Third Time’s the Charm: Pro Football Returns to St. Louis

Mark Taylor
Director, Marketing and Community Engagement
XFL St. Louis BattleHawks

Third Time’s the Charm: Pro Football Returns to St. Louis

For former fans of the NFL’s Cardinals and Rams, the mere mention of the word “football” triggers an emotional love/hate response. After all, both franchises enjoyed success here before pulling up stakes and relocating to Arizona and Los Angeles, respectively. Ties to the community run deep. The Cardinals were founded as the Morgan Athletic Club in 1898 and remain the oldest continuously run professional football team in the United States, calling St. Louis home from 1960 until 1987. Meanwhile, the Rams won their only Super Bowl in four appearances in January 2000, a 23-16 victory over the Tennessee Titans, while in St. Louis. After a twenty-year run in the STL, The Rams returned to L.A. in 2016. That sound you hear now is the whistle signaling the launch of football’s newest league to rival the established NFL.

Headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, the XFL is a professional American football league owned by Vince McMahon‘s Alpha Entertainment. The league will follow a similar structure as the previous XFL, which was controlled by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) and NBC, and operated for a single season in 2001. Centrally owned and operated by the XFL (as opposed to the franchise model, with each team having different ownership groups), eight teams, led by the St. Louis BattleHawks and including the Dallas Renegades, Houston Roughnecks, Los Angeles Wildcats, New York Guardians, Seattle Dragons, Tampa Bay Vipers and (Washington) DC Defenders, will compete in a ten-game season and a two-week postseason during the winter and spring months, following Super Bowl LIV.

Mark Taylor Bio

With a deep background in fundraising, planned and major giving, event planning, corporate sales and development, public relations, communications, community relations and relationship building, Mark Taylor leads the effort to introduce this exciting new sports team to the St. Louis market. In his more than ten years with the St. Louis baseball Cardinals in community relations and communications roles, Mark was responsible for establishing and executing key community programs and initiatives, developing key corporate partnerships in cause-related community programs and for Cardinals Care, the team’s charitable foundation. He developed the Cardinals Kids Club and implemented the new Varsity Club during the 2013 season, while organizing player/coach/staff involvement in the community and overseeing complimentary ticket operations.

Prior to signing on with the BattleHawks, Mark also served as Senior Manager, Development and Communications for Operation Food Search, a local non-profit distributing more than 3 million dollars of food and household items to community partners that in turn feed over 200,000 people in need every month, one-third of which are children. Mark’s responsibilities included fundraising, special events, volunteerism, digital promotion, communications, social media and marketing, among many others, as well as working with senior OFS leadership to develop strategy and communication both internally (board and donors) and to the media and public.