Sky Blue FC has money to spend on signings, and GM Alyse LaHue is ready to spend it

Barely 11 hours after Wednesday night’s National Women’s Soccer League draft ended, Sky Blue manager Freya Coombe hosted a tactics seminar at this year’s online edition of the United Soccer Coaches convention.

Toward the end of the session, someone in the virtual audience asked how happy Coombe was with the team’s draft haul: marquee prospect Brianna Pinto, a trade to bring back midfielder Jennifer Cudjoe, and $240,000 in allocation money to add to the team’s player payroll.

“Just a little bit of allocation,” Coombe said with a smile that betrayed knowing it’s far more than that. “It is nice to go window-shopping for some players now.”

Sky Blue will do so with the eyes of the entire NWSL watching, and hoping a team that has long been one of the NWSL’s smallest will now punch at its market size’s weight.

“It’s a little more allocation money than I thought we were going to walk out of the draft with, so it may open up some different opportunities for us,” general manager Alyse LaHue told The Inquirer. “But certainly we already had some ideas in mind ... The international pool of women footballers is massive, and there’s so much opportunity out there if you can take a little time to scout and look around.”

Along with that, Sky Blue will finally move into Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J., this year, after the coronavirus pandemic meant they couldn’t in 2020. LaHue said the team is planning to have fans in the stands during the regular season, though the calendar still isn’t set yet.

» READ MORE: Sky Blue FC gets U.S. national team rising star Brianna Pinto in NWSL draft

The expectation as of now is that the campaign will start with a Challenge Cup tournament in April, potentially at a single site, then the regular season will kick off in May.

“Right now we’re moving forward as if we’ll have some number allowed at our game days this season,” LaHue said. “If there’s no fans, it does make it a little challenging from an operational perspective to conduct games there when we’re not getting gate revenue out of it, but we’re going to do everything we can to play games in our home stadium.”

(It so happens that the final decision will be made on that by a Sky Blue co-owner, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. The next top-level outdoor pro teams in New Jersey to play games will be Sky Blue and Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls, who are the building’s main tenant.)

When the time comes, a marquee of Carli Lloyd, Pinto, and Margaret Purce should be bright enough to attract fans not just from the team’s traditional New Jersey base, but from across the Hudson River in New York as well thanks to nearby public transit lines from Manhattan. Sky Blue also still has a segment of fans in the Philadelphia area, since the club’s former home at Rutgers was within driving distance.

The potential is huge, but for now, it’s all still just potential. No one knows that better than LaHue, who has had to wait until her fourth year with the club to truly fire the ignition.

“We believe our location absolutely should be an asset to us, particularly in the international market,” she said. “I think that’s a huge advantage for us, and something that maybe in the past the club wasn’t able to take advantage of as much. But that’s something that is really important to me. ... If we don’t start with New York City, we’d be missing something.”

Pinto won’t get on the field for Sky Blue until after the NCAA’s coming spring season, assuming it happens, but she will be worth the wait. The 20-year-old is a dynamic central midfielder who can create and score. Her pedigree includes taking part in senior U.S. national team training camps since she was 16.

» READ MORE: NWSL commissioner Lisa Baird faces heat over complex draft rules and Catarina Macario joining Lyon

“The opportunity to be able to draft Pinto was massive for us, and to be honest, had we drafted earlier, she still would have been our target,” LaHue said.

With the big catch hauled in, LaHue was ready to trade some of Sky Blue’s other picks. She has a history of draft-day trades, and with seven picks total on the night — including two more first-rounders and a high second-rounder she was ready to do it again.

“We don’t have a lot of roster spots right now ... so we never anticipated taking all seven draft picks,” she said. “We had always planned to make a move to obtain some allocation money or some players.”

And so, as she put it, “things got a little wild”: three trades over two rounds that landed Cudjoe’s return and the pile of cash.

Now LaHue gets to go spend it.