By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
They’re the new sports team in Las Vegas that’s taking joy in the unconventional.
The Las Vegas Lights FC is the team with the coach that took a seat in the supporters section and smoked a cigarette after he was tossed out of a match. It’s the club that has two llamas on the field for player intros. And its goalie tackled an opponent around midfield during a game.
And now the first-year Division 2 soccer club in the United Soccer League can claim it’s the first professional sports team with a business sponsor that sells marijuana. In fact, LV Lights FC was so pleased with itself that it pinned the announcement tweet on its Twitter account.
The Lights have signed a business partnership with NuWu Cannabis Marketplace. At 16,000 square feet, it’s the world’s largest dispensary serving downtown Las Vegas and the Fremont Street entertainment area. It also has a 24-hour drive-thru. You can see the celebration over the deal in a video below.
The NuWu downtown location made it a good match for the Lights, a team that has embraced its downtown Cashman Field venue and has also aligned itself with another downtown anchor, internet retailer Zappos.
The Lights also would like to find a sports betting partner because the USL team wants to allow fans to place bets on the soccer game and other props. Owner Brett Lashbrook wants his team to be the first pro team in the U.S. to embrace gambling right in the stadium.
Curious about the response to the Lights lining up a dispensary as a sponsor? Well, Lashbrook enjoys the team getting media attention — so he must be have been happy about ESPN’s Darren Rovell reporting on it for ESPN’s website Friday. Then Sports Illustrated did a short web story, quoting parts of Rovell’s web story.
Here are some highlights from a LV Lights FC twitter account thread.
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After Cox Communications squashed the Lights’ attempt to televise Lights games on the city of Las Vegas’ TV station, the soccer team will broadcast its games in the local Las Vegas market on my on myLVTV.
myLVTV is available locally over the air (Channel 21), on COX (Channel 12, 1012 in HD), on Centurylink (Channel 21) and on DirecTV (Channel 21). Each televised match is accompanied by the Spanish-language radio broadcast of all home and away games on ESPN Deportes 1460AM.
Here’s the press release material on the TV arrangement.
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The Lights tied Sacramento, 1-1, tonight, with an announced attendance of 8,167.
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