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Igniting the Sparks
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| Kathy Goodman (left) and Carla Christofferson bought the Sparks from Lakers owner Jerry Buss for $10 million. After a disastrous 2007 season, the team currently has the best record in the WNBA's Western Conference. Photo by Gary Leonard. |
Kathy Goodman and Carla Christofferson Find That Owning a Sports Team Is Never Easy
by Ryan Vaillancourt
On a recent Tuesday night at Staples Center, as the members of the Los Angeles Sparks hustled up and down the court, all eyes seemed to be on 6-foot-4-inch rookie sensation Candace Parker.
The crowd appeared to collectively hold its breath each time Parker took possession of the ball, and let out a cheer when she made a shot.
Sitting courtside were two women who might just be Parker's, and the Sparks', biggest fans. Like the rest of the more than 8,000 people in the stands, they cheered when the Sparks scored and groaned when the visiting Seattle Storm converted. But what sets Kathy Goodman and Carla Christofferson apart is that they like the Sparks so much that they bought the team.
To say their 19 months of ownership has been a roller coaster is an understatement. In that time, they have gone from the high of purchasing the squad to the lows of unexpectedly losing their two best players and finishing with the worst record in the league. Now, 10 months since the close of the team's disastrous 2007 campaign, they have two of the top players in the WNBA, and at press time, they were in first place in the league's Western Conference.
"All kinds of good things happen when you win," Goodman said last week before the game against Seattle, which the Sparks went on to win 76-62. "You get covered in the sports pages, you get to be on TV, people want to come. Los Angeles is a city that supports winning sports teams and all of that is good and makes everything easier, but it doesn't make anything easy."
Welcome to the world of sports ownership, Los Angeles-style, where nothing less than a championship seems to satisfy.
Part-Time Job
Goodman, 45, and Christofferson, 41, arrived on the public scene in late 2006, when they completed a $10 million purchase of the Sparks from Lakers owner Jerry Buss.
In almost every way, it was unexpected, and many things remain unusual. For one, running the Sparks is, for both women, technically a part-time job.
Christofferson is a partner in Downtown powerhouse law firm O'Melveny & Myers. Goodman is a former attorney who used her expertise in bank law to help orchestrate financing for film industry clients. She later started her own production company, Intermedia Films, which in 2000 went public in Germany. Now, during the Sparks' off-season, Goodman teaches English and Social Studies at HighTechHigh, a charter school in Van Nuys.
The two met when Christofferson was hired to represent Goodman's company in a lawsuit. They soon realized they had a mutual love of basketball and, in particular, the Sparks. Both had season tickets and they began going to games together, though they always sat in Goodman's seats.
"Hers were better," Christofferson said.
It was in those seats that the two joked about buying the team. Then it became less of a joke. Ultimately they put together a proposal, secured investors and made a deal with Buss.
But on Dec. 7, 2006, the day Christofferson and Goodman announced the deal at a press conference, a bombshell hit: Lisa Leslie, the team's star and the face of the WNBA since it launched in 1997, announced that she was pregnant and would miss the entire season. Then, five games into the season, All Star and top scorer Chamique Holdsclaw abruptly retired, leaving the Sparks without their two marquee players.
The squad sputtered, finishing with a league-worst 10-24 record, making it appear that Christofferson and Goodman had just bought a $10 million lemon.
Fans First
In the days when they were fans, not only did Goodman and Christofferson talk about the team, they discussed how they would run it differently. The key change these days, they say, is that whereas Buss' staff had to divvy up time and resources to manage the Lakers and the Sparks, they focus solely on the WNBA team.
It is part of a league-wide trend. Before the 2007 season, all but two teams in the league were owned by the same entity that owns that city's NBA team. Now, half of the league's 14 franchises are independently owned.
"What's great about what's happening is this evolution of flexibility all built around committed owners," said WNBA President Donna Orender. "When you have multiple brands in any company, there are opportunities and challenges and they're different than when you have someone who's singularly focused on a single brand. I think we are richer by virtue of having both models within our ownership group."
Proponents of the dual-ownership model say it benefits the WNBA squad to have the NBA team's business infrastructure, like experienced ticket sales and marketing teams, already in place. But Christofferson and Goodman say the dual-ownership model offers mostly false synergies.
"If I were an NBA team and I could spend an hour selling a sponsor for my NBA side, which is a much larger dollar figure than on the WNBA side, or I could spend an hour on a WNBA sponsorship, it's pretty clear to me from a business model which way I go," Goodman said. "It doesn't have anything to do with sexism. It doesn't have anything to do with anything other than business."
Purchasing the team so close to the start of the 2007 season gave the owners little time to sign new sponsors. Instead, the duo focused on things they thought they could immediately improve, namely the "fan experience," Christofferson said.
Last year, Christofferson dreamed up Sparky, an oversized mascot dog that entertains the crowd during breaks in the game. She also initiated a plan to give every home game a theme - Father-Daughter Night, Fitness Night and Fiesta Night, for example - most of which include giveaway souvenirs.
Those efforts kept fans, who are largely comprised of families and are about 65% female, coming back to Staples, Christofferson said.
"One of the things we were surprised about last year, because we obviously were worried that we weren't winning, is we would look around the stands and there were still people coming," Christofferson said.
Despite the team's struggles, attendance increased 4.6% in 2007 over the previous year, jumping from an average of 8,312 to 8,695. To express gratitude to the fan base, the owners toward the end of the season mandated that players sign autographs after games, win or lose.
The autograph sessions, which continue this year, symbolize an unspoken responsibility that most WNBA players seem to embrace. It was evident during pre-game warm-ups before a recent home contest, when a group of pre-teen girls sitting midway up from the court erupted in a chant of "Lisa, Lisa, Lisa" as Leslie stretched. Leslie paused, looked their way, smiled and waved like it was a parade. WNBA players, Leslie said, are athletes first, but their role as de-facto league ambassadors is a close second.
"It is something that we're all conscious of, because we go as our fans go and as our sponsors go, and we recognize how important that is not just for our salaries, but for the attendance in the arenas and our owners," said Leslie.
A Long-Term Investment
After focusing last year on the fan experience, in the off-season Christofferson and Goodman focused on some of the projects they discussed when they still sat in the stands, namely notching sponsors interested in the Sparks, not the Lakers and the Sparks by default.
It has been successful. Trader Joe's is a new sponsor this year, said Goodman, as are the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Amtrak and others. The team is currently negotiating a new sponsorship deal with a major Los Angeles hospital.
Christofferson and Goodman also developed ticket-selling arrangements with Costco and the American Automobile Association, she said.
Then there was a bit of fortune. Having the league's worst record gave the Sparks the first choice in the WNBA draft, where they selected Parker, one of the most heralded female players of the past decade. Leslie also came back after having her baby, and the duo has helped the squad return to the top of the Western Conference.
That combo has attendance on the rise again. The May 17 home opener sold out, and through the first 14 games of the season, the Sparks averaged 9,035 fans, a jump of 3.9% over last year. The team received national attention last month when Parker dunked in two consecutive games - a WNBA player had not dunked in a game since Leslie did so six years ago.
Beyond Parker and Leslie's individual performances, fans are likely coming to games because it's the off-season for the city's most popular basketball teams and tickets are priced to attract families, said Kathy Schloessman, president of the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission. The average Sparks seat is $22.
"They're competing with everybody else who plays at Staples Center, but I think Kathy and Carla are smart enough to know who their specific audience is," Schloessman said. "Not everybody in this city can afford $150 to $200 for a basketball game. So you've got a time when the kids are out of school and an affordable price range."
Still, the franchise remains in the red, though Christofferson and Goodman declined to disclose by how much and downplayed the significance of the fact that they are not yet breaking even.
"When we were putting together a business plan to buy the team, we knew the team wasn't making money and we knew the day we bought it, it wasn't going to magically start making money," Goodman said.
But the duo nevertheless hopes that their business plan will allow them to turn a profit by 2010, if not next year, Goodman said. Either way, Goodman and Christofferson plan to be at the Sparks' helm for quite a while.
Asked how long she envisions owning the team, Goodman did not flinch: "Forever," she said, without a trace of irony. "We didn't buy the team with an exit strategy."
Contact Ryan Vaillancourt at ryan @downtownnews.com.
page 1, 7/7/2008
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to re-distribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
The crowd appeared to collectively hold its breath each time Parker took possession of the ball, and let out a cheer when she made a shot.
Sitting courtside were two women who might just be Parker's, and the Sparks', biggest fans. Like the rest of the more than 8,000 people in the stands, they cheered when the Sparks scored and groaned when the visiting Seattle Storm converted. But what sets Kathy Goodman and Carla Christofferson apart is that they like the Sparks so much that they bought the team.
To say their 19 months of ownership has been a roller coaster is an understatement. In that time, they have gone from the high of purchasing the squad to the lows of unexpectedly losing their two best players and finishing with the worst record in the league. Now, 10 months since the close of the team's disastrous 2007 campaign, they have two of the top players in the WNBA, and at press time, they were in first place in the league's Western Conference.
"All kinds of good things happen when you win," Goodman said last week before the game against Seattle, which the Sparks went on to win 76-62. "You get covered in the sports pages, you get to be on TV, people want to come. Los Angeles is a city that supports winning sports teams and all of that is good and makes everything easier, but it doesn't make anything easy."
Welcome to the world of sports ownership, Los Angeles-style, where nothing less than a championship seems to satisfy.
Goodman, 45, and Christofferson, 41, arrived on the public scene in late 2006, when they completed a $10 million purchase of the Sparks from Lakers owner Jerry Buss.
In almost every way, it was unexpected, and many things remain unusual. For one, running the Sparks is, for both women, technically a part-time job.
Christofferson is a partner in Downtown powerhouse law firm O'Melveny & Myers. Goodman is a former attorney who used her expertise in bank law to help orchestrate financing for film industry clients. She later started her own production company, Intermedia Films, which in 2000 went public in Germany. Now, during the Sparks' off-season, Goodman teaches English and Social Studies at HighTechHigh, a charter school in Van Nuys.
The two met when Christofferson was hired to represent Goodman's company in a lawsuit. They soon realized they had a mutual love of basketball and, in particular, the Sparks. Both had season tickets and they began going to games together, though they always sat in Goodman's seats.
"Hers were better," Christofferson said.
It was in those seats that the two joked about buying the team. Then it became less of a joke. Ultimately they put together a proposal, secured investors and made a deal with Buss.
But on Dec. 7, 2006, the day Christofferson and Goodman announced the deal at a press conference, a bombshell hit: Lisa Leslie, the team's star and the face of the WNBA since it launched in 1997, announced that she was pregnant and would miss the entire season. Then, five games into the season, All Star and top scorer Chamique Holdsclaw abruptly retired, leaving the Sparks without their two marquee players.
The squad sputtered, finishing with a league-worst 10-24 record, making it appear that Christofferson and Goodman had just bought a $10 million lemon.
In the days when they were fans, not only did Goodman and Christofferson talk about the team, they discussed how they would run it differently. The key change these days, they say, is that whereas Buss' staff had to divvy up time and resources to manage the Lakers and the Sparks, they focus solely on the WNBA team.
It is part of a league-wide trend. Before the 2007 season, all but two teams in the league were owned by the same entity that owns that city's NBA team. Now, half of the league's 14 franchises are independently owned.
"What's great about what's happening is this evolution of flexibility all built around committed owners," said WNBA President Donna Orender. "When you have multiple brands in any company, there are opportunities and challenges and they're different than when you have someone who's singularly focused on a single brand. I think we are richer by virtue of having both models within our ownership group."
Proponents of the dual-ownership model say it benefits the WNBA squad to have the NBA team's business infrastructure, like experienced ticket sales and marketing teams, already in place. But Christofferson and Goodman say the dual-ownership model offers mostly false synergies.
"If I were an NBA team and I could spend an hour selling a sponsor for my NBA side, which is a much larger dollar figure than on the WNBA side, or I could spend an hour on a WNBA sponsorship, it's pretty clear to me from a business model which way I go," Goodman said. "It doesn't have anything to do with sexism. It doesn't have anything to do with anything other than business."
Purchasing the team so close to the start of the 2007 season gave the owners little time to sign new sponsors. Instead, the duo focused on things they thought they could immediately improve, namely the "fan experience," Christofferson said.
Last year, Christofferson dreamed up Sparky, an oversized mascot dog that entertains the crowd during breaks in the game. She also initiated a plan to give every home game a theme - Father-Daughter Night, Fitness Night and Fiesta Night, for example - most of which include giveaway souvenirs.
Those efforts kept fans, who are largely comprised of families and are about 65% female, coming back to Staples, Christofferson said.
"One of the things we were surprised about last year, because we obviously were worried that we weren't winning, is we would look around the stands and there were still people coming," Christofferson said.
Despite the team's struggles, attendance increased 4.6% in 2007 over the previous year, jumping from an average of 8,312 to 8,695. To express gratitude to the fan base, the owners toward the end of the season mandated that players sign autographs after games, win or lose.
The autograph sessions, which continue this year, symbolize an unspoken responsibility that most WNBA players seem to embrace. It was evident during pre-game warm-ups before a recent home contest, when a group of pre-teen girls sitting midway up from the court erupted in a chant of "Lisa, Lisa, Lisa" as Leslie stretched. Leslie paused, looked their way, smiled and waved like it was a parade. WNBA players, Leslie said, are athletes first, but their role as de-facto league ambassadors is a close second.
"It is something that we're all conscious of, because we go as our fans go and as our sponsors go, and we recognize how important that is not just for our salaries, but for the attendance in the arenas and our owners," said Leslie.
After focusing last year on the fan experience, in the off-season Christofferson and Goodman focused on some of the projects they discussed when they still sat in the stands, namely notching sponsors interested in the Sparks, not the Lakers and the Sparks by default.
It has been successful. Trader Joe's is a new sponsor this year, said Goodman, as are the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Amtrak and others. The team is currently negotiating a new sponsorship deal with a major Los Angeles hospital.
Christofferson and Goodman also developed ticket-selling arrangements with Costco and the American Automobile Association, she said.
Then there was a bit of fortune. Having the league's worst record gave the Sparks the first choice in the WNBA draft, where they selected Parker, one of the most heralded female players of the past decade. Leslie also came back after having her baby, and the duo has helped the squad return to the top of the Western Conference.
That combo has attendance on the rise again. The May 17 home opener sold out, and through the first 14 games of the season, the Sparks averaged 9,035 fans, a jump of 3.9% over last year. The team received national attention last month when Parker dunked in two consecutive games - a WNBA player had not dunked in a game since Leslie did so six years ago.
Beyond Parker and Leslie's individual performances, fans are likely coming to games because it's the off-season for the city's most popular basketball teams and tickets are priced to attract families, said Kathy Schloessman, president of the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission. The average Sparks seat is $22.
"They're competing with everybody else who plays at Staples Center, but I think Kathy and Carla are smart enough to know who their specific audience is," Schloessman said. "Not everybody in this city can afford $150 to $200 for a basketball game. So you've got a time when the kids are out of school and an affordable price range."
Still, the franchise remains in the red, though Christofferson and Goodman declined to disclose by how much and downplayed the significance of the fact that they are not yet breaking even.
"When we were putting together a business plan to buy the team, we knew the team wasn't making money and we knew the day we bought it, it wasn't going to magically start making money," Goodman said.
But the duo nevertheless hopes that their business plan will allow them to turn a profit by 2010, if not next year, Goodman said. Either way, Goodman and Christofferson plan to be at the Sparks' helm for quite a while.
Asked how long she envisions owning the team, Goodman did not flinch: "Forever," she said, without a trace of irony. "We didn't buy the team with an exit strategy."
Contact Ryan Vaillancourt at ryan @downtownnews.com.
page 1, 7/7/2008
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to re-distribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
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