CVB approaches soccer group about dropping City of Roses moniker

Cape Girardeau's annual 80-team spring soccer tournament will still be called the City of Roses Soccer Tournament when it begins in late April. Whether that name will stick in future years is yet to be determined.

Tournament organizers, like the organizers of the annual City of Roses Music Festival, are considering a name change. The reason -- the City of Roses is no longer the City of Roses. It's slogan, developed in 2003 by a Nashville, Tenn., consultant, is now "Where the river turns a thousand tales."

Cape Girardeau continues to try to brand itself as a river town, not the City of Roses. The city government, Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau all dropped the City of Roses slogan a few years ago.

Last month organizers of the music festival began to consider a name change after learning the official slogan used to market the city has changed.

Shortly afterward the Southeast Missouri Soccer Club, which organizes the annual City of Roses Soccer Tournament, was approached by the Convention and Visitors Bureau with the same idea.

CVB executive director Chuck Martin suggested the tournament change its name and said the CVB might help pay for promotional materials to get the new name out.

The idea was only a suggestion, said Martin, who's not pressuring any organizations to change the names of their events. Tournament organizers can keep the old name without losing any support or being ostracized.

However, when marketing the city's river-based image the more consistency the better, said Martin. Especially in a town where roses are no longer a dominant feature.

"The first tenet in marketing you have to subscribe to is you don't promise what you don't deliver, and by no measure today are we the City of Roses," said Martin. "People coming in will have that logical question, 'Where are the roses?'"

Martin said his comments aren't meant to pay any disrespect to the city's history as a City of Roses, just to point out that times have changed.

The name City of Roses commonly is attributed to the 10-mile garden of 25,000 roses that once bloomed along Highway 61 between Cape Girardeau and Jackson. When improvements were made to the road in the 1970s, the roses disappeared.

Since then the name has fallen in and out of favor, as have efforts to restore the roses to different areas of the city. One place the roses have stuck is Capaha Park's rose garden, which was established in 1953 by a council composed of eight local garden clubs. But other prominent rose displays are hard to find.

When he moved to Cape Girardeau in 2000, Dr. Don Jung wondered where the roses were. "That means no disrespect to the people who were here when it meant something and had some truth to it, but when you're marketing a city with that as the official label, how are you going to promote that?" asked Jung. He is a communications professor at Southeast Missouri State University.

Even though the roses aren't prominent anymore, the traditional name has stuck on events like the soccer tournament and music festival.

Tim Pliemann, president of the soccer club, said the huge numbers of people who come for the tournament look for the City of Roses name. But if the club chooses to change the name, that can be overcome, Pliemann said. Not only do they look for the City of Roses name, they look for Cape Girardeau, he said.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182