THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 22, 1997 TAG: 9702220268
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY HARRY MINIUM, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 47 lines
The Hampton Roads Mariners will become the Virginia Beach Mariners if City Council approves funding for a new soccer stadium in Lake Ridge.
Sources say the Mariners agreed to the name change during lease negotiations with the city. The Mariners would lease the $8 million, 6,000-seat facility and run it for the city.
Vice Mayor W.D. ``Will'' Sessoms Jr. and Page Johnson, co-owner of the Mariners, declined comment.
The Mariners would become the second of three area minor league teams to drop regional names in favor of city identifications.
The Tidewater Tides baseball team became the Norfolk Tides when they moved to Norfolk's Harbor Park in 1994. The Hampton Roads Admirals hockey team, which plays at Scope, is the lone professional sports team with a regional name. The Admirals and Mariners are owned by Johnson and Mark Garcea, who are also minority owners of the Tides.
The Tides changed their name at the request of the city of Norfolk, but it is not a requirement of their lease.
Curiously, it was at the request of Virginia Beach officials that a proposed National Hockey League expansion team - the Rhinos - adopted the name Hampton Roads. George Shinn, the Charlotte businessman who applied to bring an NHL team to the area, wanted to name the team Norfolk, but chose Hampton Roads largely at the request of Beach officials.
Shinn's application was rejected by the NHL on Wednesday.
Beach officials note that an arena for the Rhinos, though located in Norfolk, would have been regionally funded and thus needed a regional name. Virginia Beach taxpayers might have paid more than $600,000 per year for 30 years for the arena.
The first phase of the soccer stadium will be funded solely by Beach taxpayers, just as Harbor Park was funded by the city of Norfolk, Beach officials say.
The soccer stadium will be discussed by City Council Tuesday in a closed session. A vote on funding isn't expected until early March.
Johnson and Garcea hope the stadium eventually will be expanded to 30,000 seats for a Major League Soccer team. The Mariners will be dormant this spring, Johnson says, because they have no adequate stadium, but will return in 1998 in the A League, one step below the MLS. MEMO: Staff writer Karen Weintraub contributed to this story.
KEYWORDS: SOCCER STADIUM VIRGINIA BEACH CITY COUNCIL