With Lynn Family Stadium ready to host its first matches, Louisville City FC has been especially hard hit by by delays to the USL Championship season due to the coronavirus pandemic.
This was supposed to a glory moment for Louisville City FC: After years of sharing a baseball ballpark with the Louisville Bats and enduring all the compromise that relationship entailed, the team was prepping for a season that saw the opening of a new stadium, Lynn Family Stadium. But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, those plans are on hold and will likely be delayed again after President Donald Trump announced an extension to shutdowns to April 30.
For Louisville City FC president Brad Estes, the shutdown means his staff works from home and plans for a season opener without knowing when that season opener will be played. Here’s what he told the Louisville Courier-Journal about how he and his front-office staff are dealing with the delay:
“My energy, personally, is being spent on our training grounds project with James O’Connor. We’re still marching forward with that and plans for the NWSL rollout. And, candidly, it’s planning for contingencies around this virus. We don’t know where it’s going to go and while we’re very hopeful and positive-minded in thinking we’re going to get all the games in, we’re also not whistling past the graveyard. We understand this is a very serious issue, so we have to think about contingency plans as well.”…
[On how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the season:]
“We have not laid people off, keeping in mind at this point we haven’t technically sustained any loss. If we can get all of our games in, we’re good to go. If you have to squeeze in some games on a Wednesday night instead of having all Saturday games, there would be some financial impact there, more than likely. But we’re a community asset and it’s very important for us to hold onto everybody as long as we can and as of right now, we don’t feel that’s something we’re going to need to do.
“But as I said, this is iterative on a daily basis. We have to see how it manifests itself.”
Rendering courtesy Louisville City FC.
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