Pete Hayes
The Telegraph
March 25, 2007
 
The cry for professional outdoor soccer’s return to St. Louis has been heard for years. But since the departure of the Stars of the now-defunct North American Soccer League in 1977, no big-time pro soccer teams have called St. Louis home. Jeff Cooper is out to remedy that situation. And this time, he says he holds the magic key to success a new stadium.

Cooper, an East Alton attorney, is leading a group aimed at bringing a Major League Soccer franchise to the St. Louis area. The 37-year-old Granite City native has already successfully landed a team in the new women’s professional league, which will begin play in 2008.

We went to the MLS about two years ago and they almost laughed, Cooper said in his spacious East Alton office at Simmons Cooper LLC. We were about the 20th group from St. Louis that had gone through there. Every group said all the right things, but nobody had a stadium.

Long known as one of the original hotbeds of American soccer, St. Louis has watched as seemingly lesser cities had successful pro teams, while the Gateway City went without. The reason? No stadium. The old NASL Stars used to play at Busch Stadium II and later at Washington University’s Francis Field, but those venues’ days are long past.

PLAN B

Cooper went back to the drawing board and came up with a plan. Actually he’s working on three plans. He and the St. Louis group are negotiating with three St. Louis area communities including Collinsville on the construction of a soccer-specific stadium.

Soccer-specific stadiums have become all the rage in the 10-year-old MLS. Columbus (Ohio’s) Crew Stadium was the first in 1999 and was followed by seven others, including Toyota Park in Chicago and the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif. The stadiums are configured to seat between 18,000 and 30,000 fans as compared to the gigantic football stadiums many MLS teams played in when the league began.

When three (area) mayors called the MLS they said they were interested, that’s when the league started taking us seriously, Cooper said. Serious, indeed.

Cooper, a 1987 graduate of Granite City High, has joined with law partner John Simmons in using their resources to help out youth and college sports teams and sponsors in recent years. They funded the remodeling of the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville baseball complex last year. Simmons, a native of South Roxana, was recently given the go-ahead for a minor-league baseball team and stadium in Marion.

Neither John nor myself grew up with money, but we’ve created a business that’s done well, said Cooper, who played a year of college soccer at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. We’ve always been committed to giving back.

We’ve got a self-imposed deadline of June 1 to have an agreement with one of the communities, said Cooper, who declined to identify the two vying cities besides Collinsville.
Any taxes we would generate would be reinvested in the stadium so we could pay for it.
The proposed Collinsville site is near the intersection of Interstates 255 and 55/70.

Over the next 20 years, (Collinsville) is going to be one of the big growth corridors of St. Louis, Cooper said. For people who need to live close to downtown St. Louis, it’s right near 255 and 55/70 about nine miles to downtown.

True enough. But it is in Illinois not Missouri. And that alone can cause concern for Missourians.

To a lot of people in Missouri, the Mississippi is like the Pacific Ocean, Cooper said. But we conducted a poll of 600 soccer people from Missouri no Illinois folks and asked if they would come to Illinois to watch an MLS team play in Illinois if that was the only place they could see it played. There were 86 percent who said yes and 12 percent who said maybe. That leaves just two percent at no.

WOMEN’S SOCCER

Cooper is also the owner of a semi-pro women’s soccer team in St. Louis, River Cities FC of the Women’s Professional Soccer League. That team is coached by former SIUE and Granite City High star Justin McMillian and last season featured players such as former Alton High standout Lindsay Kennedy, former Edwardsville star Katya Hessel and former North Carolina star and U.S. National Team member Lori Chalupny.

(River Cities) won the Midwest regional championship and finished second in the league in just their first year, Cooper said proudly. I’m excited about this season.

Cooper’s team in the yet-to-be-named women’s major professional league is a done deal. And despite his heavy workload and the task of going after the MLS team, he says he and his group are not spread too thin. In fact, just the opposite is true, he claimed.

St. Louis will join Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Washington and a team to be named later.
We’re very excited about it, Cooper said. When you combine the two efforts, you’re more concentrated.

For the first season, the team will play at St. Louis Soccer Park in Fenton. Beyond that, the plan is for the team to share the new soccer-specific stadium with the St. Louis MLS team in Collinsville or another area community.

DAWN OF AN ERA

Bringing the MLS to town would be the plum of Cooper’s efforts, of course. The league’s Los Angeles Galaxy recently made headlines by signing England’s David Beckham, one of the top players in the world, currently with Real Madrid. MLS started with a niche of supporters that’s steadily grown. With that growth has come expansion.

We would like to have a team with a definite St. Louis flavor, Cooper said. We would of course want to be balanced to be competitive, but that depth could be peppered with St. Louis players.

This is the dawn of a huge era for American soccer.