Jeff DiVeronica

@RocDevo

Treading water.

Over the summer, that's how someone who works for the Rhinos described the operation going on at the team's offices and stadium at 460 Oak St., where local Assemblyman David Gantt demanded our soccer stadium be built or he wasn't going to support Rochester getting a $15 million state grant for it. And now we finally get the distress signal, an SOS. Pardon the comparison to the Fast Ferry, another failed Rochester project, but let's face it: It's spot on.

Like the ferry, the soccer stadium is sinking. It has been for years, and either Rochester finds an owner to come in and do it the right way or we unscrew all the bolts, unhinge the seats and tear down the facility. The City of Rochester can recoup some of its money by selling it off for parts.

How sad, right?

That was some of the sentiment I heard Tuesday night on social media after news broke that the Rhinos, fresh off a USL Championship in October, are looking for a new owner. The City of Rochester terminated owner Rob Clark's operating lease Dec. 31 because it wants someone else to run the $32 million, 10-year-old facility. When faced with just paying rent as a tenant, Clark and his family said, thanks but we'll gladly get out of the soccer business.

Clark out as Rhinos owner; USL takes control of team

Here's the thing, though: This might not be a sad thing. It could be a great thing. Our soccer team and stadium needs more from an owner, from an operator, from its fan base. Remember back in the late 1990s when the Rhinos drew sold-out crowds to Frontier Field? Everyone around town wanted to be a part of it and worked together to try to make the Rhinos great. Over the last several years, it's embarrassing how often soccer people in this town work AGAINST the local professional team and do things to hurt the Rhinos. They know who they are.

The Rhinos have brought plenty of this on themselves and I'm not talking just about ownership. You need to do a lot of the little things a lot better than the Rhinos have, things that don't cost much. Let's start with finding a spot to display all five championship banners, boldly and proudly. But you also need money to do a lot of the big things and the Clarks weren't providing enough for that.

Were they going to up the ante in 2016 coming off a championship season? We'll never know, but if they weren't paying what they signed on to pay the city for rent and part of the utilities and other costs of sharing the duty to run the stadium, shame on them. The Clark family has enough money, trust me. They just chose not to. Had the Rhinos' original owners had anywhere near the financial resources the Clarks have, they'd have made it into Major League Soccer and maybe it'd all be different for Rochester.

But they didn't and they didn't want to take on a fourth investor, so they lost the team under a mountain of debt.

Give the Clark family credit. It saved pro soccer in Rocheser in 2008. After that season, Clark said the team lost $2 million. In the past few years, cost-cutting moves such as chopping the player payroll (which makes it even more amazing the type of squads coach Bob Lilley has built) helped trim that to a couple thousand dollars a year in losses, I've been told. In minor-league sports, breaking even isn't all that bad and the Rhinos, even on a shoe-string budget of late, were close.

From 2008 to 2011, Rob Clark lived in Rochester and was going to build a life here and tried to make it work. But he was more worried about players and coaching strategy when he should have been focusing on the business of running a pro team.

Live and learn. He knows that. Clark didn't want it to end like this. I could hear it in his voice on Tuesday. But when he became an absentee owner circa the end of 2011, the Rhinos became more about cost containment than building a better organization. Clark was an absentee owner and that's a difficult way to run any business, let alone a minor-league team. Smart people I know say minor-league sports must be run like a small business with a lot of attention to detail.

When Clark moved, that's when the treading water really started.

Now this team, stadium and city needs a deep-pocketed owner with vision and commitment to make the Rhinos great again. It's going to take money and time. There is no magic spray unless Mr. Beckham wants to come out of retirement, suit up and fill the seats. But this time it has to be done right and if that can't happen, we go dark.

Yup — adios, Rhinos, just like the Fast Ferry. My father taught me this: If you do something, do it right, not halfway. A new Rhinos owner has to live by that, too.

The good news? The USL believes in Rochester. You want to talk about stepping to the plate, start with the USL. The league in which the Rhinos have played for 20 years easily could have walked away, said thanks for 20 years Rochester, but we'll just move on without you. The USL said: Nope, we think this market can still flourish again. Tom Veit, the Chief Marketing Officer the USL brought in to run things until a new owner is found, was here for the Oct. 17 USL title game. He saw how a few thousand hearty fans sat through cold, wet weather to watch the Rhinos rally to beat the L.A. Galaxy II in overtime, 2-1. He was impressed by that. He also was a founding partner for PPL Park and the Philadelphia Union, which launched in MLS in 2008. Veit knows how much more history there is in Rochester — good and bad, I told him pretty much everything I've seen over the past 20 years — than Philly and he thinks the Rhinos can be great off the field again. They are one of the most tradition-rich soccer franchises in North America. Soccer can thrive here, he said, the Rhinos proved that in the late 1990s.

Of course, a lot has changed. Most critically, I think, the venue in which they play. That's why the city and a new owner have to do this thing right now and invest in the stadium and neighborhood. Is pro soccer a community asset anymore, or a detriment? We're going to find out.

If soccer fans in Rochester don't know that the USL is on the upswing in a big way, I'll accept some of the blame. The league has grown from 14 teams just two years ago to 30 in 2016. It's now a bonafide feeder to MLS with 11 teams owned by Major League Soccer. Its teams are valued in the millions, not thousands, and this rapid expansion isn't some money grab the way it once was in the USL. It's smart growth into markets where there is solid ownership. Veit says the league has turned down some prospective owners because in the USL's view they didn't have what it takes.

Good for them. I hope they keep the bar that high for whoever is up next for the Rhinos, and it doesn’t appear the USL is going to abandon the Rhinos if a new owner can’t be found quickly. The league doesn’t want to lose one of its flagship franchises.

But it's time to stop putting Band-Aids on pro soccer in Rochester.