World Cup action just around corner

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This article was published 17/04/2015 (3288 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What the last two years have taught Chad Falk, is time flies when you’re on the run: Two years racing down to just 100 days, then to 50, soon to none.

The countdown is on, to the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup. On Friday, it struck 50 days until the first match kicks off in Edmonton on June 6.

“I was walking through The Forks the other day, and I caught a glimpse of the countdown clock there,” said Falk, the tournament’s Winnipeg venue general manager. “It sank in at that moment. Just to see it in that way, it was like, where did the last 50 days go? I remember the 100-day mark really well.”

Two years ago, Falk was running a one-man show for FIFA in Winnipeg, a veteran sports organizer working alone from his Winnipeg home. A few months after he was hired, a couple of other local employees came on board; now, they’re settled in their offices inside the warren of Investors Group Field.

In just over a month, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers will hand over the keys to the venue, which will be cleaned of all its branding and temporarily renamed simply Winnipeg Stadium. The first of Winnipeg’s seven matches will kick off there at 3 p.m. on June 8, a group-stage battle between Nigeria and Sweden.

Before that happens, there is still a long checklist of work that has to be done.

For the most part, the human infrastructure of the event is now in place. The venue team recently finished hiring the last of their 20 staff positions, and the volunteer ranks are flush. Most of the local crew are Winnipeggers, which helps with the internal buzz. “That ignites a passion in our office,” Falk said. “It’s a frantic mood right now, but everyone’s really exited.”

Attention

Now, their attention is turning to getting the various locations up to snuff. The biggest piece, Falk notes, and the most obvious to the public will be the work of covering or removing the advertising in the stadium, which will have to be replaced quickly when the tournament is done.

That means concession stands and end zones have to be cleared of branding, but the most daunting piece may be covering the ads that mark the 33,000 cupholders in the stands. “There are ads on almost every one of them,” Falk said with a laugh. “We’re working through that process, we’ll get a team of volunteers in. Our head office in Ottawa thinks it will be a great team-building exercise.”

There are other little tweaks in the stadium, out of the public eye, from the media facilities right down to the plumbing: FIFA organizers must swap out four dressing-room urinals in favour of full toilets. “It’s just four, so it’s not so bad, but it’s a unique piece,” Falk said.

Outside the boundaries of the stadium, the early spring has helped ease the timelines on preparing practice fields at Waverley and Shaughnessy parks. While practice venues in Moncton are still sleeping under several feet of snow, work on fields in Winnipeg is well underway.

At Waverley, crews started tearing up the old turf on Easter weekend. At Shaughnessy, graders are getting the ground ready for fresh turf, which will be laid around the middle of May. “We’re really, really fortunate to have the weather,” Falk said. “On all three training grounds, we have tight timelines.”

While the construction starts ramping up, ticket sales for games featuring the United States have been brisk, and the stadium will be at near capacity for those games.

But many tickets still remain for the final matches on June 15 and 16, and Falk said the ticket sales staff are pushing those days.

The June 15 slate will see Germany battle Thailand in the afternoon and China facing New Zealand in the evening; on June 16, defending FIFA champions Japan will take on Ecuador.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca