesbians who pledge to buy season tickets and events designed to rally the area’s gay market. The bid’s chief cheerleader, City Council President Lisa Borders, is a gay-friendly politician considered a leading contender in the 2009 mayoral race.
Terwilliger said Wednesday that the fan base for the team and the league “is very different” than those that support a men’s professional franchise.
“Obviously, it has a lesbian component to it. We are going to reach out to that audience and sell the event based on the fact that it is fun, family-oriented and should appeal to women. We are going to go and sell it on the basis of who has demonstrated an interest in the past and not play up the hard-nosed side of it,” he said.
Meadors said the Atlanta team could appeal to lesbian fans simply by putting a “great team on the floor.”
“We want people in the stands and to be involved in our team. We want to go out and get as many fans as we can and go wherever we need to go,” she said
http://www.wnba.com/atlanta
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