MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “You know I still get the alerts on my phone, ‘hey the Redbirds were supposed to play tonight. Hey soccer match tonight,” said Craig Unger.
For Craig Unger this pandemic has brought double the stress.
“It’s hard to see beautiful days like this where you are sitting here and everything seems so peaceful and great but then the reality of what’s going on outside of these walls is eye opening,” said Unger.
Unger is the President and General Manager of the Redbirds, he’s also the President and Owner of 901 FC. And both teams are on hold for the time being.
“We like to control things, that’s how we operate. We control all the things about our business, and I think it’s the lack of control that becomes the most frustrating thing for us,” said Unger.
Trying to manage a team during this outbreak is hard enough … Unger’s got to do it for two. And each side brings a different set of circumstances.
“On the baseball side, the challenges are our players come from major league baseball, they are all under contract with the St. Louis Cardinals, every other minor league team is that way. So we have to wait for them to decide how they are going to start and what their process is,” said Unger.
As for soccer 901 FC was just getting it’s franchise rolling, playing just one game in it’s second season before everything shut down.
“So the timing is challenging for us. Now I will say this, fresh off our first year for soccer, knowing what it took for us to launch soccer, our mindset has been what we’re going to go into of look we may play in 2020 but if we don’t, we know how to launch a team. And we will take the sort of attitude that we are a start up again,” said Unger.
But as the sporting world begins to take baby steps back, Unger is encouraged there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
“We shut down the things that we did and now we all recognize we’ve got to start coming back out, we’ve got to start doing little things. We don’t want to rush into anything. But the end is, there is a time out there, I don’t know when but things will comeback. I don’t what normal looks like for us this year, next year everything that we do here is going to be that the health and safety of our fans, our employees, our players, everything associated with what we do, has to be right for the community,” said Unger.
Unger did also mention the USL said teams can start doing training individually or in small groups. 901 is still waiting for approval from the city and health department to start that.