Hey everybody,

The Stars would like to have a presence at Grand Old Days on June 3rd. Andy Lorei, player and front office staff member, is looking to supplement players staffing the booth with Dark Clouds. Please PM me if you can work the booth any part of the day and I'll give you Andy's contact info, details below:

We are involved in this years Grand Old Day on June 3rd...I am emailing you guys to see if you would be interested in helping to set up/organize a Dark Cloud presence at the event...I will be on the road so I need competent people to oversee this. Set up is between 530-730 am (ouch...but it shouldn't take more then 15 minutes so 7 would be fine). The event runs until 6 pm....In a perfect world we would have 1 or 2 dark clouds along with 1 or 2 players at the booth the whole day. I have all the supplies at the office so if in fact you
were interested you need only to stop by.

Thanks very much,
Andy

Would love to, but out of town this weekend. Good luck.

I'm in and can stop in the office tomorrow to pick up the supplies, so anyone who helps doesn't need to come up to Blaine first.

We've always talked about how we'd help the Stars if they did more community outreach, i.e. the state fair, so this is a chance to step up.

Go Stars! Let's let the world (or St Paul, at least) know we're out here!

I'm also out of town this weekend; I'll be standing in Milwaukee.

They are good on the set up. Just gotta man the booth.

Damn, Got a birthday in Austin. This would be very fun!

This is a great opportunity for those who complain about there not being enough outreach to get involved.

Andy is now in San Antonio, so he has Jake the Intern in charge of their side of it. I said I'd coordinate the Dark Clouds side for him.
PM me or email/call/fb me directly if you already have my info and I'll give you all the details and we'll figure out a schedule.

Great fun today.
I talked to hundreds of people about soccer, talked to the three Stars players who stopped in while I was there, plus Tony Sanneh and another former Thunder player, but I'm too tired to think of his name right now.

This is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing. I didn't try to convert the other sports fans, just bring in the existing soccer fans. There are so many soccer fans out there that don't know about the team or don't think to come to games because they haven't for a long time. For example, people who have been to Thunder games but haven't been back in the last few years, I told them about the track being removed and how much better the already-good stadium is now.
I talked to people from other countries, including a former Swiss national team goalkeeper (for U13 - his claim to fame, he said with a grin), men, women, people of all ages -- there are fans out there, they just need to be guided to NSC.

Honestly, this team is easy to sell/fun to talk about right now. Last season's champion, undefeated this season, doing well in Open Cup...

GO STARS!

I was there for about two hours yesterday, about an hour of which was just the parade going by, but we had a lot of people come up with varying amounts of knowledge about the Stars. Lots of folks that knew about MLS, but not the Stars hadn't heard about the Open Cup win on Tuesday and that seemed to make a good impression, especially the bit about how if the Stars beat San Jose we could face Seattle here.