#1 Chance Myers

 With the first overall pick in the draft our Wizards chose UCLA defender Chance Myers. Myers played just two years of college ball collecting a total of 4 goals and 4 assists playing in 42 games. You can probably guess by his hair that he is from Cali, specifically Thousand Oaks, CA. While he is an unexpected pick this high in the draft Myers has been in the eyes of U.S. National team for some time now having played for both the U-18 and U-20 teams. This January Chance was called into the U-23 teams camp. What I think surprises many people is that we essentially traded Nick Garcia a proven defender for Chance Myers a project player. Why? Simply put, money. Garcia counted for $125,000 against our 2.4 million cap while Chance will count as $0 due to his Generation Adidas status.

#11 Roger Espinoza

 With their second pick and eleventh overall in the draft the Wizards chose 5′ 10″ 160 pound midfielder Roger Espinoza out of Ohio State. Originally from Aurora, Colorado he played most of his college ball at Yavapai College (junior college). Playing in 2007 Rogers’s only year at Ohio State he scored three goals and assisted on 3 more playing in 26 games. Playing two years at Yavapai Junior College he scored a total of 7 goals with 6 assists in 50 games.

Updates as Picks are made.

#23 Yomby William

With the 23rd pick in the draft the Kansas City Wizards have picked defender Yomby William out of Old Dominion University. Originally  from Bafoussam, Cameroon he began his college ball at Oschang. At 26 years of age he is a bit old to just be starting at the professional level. What he has going for him is being huge. At 6′4″ 185 pounds he is one of the larger defenders in the league, assuming he has any speed he could turn out to be a decent option off the bench.

#25 Jon Leathers

 With the 25th pick the Wizards chose Defender Jon Leathers out of Furman University. He grew up in Athens, Georgia where he attended Prince Avenue Christian. He was awarded the Furman Male Athlete of the Year in 2006/2007. Jon was part one of the players called into the U.S. U-23 National team that Hohlbein and Harrington traveled with China with recently.

Matt Marquess

With the 39th pick in the draft the Wizards take Midfielder Matt Marquess. Matt is out of Santa Clara and scored 1 goal in his college career and had 4 assists. While listed as a midfielder he played two NCAA tournament games at defense. That along with his stats leads me to believe he must be a defensive mid. Hobbies are listed as Hockey and Golf, not sure how he’ll like Kansas City.

Rauwshan McKenzie

53rd and final Pick is Defender, Rauwshan McKenzie out of Michigan State. He has 2 goals and 3 assist over his entire college career.

Overall

We chose 4 defenders and 2 Midfielders which means we must have some plans at Forward coming in via transfers. Trujillo for sure, but there must be someone else that has yet to even show up in rumors. That or we are in for a long 2008 season.

Steven Goff of the Washington Post’s Inside Soccer spoke to the head of the new women’s professional soccer league, creatively called Women’s Professional Soccer. There are currently 7 teams that will begin play around April 4th 2009. One note of interest is that they are looking to add an 8th and maybe 9th club before the first game is played and Kansas City along with San Jose, Vancouver and Cary, NC were mentioned as possible destinations. If you’re reading this you are probably a big soccer fan and live in the Kansas City area, so would you attend Women’s Professional Soccer games?

I thought I’d take a moment and let you know the plans for this site in 2008. While news has been slow recently it should pick up soon with major transfers throughout January and league trades leading into the season. January 18th we’ll pick up a few players in the MLS Supedraft; images of both the Bannister stadium and new jersey should surface leading us up to the pre-season not long after that. Oz City is meant to be more than just a blog though. You might have noticed the static pages in the left column. Those are meant to be reference pages that are easily accessible all the time. Many of you know a great deal about the team, however as new fans are gained they will be looking for info about the team and those pages will be a big help. This will take some time to finish- if you are interested in helping with any of the pages let me know. Now let me tell you about some of the fun things planned for this year.

Practice Reports: I’m hoping to get out to a practice once a week to observe and get a feel for what is going on with the team. I will never reveal anything that will help our opponents, but do hope to gain permission from the Wizards to get Q&A time with players and coach Onalfo from time to time. These reports will be modeled after the ones done on 3rd Degree.net.

Where Are They Now: I’ve found some interesting information out about former Wizards, some big names you’ll remember and others who only played minor roles in the history of the team. Some are still in the world of soccer while others are doing very normal jobs now. I’ll catch you up with what they are up to and get interviews when I am able.

Rumors: We’ll keep up with all transfer rumors involving the Wizards.

New Merchandise: When ever new merchandise goes up for sale we’ll get you photos and info on it.

Links: We will always have links to Wizards news wherever it is found: on other blogs, newspapers, official releases, etc.

Game Reports: M of Down the By Line has said he will provide pre-game and post-game reports which he will be double posting on his blog, down the by line, as well.

Stats/Results: You’ll find a schedule updated at Oz City that tells you info such at TV channel, time, etc. for upcoming games. For past games you’ll find the score, list of who scored in the game and a Man of the Match award.

“Who is ______?”: As we acquire new players we’ll give you a run down on who they are, where they have played, their stats, etc. From time to time we’ll do the same thing with our existing players.

I hope you enjoy keeping up the Wizards through Oz City this year. We will continue covering all things Wizards from fan-made logos to breakdowns of how we finally scored on a corner trick this year.

I was making a logo for an indoor soccer team I play on just for fun and decided to adjust it to be a Wizards logo. You can see the result above and variations below/inside. The first uses only the two blues, yellow and blue which appear to be the 2008 color scheme and no black (This is assumed by looking at season ticket ads).

This has a moon, I have not been able to come up with many Wizard themes that are not a Wizard and I’ve not been able to make or find a wizard that is worthy of being on a logo. The more I’ve messed around with logos for the Wizards name the more I think they are going to re-brand the team all together.

If you want to take these and make variations which are better feel free to.

Also if you are interested in making your own to share with the world, but don’t own and can’t afford Photoshop there are two free programs that can do much of the same stuff. Each with link below.

GIMP – This is aparently the more powerful of the two, but a bit more difficult to figure out. Check out the Wikipedia page and the official page if you are interested.

Paint.net -This one feels a lot like Photoshop, I have not found a way to edit text after making it the first time though. Any way check out the wikipedia page or the official page if you are interested.

FC Dallas has on official fan club organization. You join it and get a T-shirt, big photo of team and favorite player, the best part however is the two free tickets to certain away games. I choose the Wizards/FCD game in may for my tickets. I took the weird looking guy on the left (whose name I wont’ mention) with me. He is a big Wizards fan, at the time I was not. I wore my FCD jersey and as we walked in the stadium the guy on the left kept telling me how I was going to be beat up wearing that thing into the game, all the while laughing and teasing.

As we walked I was teased by a few workers and individuals only further stirring up the weird guy on the left, but soon we hit an area with few people and yet we continued to walk to our section. Suddenly out of the section we are walking to comes the guy on the right. No idea who he is, but he is obvious nuts (we need a few like him, costume and all). It is at this moment that he (and I) realized we will be in the away fan section since our tickets came from FCD. Sure enough we walk down to our seats and it is in the middle of 30-40 FCD supporters with the one guy (left) who has been talking trash the whole way sitting awkwardly there in his blue Wizards jersey. Good times…

Now If I can just talk that dude into getting season tickets with me we won’t have to sit in the FCD section.

The following is either a homemade video or out takes for the old Wizards commercials. Not sure, but I’m posting it since it is the off season.

Video posted by bihuniak, if you read this bihuniak perhaps you can tell what this is all about.

I was at the Legends again today and made a special stop at Community America Park to check it out now that the lines had been drawn. The logo in the middle of the field looks great, I hope they keep for the season. It would be a great thing if other MLS teams placed their logo in the circle as well. Anyway check out the video inside, it includes a cheesy Oz City TV title.

You can see the different seating locations here, the location of the Cauldron is marked on the video, my understanding is that it is the grass triangle and it will be converted into bleachers. If I’m wrong someone correct that info in the comments. Anyway, full season tickets to that section are $299. Going back gave me a little perspective and I really think this will be a fun time in the teams history. The place should be easy to fill up giving it atmosphere and their isn’t a bad seat in the place.

As we reach one of the slowest sections of the off season I thought now would be a good time to consider the physical look of our team. While we don’t know exactly what the new Wizards Jersey will look like, we do know that it will include yellow in the design. Yellow is also included on the new Season ticket pamphlets. While this concerned me at first, I’ve now come to be really excited about yellow being in our jersey and even more excited that OnGoal may be moving to changing our colors from only the traditional blue, black and white to those three plus yellow. This added color goes well with blue and will give the team a wider range of product designs, identity and uniqueness.

More importantly though it will give the fans a greater ability to identify our team by colors alone. Right now We are blue, but blue alone doesn’t make anyone in KC think Wizards, It is kinda Royals, kinda KU, but few will think of the Wizards when they see blue paired with only white and black. Now imagine blue and yellow is our color.

Suddenly every time you see those colors together you will think of the Wizards whether the logo and/or name is on that object or not. At games the Crazies can help blanket the Cauldron area with blue and yellow like the Club America photo above. Yes it can be done with just one color, but one color alone never gives the same effect of really representing the team as two distinct colors together.

Let me be clear when I say I like the idea of our colors being blue and yellow I mean in same fashion of Club America (minus the red) not the navy and gold that are currently the Galaxy’s colors. Those are dull and boring, CA’s blue and yellow are bright and lively. Check out these jerseys. It would be wonderful to see our away jersey yellow instead of white or grey like most of the league.

Beyond Jerseys it would be fun to find a blue and yellow anything and have that sense of supporting your team by choosing the specific color combination regardless of whether the team makes the product or not.

I realize much of what I have said here would be true of any other color combination as well, but I thought we should look at blue and yellow because we know that our new jersey will feature those two colors. If we took the shades of blue and yellow shown in these pictures then we would really have something unique in the American sports landscape. It would also go well with the Wizards theme, how many times have you seen yellow stars with a wizard’s hat (If look below I know your answer is now is at least once)? I know many of you are set on us being blue and blue or blue and white, frankly that is boring. Chelsea is that, their fans look boring. Besides the Royals are already Blue, Black, White and the Wizards must distinguish themselves from the other professional teams in the metropolitan area.

Let me ask you this, assuming OnGoal is going to add a color to our blue to distinguish the Wizards from the Royals, what color would you prefer be added? Yellow? Green? Red? Pink? Orange? etc? I believe yellow is the only way to go.

Here is a great video that will leave you longing for the season to begin again. This is what the team should use to sell season tickets. This video or one like it playing in the background or being emailed to prospective buyers. Heck as cheap as DVDs are to make today they ought to hand these out like candy in the mall with the kiosk or at the legends while people are buying Christmas gifts for their children.

The video is by marsdangerous, Mars, if you want your real name here send it in. Nice work. szazzy made me aware of this video.

To finish the theme of logos I thought I’d post some of the better logos of other teams called the Wizards around the world.

This is a really cool logo and it is for a high school basketball team in Colorado, only as far as I can tell, they never used it, it was merely a mock up idea.

Click Read More to see the rest of the logos.

The NBA Team, Washington Wizards, I kinda like it, but not for a soccer team, clearly what the Wizard is doing would be a red card(it looks intentional).

Logo for Comic Store, sort of our 2008 colors

Boring, obviously a basketball team

Californian Brewing Company

Slot Machine

Soccer Team logo highlighting all the important parts of the team, the ball, team work, a star, the whistle and of course the eagle, hard to win without an eagle.

Baseball Team

Basketball Team, yes, adding stars to anything makes it Wizardy.

PortaPotty, our temp stadium may need to pick up a few of these.

Traveling Street Basketball

Basketball Again

I must say I genuinely like the first one, though I’d want it to be in a badge/crest somehow. The comic one isn’t too bad either.