Thursday, October 24th - 4 hours

Timbers-Thorns FC North is a part of the Portland Timbers alliance. Growing up playing club soccer we were never in an alliance with any particular teams so when TTNFC joined the Timbers-Thorns alliance, my first thought was "Cool, we get a professional team's logo on our gear" and that was about it. I thought the main point of this was to create a buzz for the professional team and a marketing strategy on their part. This thought was encouraged by the fact that the Seattle area teams that I played growing up were often an alliance team by the Seattle Sounders (Before coaching, I thought they were a team sponsor. I had no idea that an alliance team was even a thing). Throughout the last three years since joining the Timbers-Thorns alliance, a few coaches from the professional level have made their way up from Portland to put on coaching clinics or to run practices that we attend as coaches to learn from in a hands on environment. On November 21st, the club will be putting together a "Staff Town Hall" meeting at the club office. At this time, coaches and board members from the Portland Timers and Thorns teams will explain what exactly it means and the importance of being an alliance club. In the thought process of being a communications director, I'm surprised that it took this long to get this meeting together. I assume (hope) it would be a scheduling issue as I'm sure the coaches and board members of the professional club are very busy, but in hindsight, the directors should have sent out some sort of email explaining why being an alliance club is such a big deal and what opportunities this presents for players and coaches in terms of long term goals. Before the 21st, I plan on sending on sending out an email to all the coaches about why attending is important to make sure that we do our best to get as many to attend as possible so that we have educated coaches and a better opportunity of educated players and parents.