A record crowd turned out for the season’s final home match. (Photo: Dan Barton)
“Of course we’ve got to be in shape, we’ve got to be fit, the team has to play well together so there’s good chemistry there. But what are the other things we can do? Do we change the composition of the team? Do we change the way we train? Do we change the way we think about scheduling games? Do we want to play our most difficult games early on? Do we want to sprinkle some of those games further out? It was really unfortunate that the toughest opponent that we would face all season, on the road, is the very last game after we have a match the day before. There’s really no mercy in the scheduling. It’s really tough to schedule this many games. We learned a lot this year that we’ll apply all throughout the offseason as we start to think about next year.”
The community core
Crowley said that the club hopes to return many of its players from its inaugural season, local athletes who not only showed great desire and skill on the field, but who also embraced the sense of community at the core of what Stockade is all about. But the success of the first season brought attention, and that attention is yielding even greater interest. Crowley said he’s receiving e-mails on an almost daily basis from players who want a shot with Stockade. How will the team’s administrators and coaches find the right roster for 2017? It’s likely to begin a lot earlier in the process than it did this year.
“One of the things we are thinking about is, it can’t be, ‘OK guys, last Sunday was it. We’ll see you nine months from now,’” Crowley said. “These guys have to be training and playing, and the team has to be together in the offseason. And we have to figure out how to do that. And figuring that out is nearly as complicated as figuring out the regular season. We were thinking, are there other leagues that we put them in in the offseason? How do we pay for that? Are we continuing to add players to this offseason team so we can continue to evolve and build what the best Stockade team is going to look like?”
But while short-term goals are at the fore, Crowley is also looking ahead. From the very beginning, he’s talked about the Stockade FC experiment as a long-term project.
“Admittedly, 10 years is a long time,” he said. “Let’s try and qualify for the [U.S.] Open Cup [a tournament founded a century ago which breaks down the barriers of American soccer, giving teams like Stockade FC, who play in the fourth tier of the vast soccer hierarchy, an admittedly obstacle-laden path to challenge teams in the MLS]. Let’s try to do it in five years. Now at the end of the season, I’m thinking, gosh, that’s ambitious. That’s more ambitious than I thought considering the level of competition in the league, but it’s still a good thing to shoot for.”
There is also the possibility that one day, as the club’s popularity continues to grow locally, that they’ll have to make greater investments in training and grounds.
“I went to the Cosmos facility [before the final game],” Crowley said. “We didn’t play at the main stadium, we played at their training facility. It’s a dedicated soccer field. You sit very, very close to the field and it feels great. And when I think of where are we, maybe not five years from now, but 10 years, have we earned the right to have our own place to play? At some point to we end up outgrowing Dietz? We didn’t even scratch the surface of getting people onto the other side of the field, but how many seasons does it take for us to fill that up? And then what’s our move after that?”
Long-term success may also be measured by the makeup of the roster in the years to come.
“We always wanted to inspire kids to play for Stockade FC,” Crowley said. “I didn’t even know what that meant, to be honest, but after the first couple of games where kids are down there getting their autographs signed, kids are begging to play in those halftime games, and you overhear people saying, ‘I’m going to play for Stockade one day.’ Well, that’s what that means, and on a scale of 1-to-10 we did an 11 at that this year. One of the things I like to think about now, and we were kind of getting giddy thinking about this the other day, is that five years from now, are some of the kids that are in the stands getting autographs, are they going to have gone through high school and playing for this club? That’s a real possibility.”
But maintaining that connection to the community will be a challenge for a team that’s played its entire season between May and mid-July. How do they stay in the hearts and minds of local soccer fans now that there aren’t any official games to play?
“The answer is not to go dark for nine months and reappear in the spring,” Crowley said. “The answer is, maybe do a meet-up every month, and we should do it in different towns. We should try and get people together to watch the EPL [English Premier League] games and have some Stockade branding there. We should do these friendlies. I’d love to be able to do some youth camps, but I think the summer is short and we’re running out of time. But anything we can do to get the players out of the community.”
