New York, March 20, 2003 -- Chris Sienko is the director of sports and entertainment for the Mohegan Sun and the interim general manager of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun. Prior to joining the Sun staff, he served as the general manager and director of marketing and corporate sponsorships with the ABL’s New England Blizzard. He sat down with WNBA News to talk about the Sun's upcoming first season.
Q: How is everything going?
Sienko: We’re doing great. We’re obviously trying to put a lot of things into place at one time, trying to finalize practice facilities, housing situations for the players, logos, secondary logos, uniforms, merchandise, staffing, coaching, assistant coaches, you name it. There’s a lot of stuff that’s going on and in progress. We’re working to try and check things off of our list each day. We take a few things off and a few more things get added on, but you move on and go forward. So far we are very pleased and ahead of schedule of where we would like to be.
Q: What’s the status of the team logo?
Sienko: Logos are actually with the league right now pending approval. We hope to be able to unveil that next week. Secondary logos are being worked on today and hopefully will be submitted to the league tomorrow. Colors have all been decided. Those issues are covered right now.
Q: How are ticket sales going?
Sienko: Ticket sales are going very well. Since we announced our franchise on January 28, we are already over 2,500 season tickets sold. Our advertising campaign actually kicked off in the last couple of days. We hope to add to those numbers significantly in the next month and a half.
Q: How are you promoting the team?
Sienko: Advertising includes prints, radio and television. So we are obviously trying to promote that we are in town, that we do have an affordable ticket for season subscribers. We’re not only promoting ourselves in Connecticut, but in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well.
Q: How is the staff coming along?
Sienko: We have a good part of the staff set up. We have a lot of candidates for our positions. Sports are a big deal. A lot of people want to be involved, but it’s all about finding the right people that are going to help this team be successful off the court as well.
Q: Do you think the success of UConn’s Women’s basketball team has helped your team?
Sienko: I think UConn is a great source of pride to Connecticut. While we appreciate them and we expect to capture all of those fans, we also don’t want to rely on it. We’re going to work just as hard to capture those people that don’t really follow UConn. We want to go after basketball fans in general. So, it will always help that you have a successful team in the state. Hopefully, we can ride off of that and capture some of that enthusiasm. But we don’t want to assume that that’s going to happen, so we’re going to work just as hard to capture those fans.
Q: What are your expectations for this season?
Sienko: We’re very excited. We have a top-notch coach in Mike Thibault who is going to really help take this team that missed the playoffs by a tie-breaker last year, into and deep into the playoffs. That is our expectation. That is our goal. We’re not really settling for “this is our first season” because this team has existed for many years. This team knows what it has to do. We have veteran players and we’re expecting to go deep into the playoffs. We’re really excited about the season.
Q: Will the New York Liberty be your biggest rival?
Sienko: We’ll definitely have a rivalry with New York. How can we help it? We’re very close. We hope to have a rivalry there and we’ll kick that off with our first preseason game in our history against New York. It starts from day one.