We’re one week into the WPS season, and It’s been a super-busy at the league office, as you can imagine. I thought I’d take a moment to put a pen to paper and discuss what’s been happening on the inside – well from the web department at least. This post offers a brief overview of three content-driven initiatives at the WPS league office.

WPS Fantasy Challenge

We launched the WPS Fantasy Challenge, which has gotten off to a pretty rockin’ start. This was really the brain child of the Commissioner and brought to life by Karyn Lush in the league office with STATS, our stats agency. If you haven’t had a chance to make your team yet, that’s cool. You can still sign up at fantasy.womensprosoccer.com, although your chances of winning the any of the leagues you’re in get slimmer by the week because you’ll have fewer opportunities to amass points as the season ticks away. Personally, I think the fantasy game is really fun, and it’s been cool to see my less-than-obsessive-WPS-friends (aka the ones who don’t actually manage the stats on a weekly basis) kick my butt. Sad but true.

Defend Your Turf

Next up, Defend Your Turf. Rachel Epstein at the league office brought on Pereira & O’Dell as the league’s marketing agency and together they’ve really built a rock star marketing campaign that brings together TV, web, text, social and print elements that work across the league. They’ve described it as “the attack of the 50-foot Women’s Professional Soccer player,” ha! Basically, they’ve put up these awesome building-side projections featuring Abby Wambach (Washington Freedom), Tasha Kai (Sky Blue FC) and Megan Rapinoe (Chicago Red Stars) in each of their team hometowns. The projections are interactive, and when they’re up, passers-by can text in their #DYT message and see it in real time.

Here’s Abby Wambach’s projection as an example:

I think this campaign has been especially fun, because it’s enabled fans to have a voice in a way that women’s sports fans aren’t necessarily accustomed to: “Talk some trash”. See what people are saying on Twitter right now: http://twitter.com/#search?q=#dyt. Here are a couple of my favorite tweets so far:

@triscutbiscut Rocky < #KL13 #DYT
@maire_ryan @athleticasoccer is going to ruin @chicagoredstars home opener like #CRS did last year. It’s time for revenge #athletica #wps #DYT
@zapwater Defend your turf, Defend Chicago #DYT http://www.twitvid.com/P1OON
@AreYouOnTheBall RT @The_Riptide: Prompt for next Sunday (directed at Mittsy and AROD) “Give Back Our Scarves” “Give Back Our Scarves” “Give Back Our Scarves” #DYT #BOSwps

A couple Chicago Red Stars players have gotten into it too:

Here is a video of the projections in Hoboken, NJ.

Player Interviews

We held a Social Media Round Table at the WPS League Office a couple weeks ago (full blog post still to follow), and one of the no-brainers/awesome ideas that came out of it was to link our WPS Sunday on Fox Soccer Channel preview stories with a player and video interview that gets shared across the interwebs. So, you’ll probably notice that the FSC preview for the Sky Blue FC vs. Chicago Red Stars story featured an interview with the one and only Carly Lloyd. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be posting the FSC preview for Boston Breakers vs. Philadelphia Independence game with an interview of Amy Rodriguez. Mad props due to our in-house journalist Abby LePeilbet for taking on this new challenge and executing so well! And big thanks to John Archibald in New Jersey and Dani Collins in Philadelphia for conducting these interviews.

Of course, this is just a brief glimpse of all the stuff we’ve put together in the last couple weeks; I’ll get more posted soon I promise. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note or a comment if you have questions, ideas or especially WPS feedback… We’re listening!

View Original Post at amandavandervort.com

• Filed Under:  
• Soccer, Sports, SportsPLUS, Media/Marketing, WPS, Business

This post is related to the following ongoing stories:

• 2010 WPS Season