With the 2006 MLS Cup being played at Pizza Hut Park, it marks the second straight year that the league's showcase event has been held in Frisco.
While the 2005 Cup was a great event, it was still held at a venue that had only been open for several months and still showed its share of growing pains, including traffic flow issues, parts of the stadium not yet completed and assorted other issues.
But this year's MLS Cup is a different story. Pizza Hut Park is now finished, has been open for over a year and FC Dallas has a great deal of experience hosting a number of events at the state-of-the-art facility.</p>
Besides MLS matches, the list of events hosted this year included part of the InterLiga tournament, friendly matches featuring the U.S. men's national team, an exhibition between Everton FC of the English Premier League and Mexican powerhouse Club America, a number of local high school football games plus a full season of concerts.
FCD President and General Manager Michael Hitchcock has definitely noticed a difference between hosting last year's and this year's Cup.</p>
"Last year, we hosted a very good Cup in spite of the fact that we had a stadium with some parts that weren't complete -- at least up to the standard that they are this year," Hitchcock said.
"This year, from an overall standpoint, it helps that we have hosted a number of events, some of them with Soccer United Marketing," he said. "We've been receiving feedback from MLS on what we could do to host great events and to improve on them. We listen to the feedback from the people that we respect and make the changes that we need to make to host even better events."
Hitchcock also said that hosting so many different events since the 2005 Cup has made his organization even better at putting on a top-notch event.</p>
"From a sales, marketing and operations standpoint, we really have our legs underneath us," Hitchcock said. "We had a great plan in place and really executed it well. We came up with a strategic plan to sell out the event and host a great MLS Cup even if FC Dallas didn't make it. We're obviously disappointed that FC Dallas isn't in the big game, but that being said we're going to host an unbelievable Cup on Sunday."
Especially beneficial to Hitchcock and the entire FCD organization has been Pizza Hut Park's first concert season, which concluded earlier this year and featured a number of highly-successful and well-attended events, including the local alternative rock event Edgefest and a concert featuring country music star Kenny Chesney.</p>
"Anytime you can host an event like a Kenny Chesney concert where we had 30,000 people on site, it can help everything from parking, security, ticket taking, food and beverage and ushers," Hitchcock said. "If you can handle that, it certainly helps you because you can take lessons learned from an event like that and apply them to MLS Cup. It certainly helps most of the big events. Even the soccer games that we've hosted this year have helped us get better from an operations standpoint."</p>
Having all of those experiences and hosting so many events in the past year has definitely made hosting the 2006 MLS Cup easier for Hitchcock and the FCD staff.
"We were certainly ahead of the curve this year to assure that we were doing everything right and meeting our timeline," Hitchcock said. "Last year, because of the stadium opening later than expected and having so many games packed into the tail end of the season, the organization fell a little bit behind where it needed to be in terms of planning and execution. This year was certainly a little bit easier than last year."
Steve Hunt is a contributor to MLSnet.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Soccer or its clubs.
