For San Diego State’s Director of Athletics John David Wicker, things are quite good.
Six years ago, he had no future home for SDSU football. Now, the stadium whose design and construction he oversaw has been fully funded, constructed on time and underbudget. It has attracted the highest level women’s soccer with record crowds. Rugby and top concerts and exhibition soccer games.
SDSU football is expecting an invitation to a Power 5 conference any day now. The men’s basketball team went to the finals.
That was all before this week.
Thursday, after years of proclaiming the stadium could host Major League Soccer, Wicker watched as MLS sealed the deal with Sycuan and a British-Egyptian billionaire to host a team at Snapdragon Stadium. And SDSU didn’t have to give up any land or make any major changes to the stadium.
The Politics Report got a couple questions in for him.
How are you going to handle all the users of the stadium? You have the Wave, MLS and soon a Power 5 college football team, never mind all the other sports and concerts. That is quite a dance.
There’s overlap at various times during the year. Fortunately, soccer doesn’t paint a field up more than lines and things like that. So while some will be standalone weekends that are just Wave or SDFC, there are some weekends where we’ll have a doubleheader. Maybe have the Wave play Friday and MLS play Saturday.
I’d love to see an LA/SD weekend where you bring Angel City and LAFC down – they both play at Bank of California stadium up there but you have our two clubs here and you could really see that rivalry develop.
Stuff like that would be awesome.
We’ll protect various dates in the fall so that we have MLS weekends and college football weekends and we’ll plug concerts in where we have dates.
Be real. Five, six years ago did you expect this would happen?
I knew if we got the initiative passed, we would get MLS eventually. Did I know it would happen this quickly? We hoped. When we were designing our stadium, we went to MLS and told them we wanted to build a stadium that was as MLS ready as we can get. We intentionally wanted it to be ready for soccer. We knew we would get it.
About the Name
For as long as there have been American sports, teams have used (and more often misused) Native American imagery and names for teams.
Now Sycuan has become the first tribe to have a major ownership stake in a top men’s professional team. The Mohegan Tribe in Connecticut own a women’s basketball team. We asked Cody Martinez, the chairman of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation whether they would consider leaning into that heritage and express it in the name or promotion of the team.
“Well nowadays we have to be careful not to misuse native American culture. I’m a fan of having a nice rivalry with LAFC so supporting SDFC or FC San Diego type of name. We’ll see where that goes. We have to work together with the ownership group. But Sycuan has been successful injecting our culture into organizations and doing it thoughtfully and respectfully,” Martinez said.
Tom Penn, the CEO of the new club said it would be either San Diego Football Club or Football Club San Diego.
“That’s the fundamental question right out of the block. Should we put the football first or put San Diego first and we’re going to listen to everybody on that,” he said at the press conference Thursday.
So don’t expect anything too creative beyond that big question.
Other SDSU news: The university has closed its investigation into former star punter Matt Araiza, ESPN reported: “While the university cannot provide specific information related to its student disciplinary proceedings and investigations, or specific information related to student records, it can confirm that none of the former students named in the civil suit are now the subject of an active investigation,” SDSU said in a statement provided to ESPN.
Montgomery Steppe Locks Up First Union Endorsement in Supe Special
Councilwoman Monica Montgomery-Steppe won the first big institutional endorsement of the county supervisor election this week, locking up the support of SEIU 221, the largest union for county workers.
In one way, that’s not much of a surprise: SEIU 221 endorsed Montgomery-Steppe’s upset bid for the City Council in 2018, when she became the first person to defeat a Council incumbent since 1992.
But in another way, it’s intriguing: SEIU 221 was the only union to support her Council bid. The San Diego Imperial Counties Labor Council – the umbrella groups of unions throughout the region – supported her opponent, as did the San Diego Construction and Building Trades Council.
It’s an early win for her over the other declared Democrat in the race, Janessa Goldbeck, a veterans’ and LGBTQ advocate and nonprofit executive.
And it’s especially notable because Montgomery Steppe, an unapologetic progressive, has not always been arm-in-arm with unions, or any big institutional player. In 2020, for instance, she won a membership vote of the Labor Council for her unsuccessful City Council presidency bid. But the Labor Council’s leadership tried to ignore the vote, denied it when we asked about it, and suggested the process may have been improper, before begrudgingly acknowledging it in a Tweet.
But the Labor Council has new leadership, and the group initiated its endorsement process this week. It’s bringing in candidates for interviews before making a decision.
Brigette Browning, the Council’s leader since early in 2021, gave her opinion on how the Labor Council should weigh endorsements when one specific union has a pronounced interest in a race, when asked her if she thought Assemblyman Brian Maienschein would make a good city attorney.
“I don’t know what makes a good city attorney or not, so we defer a lot to our lawyer union that’s within the Labor Council to give us feedback on that,” she said.
The union with the most direct interest in the supervisor race is SEIU Local 221, which represents over 10,000 county workers. The local chapter of the United Domestic Workers, which represents home care workers, hasn’t announced an endorsement yet, but is expected to endorse Montgomery-Steppe.
The other unions that could weigh in are the Deputy Sheriff’s Association – Montgomery Steppe has been a vocal proponent of police and criminal justice reform during her political rise – and the laborers’ union, Local 89 – LiUNA.
The Laborers are openly mulling their decision right now. “We’re locked in arms with Monica all the time, and Janessa is new, so we’re going on a fact-finding mission,” said Kelvin Barrios, policy and community engagement director for the Laborers. He said the union will talk to other unions, invite candidates in for interviews and send out questionnaires to help it make a decision. The Laborers wouldn’t invite Republican Amy Reichert in for an interview, Barrios said, but all Democrats will be invited.
They also conducted a poll this week. We’ve obtained screenshots of the questions asked.
The poll didn’t just ask about Montgomery Steppe and Goldbeck, though. It also asked about Raquel Vasquez, the mayor of Lemon Grove, who was rumored to be considering a supervisorial run, but who has not jumped into the fray.
Barrios said they included her in case she gets in, but that the poll was split, with some respondents asked about her, and others not, so they could get a feel for the race either way.
One line of thinking is that just including Vasquez could hurt Montgomery-Steppe’s performance, since they are both Black women who represent neighboring geographical areas. We don’t know the results of the poll.
Goldbeck, though, could have her own issue with the Laborers. In 2020, she published an op-ed at the Voice of San Diego arguing that Barrios needed to drop out of his City Council race over city ethics ordinance and campaign donation violations.
If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org or andrew.keatts@voiceofsandiego.org.