YouSaid · the spoken record

Lisa Baird

lines on the record: 31
first: 2021-03-18
most recent: 2021-03-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Microphone in this instance to kind of help the world understand that if you are nimble, if you kind of have the right moments of clarity when you need them on what to do, even if you don't have the resources that other people do to do this, that just band together and figure out a way to get it done. And I think that's the meaning of the word resilience, isn't it? Is that you kind of don't look around for the game plan to be handed to you by someone else? You make sure that your staff, your players, your owners, everybody in your trust circle believes in what you're doing. And then you just go out and get it done.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, you know, I want to say something because I just want to say I think, you know, people in our industry, media, sports, et cetera, we work really, really hard. I mean, there's no question. I worked harder than I ever did at any of those jobs this year to solve problems that I never thought I would have to say. What I will say, though, is, and I say this pretty humbly, I realize how privileged I am to be at the helm of a sport that's growing and a sport that was able to nimbly and adroitly take advantage of some horrific circumstances that the world went through and is going through with this pandemic. What I hope that I have taken away is to use that podium or the”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do, and I know that's kind of a bold brave statement to say when we're only 4% of the coverage today and we're certainly not anywhere near the massive audience or revenues that some of our men's leagues have, but I think we and other women's sports leagues are on that preponder, not only here in the United States, but abroad as well.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And part of what we did in the fall series, which we did with CBS, is we were able to take advantage of some broadcast windows that had opened up because some collegiate sports elected to suspend or delay their sports seasons. So we created a whole new format. I worked with CBS to take those windows. And you might have been turning on your TV expecting to see college football. And you saw some incredible soccer. Notice I did not say women's soccer. I just said soccer.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answered the in the no question it was wait a minute I just turn this on and I saw this sport and I went Damn, that's good.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we're seeing something really exciting happen. And I talked to, you know, I come from a broader sports world and I'd seen it in the Olympics. If you think about it, the Olympics kind of led the way here. When you watch the Olympics or even the Paralympics, you're kind of watching women's sports and men's sports, maybe not equally, but pretty equally, right? They're pretty balanced in terms of the coverage and certainly, you know, if you look at the performance of some of the bigger countries like England and the US, and the women are starting to win more medals than their male counterparts. So of course, you want to watch gold medal winning teams. But I think what we're seeing right now is women's sports coming into its own. And this summer, a lot of what I heard anecdotally and even saunar numbers is that kind of mass sports fans started watching women's soccer. It wasn't just our avid engaged fan base like Danielle.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and put our incredibly talented athletes front and center with women's sports and start to make a big dent in that coverage in the business of sports, then that's going to develop us into the kind of powerhouse sports league where compensation will grow and needs to grow. There's no question we want to see our women athletes. And, you know, that opens up big endorsement deals. It opens up all that we need in order to be sustaining. We're not at this moment in time. So I'm focused on that battle right now. Which is the battle to earn more of the attention of the media and the broad exposure.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't comment on the details of the particulars because I'm A, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't understand it. But what I will say is a big problem for us is the lack of media equality guy. Like if you think about it, only 4% of all media, this is not only broadcast, but press stories and social media, Peter is against women's sports. 4%. That's not even close to being equal. So for me, if we can continue to do the things that we did this summer.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me say if Rose or Kristen or Tobin are listening right now, you are absolutely welcome back anytime you want. The fact is that our sport operates within a global economy. We're not just like the National Football League or even the NBA where most of the players are playing in one country. Soccer is a global sport, unlike no other. Every year there is some back and forth. It's done via an organized process, frankly, of transfer fees, et cetera. This year, because of our abbreviated season, I know that several players did choose to go abroad and play abroad because they wanted more playing time. These are professional athletes, and this is their career. So Alex Morgan, for instance, went and played, I think, for Tottenham this summer or in the fall. We were only offering abbreviated system, but she came back and she'll be playing for the...”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a tough year because ticket revenue and that's a big part of any sports, but particularly ours resources. But what I think we did, and we proved it, is that the ratings we have are on the order of, you know, kind of not every”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a lot of sleepless nights over this because it was that combination of being incredibly conservative but also taking risks. So at this point in time we're now we've announced our second challenge cup. We're going into a year where the best women's soccer players both from the US National Women's Team and also other of the best players in the world, Marta Dabinia, Rachel Daly, people from all over the world will be altering between going back and forth between playing in our league and also playing in the Olympics in Tokyo this summer. And it's an opportunity for us to do something and put women's professional soccer on the same level playing field as other premier sports. I mean that's what I hope to accomplish.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. I'm saying this with confidence and everything, but when we were putting together our plan for the summer, there was part of you that said, look, I've got to be as safe and risk-free as I can. And then there was the other part of me that said, I've got to take risks because this is a summer and this is an opportunity to introduce our league, our sport, our players to a much broader audience. So it was that, and I have to tell you, there were a lot of sleepless nights. You know, I know the name of this series is Resilience.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it wasn't intentional, it was just the fact that we were maybe solving a smaller delegation, a smaller footprint, et cetera. But once we knew that we wanted to use that attention to really introduce America and the world to what I think of as the best women's professional soccer league with some of the best soccer that you could watch.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a tremendous amount of uptick in news, and we weren't expecting to see the amount of intention with sports. I mean, we were going in, going, this is what people are listening to. But when we got in there, and the fact is, by the time we had done all our protocols, all our planning, all our resources, we signed three national sponsors, when we were ready to announce, and I think it was like April 24th or April 25th, maybe 27th, we were ready to announce and we were announcing on with our broadcast partner to CBS. Literally dawned on me that we were going to be the first league back. Here was the little National Women's Soccer League, and we were leading all teams to return to competition.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had an incredible response. And I think part of it was when we designed the competition, we were fairly far along in our planning. And the Olympics had been cancelled. I sat down with our partners. We have CBS as a partner and we have Twitch as a partner. And Twitch had our international rights. So we sat down with them and we said, listen, I know from my Olympic experience how exciting this single elimination knockout round is to the public. It is exciting because there's something on the line every game. But it is intense competition for the athletes and the coaches. And we were going into this with much, much shortened abbreviated preseason training. But we all did it together. And the response from the fans was amazing on TV. You know, think about it. It was a year and a summer when we were all consumed with the political news and the social activism news. Everything was going on.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Free environment, it was the players and their discipline and their care for their own health. And one of the things I was really proud of is that early on as a women's sports league, I realized what it's like to spend a month away from your family. And several of our players are moms and have very young children. So we created a separate protocol just for the kids themselves. And those players were sequestered from their teams and their kids and their caregivers became part of the pod. So it was very challenging.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think two of the things I did was early on I put together a Zoom call with all my athletes. And so we did it twice. One was so that we could answer their questions about the medical protocols. And they had very detailed questions like, what about this? How do you know this is going to work? So I sat there with over 230 players on Zoom calls twice, the second time was as we were going into the tournament, I wanted them to hear from me that Orlando had withdrawn and why I wanted to reassure them that we could do it. But in actuality, we had a partnership upfront with our PA that said, listen, this is the conduct that we are expecting you to do. You must stay with your team. You can't mix with other teams. You can't go out. If you're going to have something delivered, it has to be according to this protocol of delivery, contactless, et cetera. It wasn't me that delivered the COVID.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a single one Yeah, we had rosters up to 28, but then you have all the staff, you have coaches, you have supporting, you have facilities. So there were probably over five hundred fifty people getting tested every two to three days, you know, when we had something that happened, we were obviously doing backup testing. And so it was, you know, finding a testing provider that could handle the volume in the turnaround time because the whole key with testing is you want it late enough where you're ensuring that you have the most recent results, but you need it early enough so that teams can make their roster decisions, they can be appropriately preparing. So even like a forty-day”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't know that so the whole industry was learning what was going on here. And out of an abundance of caution, we said, and they said, look, we're going to withdraw from the tournament. There were other leagues that didn't do that. We were so concerned about keeping the bubble pristine that they actually took the courageous action to withdraw themselves. So we went in with nine teams and we were there for a month. We staged a full-blown single, it was kind of single elimination, knockout round. The most intense competition you can do in soccer is what we did. And we emerged with zero COVID case.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one team early before we started our bubble, one team Orlando called me on Monday night and their doctors called and said Look we've had an incident of a positive test and remember this was like very early on so people were still understanding how to test people what the cadence was do you do one or two in a confirming test there were things that we didn't know at the time like what's a false positive”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People at Real Salt Lake that helped us put together facilities and we were actually able to put together a very contained plan. So we had all of the training pitches. We had two competition fields. Access to enough locker rooms because the important thing about a bubble is keeping the teams, they're called pods, keeping them separate. So we actually had to coordinate and develop the schedule so that one team was being fed in one hotel. They were able to go through the line from 615 to 658. And then we cleared, we sanitized, and then we brought the second team in. So it was all very coordinated and it sounds easy now when I'm talking about it. But at the time, none of this was tested.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you get your medical protocols and your doctors talking, you start to think about resources and what you can do. And we work on a fraction of the resources as other leagues. So we started to think about ways to stage competition. And frankly, Guy, we iterated through several rounds of could we continue to do kind of the home in a way format that people wanted to do. I think we all wanted to think that fans would come back. And there was this dawning realization that we weren't going to be able to keep our players safe unless we went to a bubble. So we started to look at that. That required us to identify a host city with the capabilities and the facilities that would enable us to do it. We looked in Utah at that point in time when we started to look at Utah, there were very little incidents out in the west of the United States. So there was low thresholds. I worked with the governor and the”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I literally was doing this because my director of finance had gone on maternity leave she and her wife were having twins. So she was gone and the app came up on Saturday morning and I spent Sunday morning. I spent six hours on Sunday morning. We loaded in a thousand pages of corroborating documents to say, here's how we're going to pay our players and here's all this stuff that we need. What I later learned is that some people just loaded in one Excel spreadsheet and got their loan, but I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to get this loan to pay the players. And seven days later, we got the resources that we needed to kind of buy us the time to continue to pay the players. It was a pretty helpful instrument. Thank you to the small business administration for doing that.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They didn't know anything about it, so I started to find out about it. I reached out, found the person at JP Morgan who could help me understand it. Literally I remember this on Monday, the small business administration, and Steve mentioned this Treasury Secretary, said, we're going to do this. By Thursday and Friday, there was an app that was completely untested in order to load your paperwork in to apply for this load. I was so nervous guy.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it was this is the point of clarity and principle for me as a new commissioner, but also with our owners and importantly with our owners, we knew that that was a critical component of whatever we were going to do is how we were going to safeguard our players, not only with the safety protocols, but also with the resources. And there wasn't ticket revenue. There wasn't the ordinary sources. So I started looking around again. No playbook. And we started to hear in late March about something that the federal government was going to do with the small business administration to offer a lifeline, which it was for us to small businesses who didn't have any resources coming in. And I started to research it. And literally, there was nothing out there about it on the internet. You were just kind of hearing things from different people. I called our partner JP Morgan. That's where we do our banking business.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What does that look like? And on and on, you know. So it was solving for everything. And I think what I did is I created all of these different groups that were working on it, but I was in on every group because we're such, we have, we had 17 people working at the league. And we had great staff at our teams and our owners, but we just started to solve the problems, knowing that work or decisions in one group would affect the other.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resources that we needed to continue to pay our players. Then there was, okay, once we can get people back to training safely, which took us weeks to develop the protocol and get that done, what kind of competition?”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's what you do. You start to take it apart and say, okay, what are all the problems that we need to start to solve? Well, the first one was, of course, we convened a medical task force of fifteen doctors. By the way, you know, these are all doctors that, you know, are not subject matter experts in infectious disease, although they, you know, have access to the resources. So we just got to work to really try and understand what we needed to do to develop what then became medical protocols that governed every aspect of what we were doing. So that was one work stream. The second workstream for us was, you know, even before we got to competition, one of my biggest concerns is we're a small league. We're very tiny. We're dependent on things like ticket revenue and sponsorship. And we needed to put together a short term and a long-term plan to have the”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was crystal clear, and I think it was because we realize, we understand, you know, you have live sports and even at women's soccer, we are team sport or a contact sport. Literally, we're putting our athletes at risk until we understood what this was and what it was. So that's the moment of clarity was that moment of safeguarding health and wellness. But I think what was absolutely sobering was the next few weeks out of it The dawning realization that there was no game plan to come back. Like whenever, you know, there has to be a game plan for this, right? I kept, I called everybody. You know, I'm a small league. We're very thinly resourced. So I'm calling the NBA. I'm calling people in the Olympics. I'm calling everybody I can figure out to say, okay, what's the playbook? And there was none.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I landed, my phone blew up, and it was because the NBA had suspended their operations. And what was amazing to me is the sports industry worldwide shut down in 24 hours, an entire industry just hit the pause button. And I was literally got up on Thursday, and two days into it I understood what the ramifications would be for our owners, for our players, for fans, for everybody who is in our smaller ecosystem. But there was no hesitancy. I just shut down. And it was then a matter of actually really pulling together what we were going to do next. That was the thing that I was looking at going, okay, I understand we have to suspend, but wait a minute. This is beginning to just the sobering reality of how critical it was going to be for the sports industry and just started to set in like literally Thursday night.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. And yet, you know, when sometimes you're confronted with a decision and you know exactly what to do, even though it's incredibly hard, that was the moment. I'd started my job and I went out to Chicago where our offices were and it was on Tuesday. And I remember I had come from public radio and journalism. And so we would following it as a story. And I'd gotten a text that day from a reporter at the New York Times that I knowed saying, hey, what are you going to do about COVID? And I was on my first day of work, I was determining things. I would literally flew back to New York the next day because I had to attend a meeting.”
2021-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT