Major league lacrosse giving Beach a chance to show it is a pro town

Maybe you've noticed, or perhaps heard a thousand times, that this place we like to call home has no major league sports teams.

Maybe David Gross can do something about that.

Gross is the commissioner of Major League Lacrosse. I know, I know: Oxymoron City. But before you shout me down, at least listen to what Gross is peddling.

Basically, his pitch begins and ends with this truth: "There's nothing minor-league about the quality of play on the field. Our players are the best lacrosse players in the world."

And so they are.

Now, they also are part-timers who earn an average of $13,000 for a 12-game regular-season schedule. They hold down weekday jobs, because of the obvious marginal economics of the 8-year-old league, and they play on weekends for 10 franchises around the country.

But for what it is worth, they are the best. And this weekend, I guess we'll get a snapshot of how much that is worth to the stickheads in our budding lacrosse hotbed.

The Washington Bayhawks and the (formerly) Philadelphia Barrage will open their seasons at the Virginia Beach Sportsplex, and Gross and his people will be watching closely.

It will be the first stop on a Barrage-over-America tour, seeing as how the Barrage's ownership abandoned the team not long after it won last year's championship.

The league took over the franchise and will produce five Barrage "home" games in various markets, trying to find the orphans a new playground.

Our audition begins at 2 p.m. Sunday.

"This is a bit of a beauty pageant this summer in these five markets," Gross said, "and we're gonna see who looks the prettiest."

The competition? Dallas, St. Louis, Raleigh/Durham and Portland, Ore. They'll all play host to the Barrage as MLL sizes them up as potential relocation or expansion sites. Not that Gross is coming to our door sight unseen.

Virginia Beach television mogul Tim Robertson is a co-founder of the league - his mogul buddy Jake "Body by Jake" Steinfeld is the lead dog. Through Robertson, Gross said MLL has looked into holding events at the Sportsplex "for quite some time," despite the building's disastrous run with minor-league soccer.

Hunter Francis, for one, suspects lacrosse can and will be different because of Gross' "we really are major league" rallying cry. Francis is the operations' chief for this game. A Beach resident, he is also a former MLL executive with the Baltimore/Washington franchise and a life-long lax disciple who still plays at 50.

"Personally, I think we have a really good shot" at a team," Francis said, primarily because of proximity to the rest of the Eastern Conference: Rochester, Long Island, Washington, Boston and New Jersey.

Advance ticket sales and walkup projections point to what Francis called a conservative attendance estimate of 3,000. Gross said he already expects Portland will outdraw everybody, but attendance alone won't carry this beauty pageant.

"We're not just gonna get hung up on which market sells the most tickets," said Gross. However, he did note that when MLL tested Denver in 2004, his reflexive reaction to the overwhelming local response was "how soon can we get a team here?"

Turns out, Denver has become the MLL's hottest home. It averaged 10,600 fans a game last year, 2,000 more than runner-up Boston. Chicago was last at 2,243.

Still, Gross said he wants to get a feel from the crowd about its excitement level over the game and the team possibly moving here. MLL plans to survey ticket buyers later to measure their interest.

A little matter of ownership will need to be addressed, of course. The franchise fee is $1.5 million, and Francis said "a couple" of unidentified local people have inquired.

But first things must come first, namely Sunday's first impression.

Tom Robinson, 757-446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com