seeking advice on best way to structure site

Hey there –

I’m about to start a collaborative project to build a site that will be a central repository for information about women’s tackle football, past and present. This site will eventually catalogue dozens to hundreds of teams and players, and I’m having a hard time deciding on the best way to set up the structure. Custom post types or Pods? I can see advantages and disadvantages to both. I haven’t used Pods before but some people swear by them.

Mostly I’d love to have something that was easy to cross-reference – e.g. whatever name was entered into the “team” field on a player page would automatically link to that team’s page. (If that sort of thing is a pipe dream, so be it.)

I am leaning towards using some custom taxonomies so I can make use of something like Query Multiple Taxonomies (e.g. let people search for all teams in X state that are currently active, etc.).

WP has come out with so much more advanced functionality recently and I really want to take advantage of that so I’m not spending a boatload of time doing things the stupid way. I’d love to hear any suggestions about what the smart way would be.

Many thanks…