BY SCOTT FRENCH, Soccer America Senior Editor Just minutes before the WUSA’s Aug. 25 championship game at Foxboro Stadium kicked off, league founder John Hendricks was discussing areas in which the WUSA needed to improve in Year 2. “I think we can do a better job through our investment groups, especially our corporate investors,” said Hendricks, one of two individual investors in the league. “What resources do they have, corporately, that can support the league? “Our task, in a softening marketplace, is making sure this is a 100-year-and-beyond league. These first three or four years, it’s important to do it smartly, to take advantage of all the resources of the investors. Not just the cash, but other resources, as well.” And so the announcement five days later, that the WUSA was moving its headquarters to Cox Enterprises’ offices in Atlanta and that Cox Sports chief Lynn Morgan has been appointed league president, should not have been such a stunner. Cox Enterprises, which owns 25 percent of the WUSA — it operates the Atlanta Beat and San Diego Spirit (which happen to be the nastiest rivals in the WUSA, but that’s another story) — was more than willing to provide resources to the fledgling league. Cox, in essence, is now in charge. “What happened? I think the investor group became more engaged than ever with the product,” says Tony DiCicco, who has shed his clunky chief-operations-officer title to become commissioner, essentially the job he’s been doing all along. “They probably never really looked at the product as being able to attract more than 8,000 fans on a normal basis.” The WUSA, which has been working out of Hendricks-led Discovery Communications’ Manhattan offices, should benefit greatly from Cox’s infrastructure. “We’ll be able to use their human resources, public relations, legal and financial departments to facilitate the league,” DiCicco said. “It’s not tremendously different than what the WNBA does with the NBA … accessing resources you’d otherwise have to pay for.” The WUSA will pay a “management fee” to Cox, but DiCicco says “to duplicate [Cox’s] resources would cost an incredible amount of money.” Morgan’s promotion would seem wise, too. She was thought the league’s most effective general manager — she served as Atlanta’s GM and started operations for the San Diego Spirit — and her position in the Cox hierarchy provides, as DiCicco noted, “a direct line into 25 percent of our investor core,” Cox’s Jim Robinson and Jim Kennedy. “Many of us have a relationship with, and can speak directly to, the investors,” DiCicco said. “Lynn has a 12-year-plus relationship with those gentlemen. … She’s an outstanding choice, with great qualities from a leadership standpoint as well as with marketing in the business world.” The end of Barbara Allen’s tenure as CEO, understandable given the maneuvers, astonished many. DiCicco admitted it was “a surprise to me,” and Allen in the days before her ouster spoke of work she hoped to accomplish in the WUSA’s second season. Asked how long she’d like to stay on as CEO, she said she’d never thought about it but had no plans to make a move any time soon. The WUSA is hoping in the next few days to establish a timetable for the move to Atlanta, which needs to be completed in the next month or so. DiCicco said some employees would be asked to head south, that some wouldn’t, and that he planned to work out of the Discovery offices and his office in Connecticut for at least another year. “I’m not sure it’s possible [to remain in the Northeast permanently],” said DiCicco, who has two children in high school and doesn’t want to leave until they’ve graduated. “I know Lynn’s vision would have everyone down in Atlanta. Certainly, right now I don’t think I can move. That could change in a year or two.” DiCicco said his duties, now that he’s the commissioner, aren’t going to change much. “I think it’ll be pretty much the same thing,” he said, “maybe a little bit more of an ambassador role for the sport, but I was doing that anyway.”