Well, that didn’t take long.

The new ownership group of Jake Kerr and Jeff Mooney took barely a week to find their new President and Chief Operating Officer of the Vancouver Canadians, and the person they’ve selected has a very thick resume. Her name is Aileen McManamon (pictured left), and from what I can dig up, she’s one of those ultra-motivated, ultra-educated, "let’s break into groups"-type of folks that wake up at 5am every morning and get right into moving mountains, one ton at a time.

Assuming there aren’t two Aileen McManamon’s in Vancouver, she’s a US-born marketing and tech executive who has taught at UBC, has worked with the Tour De France and the 2006 Torino Olympics and Paralympics, is a prime mover behind (and Executive Director of) the Canadian Institute for Market Intelligence, and hasn’t always enjoyed the "laid back" attitude of the BC corporate world.

What does she know about baseball? Well, she’s apparently a lifelong fan, and coaches the West Van Indians Little League team, which is a decent start. Certainly if her career trail shows anything, it’s that when she takes an interest in something, she owns it within a year or two, so I’d expect her to kick The Nat into shape pretty darn quick and be a front runner for NWL Exec of the Year before long.

Or she’ll go insane trying to make the rusty old set-in-it’s-ways Nat work like a well-oiled machine, and she’ll be in a padded room by the end of the 2007 season, muttering "more mini-donuts!" over and over.

An interesting side-note from this announcement is that it didn’t come in the normal way - via a mass email from GM Delany Dunn, or a hurried note from a press box intern. Rather, this announcement came from a professional corporate PR firm called Reputations. And they don’t come cheap. The seachange has started folks.

The only question now is, will the Vancouver Canadians start booming with this much high-powered corporate juice behind them, or will the ‘old baseball’ world clash with the new thinking and leave blood spattered across Section 9? To say there are some nervous folks at The Nat right now is an understatement.

The best advice I can give them is fairly simple, and it’s advice I’ve personally learned several times in similar situations… "Keep up, or crack open the want ads."

If you want to see Ms McManamon in action during an event at Torino 2006, there’s some video of her at YouTube (they really do have everything!).