by Allison Andrews, USLFans.com reporter
Well, this is the morning when the schedules are cranked out, and is the only event on the USL AGM calendar for the day. At 8:00 am, all of the leagues gathered in rooms that were basically portioned off from the large ballroom used for the opening luncheon, tradeshow, and Hall of Fame Awards Dinner. At about 8:15 all of the teams had their two representatives in the First Division Scheduling Room, and after Tim Holt laid down the structure of the schedule, the first course of business was the TV games.
Scenes from the First Division Scheduling
PDL Scheduling
Y-League North American Finals
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This was the second First Division Scheduling session I have attended (the first being in 2004), and in that particular meeting, I did not attend the start of the meeting. But Tim stated more than once that they had to do the TV schedule first, as he stated it's nearly impossible to work games into the TV schedule afterwards. So the list of TV games went up on the white board, and the teams worked together to assign a date for each game. This took about 25 minutes as several changes had to be made once issues were found with the TV schedule, and I have little doubt the TV schedule I saw before I left will not be the final one.
After that, teams were free to move around and teams were already clustering in their geographic regions, Seattle with Portland and Vancouver, Atlanta with Charleston, etc. I didn't stay too long after the normal scheduling began, but just like 2004, teams tended to stick with their travel partners when moving around the room. The scheduling was scheduled to go on as long as seven hours, but I had told Tim Holt I'd only stay for 45 minutes, so I thanked him for letting me attend this year and made my way out into the hallway.
Just down the hall were the Second Division (door was closed), and on the other side of the hall, the PDL and the W-League. So I poked my head in each of them and snapped a few pictures.
I do have to apologize for the quality of the indoor pictures at the Tampa Hyatt Ballroom and the meeting rooms that were separated into smaller rooms on this day. The lighting was very yellowish and quite dim, and the last thing I'm going to do is set off a flash in one of the rooms, so hence the slightly blurry quality of the pictures.
It was only just after 9:00 am by this point, and Tim Holt had suggested that I go attend the Y-League North American finals again if I had time on the final day, which I did, so with my plane not leaving until after 6:00pm, I went back to Ed Radice Park, the scene of the 20th Anniversary Celebration a few nights before, but this time it was a bit warmer with a bright blue sky, though the Vancouver Whitecaps teams seemed to be under tents provided to them by the Whitecaps organization, which on this slightly chilly day, was probably not much of an advantage, and probably the opposite, in my opinion.
I took a few hours going around to all nine fields, plus the futsal pitch, getting a nice selection of shots under the much-improved lighting.
With the NFL Buccaneers playing that afternoon near the airport, I made an early exit to get back to the airport before the game ended, as I had gotten caught in the Buccaneers traffic back in 2004.
The chilly Tampa weather and the fact that everyone on the planes I flew on seemed to have a bad cough resulted in my getting quite sick once I was back in Portland, but it was nice again to once again see the operations, even if I can't relay the details to you here, so watch USLFans.com and USLSoccer.com for more news in the coming month, and an updated to my report about the USL Hall of Fame Awards dinner later this week.
