USL PRO Feature
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The ascent of Sacramento Republic FC, from the announcement of its entry into USL PRO on December 3, 2012 to its victory in the 2014 USL PRO Championship, has been a remarkable one. Leading the way has been the club’s President and Co-Founder, Warren Smith, who recently sat down for an extensive Q&A.
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Q: When you began this club back in 2012, did you ever imagine it would get this big, this quickly?
Warren Smith: I think in the back of our minds we knew it could be, and it could happen. When you looked at the data behind it and the fact that we have so many people that play this sport, more than 130,000 in our region, and they also had top-10 viewership in the last two World Cups, top-five in the last two USA-Mexico matches, top-seven this last World Cup, we planned, and we watched, and it just happened to be the two biggest indicators of whether people would buy a ticket. We knew we could be successful in selling tickets, but what we didn’t know, quite frankly, was just what a great group of guys we’d be able to put on the pitch and compete the way that we did. That did help accelerate the interest, and I think when we got halfway through the season and people knew they couldn’t get tickets and the team was playing well, it just became a life of its own, and something that we are exceptionally fortunate for, and appreciative for.
Q: What were your emotions after seeing Republic FC take victory in the championship game?
WS: It’s an interesting question. I tried to take all the emotional aspects relative to what’s happening in our city and what’s happening with this club that we kind of felt during the season. Really, I was just happy for the boys, they’ve had some really difficult road trips, they practice their butts off, and they do a lot in the community for us, so I have to say all of the emotions were really geared toward the team and just being happy for them and what they accomplished. It was tough to see such a good team in the City Islanders lose, I wish there could have been two winners, but they played a masterful game and we just happened to end up on top.
Q: The energy around the team, both in the players and the supporters, has been so positive throughout the year. What has that meant to you as you’ve seen this grow during the past 12 months.
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WS: As a steward of the organization, it just brought a lot of pride to the work that the people are doing, and the belief in the program. Much in the way Preki runs his team, it’s a group effort. If we’re not selling tickets or we’re not competing on the field, or we’re not operating the stadium in a positive way, or we’re not paying our bills, everyone just performed on their end of the business, and I think there’s some room for growth, but the main feeling was a lot of pride for the group because it really is a group effort. There’s no one person in this organization that’s more important than the other, and it was really nice to see them be rewarded for the work the entire organization did.
Q: Speaking of Preki, was it a difficult sell to get him to sign on to be the head coach of Republic FC?
WS: It didn’t seem like it was. One of the things that was very important to Preki was having control, and an ownership that really isn’t meddling in the operations, and since I don’t know soccer that made it easy for him, and I think that was appealing to him. I think he also likes the market and he really should be an MLS coach, and for us, we’re very fortunate to have been able to attract him. I have to say I really think he’s fallen in love with Sacramento. That’s the thing about this community, people just fall in love with it when they spend some time here, so I think he wanted to prove to people that he could compete at a high level. He’s obviously had some success, although his last endeavor at Toronto wasn’t as rewarding on both sides as they would have liked, and I think he was just looking for a chance to get back in after spending time at home with his kids and watching them play through college. It was just good timing for us, and frankly the relationship is wonderful, and hopefully we can retain him and keep him here long-term.
Q: You mentioned you didn’t know much about soccer getting into this venture, but you did have previous experience as an executive. How valuable was that as you began the process of building Republic FC from the ground up, both on and off the field?
WS: I think it was essential to our success, and not just me, but in Joe [Wagoner] and Erika [Bjork] and Matt Re, we’ve got 165 years of professional sports experience in just our management team. I know I’m not the brightest bulb in the world, but one of the things I do know is you’ve got to surround yourself with great people, and give them the tools and the assets they need to succeed, and check in with them on their plans and help them adjust, help them make some decisions that they’re challenged with, but really set the tenor of the organization.
What we’re all about here is we’re trying to be true to the game, and as you know the sport really grew up as a community sport. The teams were often owned by the local pubs, and the owner of the pub needed to listen to his fans or else they’d stop coming in and drinking beer, right? Over time, that became the natural way, and I think in our country professional sports would be a lot more successful if they ran their franchises a lot more like that. There’s such big money in the other sports that I think they just kind of say, ‘here’s our product, take it or leave it’, versus really listening to the customer, so we’ve tried to really be mindful of that. Our name was developed by our fans - we had more than 6,000 participate and help us understand what was important in Sacramento - where we learned that it was really the capital and something we needed to celebrate, hence the star and the crest. Then all the colors and the other references came directly out of the California state flag because there’s a lot of pride in the fact that California was formed out here in Sacramento, and we’re the capital of the eighth-largest economy in the world, so it’s an example of how we try to listen to our fans and ultimately operate a business that works.
Q: The club has been so strongly embraced by the community, and it definitely feels as though you, as a club, take pride in that. Is there a sense of pride that you are carrying Sacramento’s flag not just in California, but giving the city national attention with the championship and the push to join Major League Soccer that's now underway?
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WS: All of us here love the community. I’ve lived here since 1988 and have fallen in love with it, and we feel it’s our responsibility - and that’s one of the nice things in sports - it’s that you play teams from other cities, you have the opportunity to represent your community, and that’s very important to us. It’s very important that we; No. 1 are professional and; No. 2 are looked at kindly; and No. 3, that when people talk about Sacramento, that they talk about Sacramento in a favorable light. We are a chance for the city to market itself. We take that role and responsibility very seriously, and frankly enjoy that role as well.
The other thing it allows us to do, though, is it allows you to locally allow people to participate in the same. All of our fans, and all of our season-ticket holders, know that there is a shining of the light on Sacramento, and we think about everything, from when the visiting team comes to the bar or restaurant afterwards for their team meal, to how they’re received at the airport, to how they’re received at the hotel. We make sure that’s looked at, and we heard a lot of great things from those who came to visit. It’s something that’s very important for us. This is really more about Sacramento, for me, and this is a chance for us to actually use the beautiful game to grow our community, to bring us together. What other place do you actually bring your community together? If you actually think about it, it’s one of two places. It’s the malls when you’re shopping, or sporting venues, and not only in sports are you rallying around that team that you have a common interest in, but you’re also coming from different socio-economic classes, different ethnicities, different parts of the community. There’s just a chance for us to really be that gathering place for people to celebrate who they are and what they are as a community.
Q: One of the things we saw in Jonah Freedman’s piece for MLSSoccer last week was that you held a stake in the Portland Timbers previously before selling to the current ownership group and Merritt Paulson. Did you have regular conversations with Merritt as you were preparing to launch Republic FC?
WS: To be clear, in 2004 I was with the Sacramento Rivercats, Art Savage and I were the founders and we were asked by the league to take over a Triple-A baseball team in Portland that was in bankruptcy. The ownership also had a USL PRO team under its ownership which was also a challenge, so we got up there and we didn’t know anything about soccer, but what we did know was how to sell tickets, how to control costs. So ultimately we ran a good sales and marketing campaign, we did so for both, and we actually learned through that process that it’s actually easier selling tickets for soccer games than it was for baseball.
If you think about the schedule, that’s really the only reason why. In baseball, you’re selling home stands of eight games, and you’re trying to create eight different events during a little over a week’s time, whereas in soccer you’re selling that one game every other week. In controlling the costs we were able to turn it around, and then because we were just the stewards the league sold it to Merritt Paulson in 2007. There were a lot of conversations in the beginning, and to be honest we thought he was crazy when he said he wanted to get to Major League Soccer, but he showed us how much we didn’t know. Obviously he had strong relationships within the sport, coming from New York, and really understood where it was going, and we didn’t it. He announced he wanted to buy into the league, and two years later did so, and has one of the most successful franchises, has been sold out every event.
What we did learn, though, is we laid the foundation for that success for him. We took an average attendance in USL PRO of just under 2,000 to just about 7,000 per match, and that was pretty good. That’s a nice strong foundation that we think at least helped him to accomplish that, but Merritt has been just a wonderful, wonderful human being, and mentor, to this process. He’s been there to answer any questions that I had - obviously we had an affiliation with them this year that was very successful. Jake Gleeson and Steven Evans, who were with us for most of this season, a couple of other players that have come through, we developed a good partnership with them.
Q: What’s the best piece of advice Merritt gave you?
WS: He told me to be yourself, and be honest, and be true to your fans, and I think he’s probably the best at that. When he’s mad, you know he’s mad. When the team loses he’s upset, but he’s engaged, he goes into the stadium, talks to fans in person. Also, surround yourself with good people, and make sure that you’re representing your city well. He’s done just a fantastic job with his franchise, and frankly he has represented the city of Portland in a masterful way, so those would be the highlights. There were a lot more detail, in-the-weeds-type stuff that he was helpful with. The interesting thing about Sacramento is it’s very similar to Portland and very similar to Orlando from a demographic standpoint. One major-league sports team at the time, both in the NBA, about the same size, about the same level of income demographically and financially, so the best way for us to have learned from Portland is to emulate and run the franchise in a similar way to the way he has, and frankly to what [Orlando City’s] Phil Rawlins has done and how he’s operated his franchise. He’s also been very, very helpful, he and his staff have been exceptionally kind with their time and their energy in helping us navigate not just the rollout of a brand and of a team, at the USL level, but also in the MLS dialogues as well.
I’ve got to tell you, this is one of the things I love about this sport. Coming from baseball, everyone kind of holds their cards close to their vest. There are some general ‘best practices’ learning that happens, but it’s rare that you have an owner call another, or an executive call another and say, ‘hey, how are you doing this?’ or ‘why are you doing that?’, where they actually share. This sport has been so open, and there hasn’t been a person that I have talked to that doesn’t have the common interest, and that is to grow the sport and to make sure that we’re doing so in a meaningful way.
Q: How do you build on the success of year one for Republic FC? Is there anything that you can let us know is in the pipeline for 2015?
WS: First, we are undersized on the facility standpoint, so we’re going to scale the facility up. We’ve already sold an additional 1,100, almost 1,200 new season tickets for next year, and at this pace it looks like we might be able to sell on the total of 2,500 by the time next year arrives, and if that’s the case we’ll expand by 3,000 additional seats. We’ve already got the design and I’m meeting with Cal Expo next week to go through the environmental process, so no matter what we’re going to have our product available to more people next year. The plan actually allows us to scale up to 16,000 in total, and we will likely do that over the course of a couple of years.
Then, obviously, we’re trying to keep the team intact as much as we can, so we have players who are staying in town. The core group that we’re retaining have stayed, and they’re active in the business, they’re usually out every day doing community events, so it was important to keep that core group intact so that we would know we could continue to compete, and I think we’ll continue to listen to our customers.
One of the things we are going to do is, we take seriously the role and responsibility of MLS and USL PRO to actually grow the talent pool, so we’re going to roll out an Academy next year. It will be a Republic Academy, and the goal is to start with U18 and U16 teams, and then work with the different leagues to form U14 teams within their league and allow us to help them on the coaching, so we can train them to our style, and to Preki’s desires at an early age. With 130,000 people that actually play the sport, we have over 100 kids from Sacramento, from this region, that are playing D-I college right now, so it shows you we have a very high talent pool, it’s just a matter of can we grow them at an earlier age and maybe help them help our country win the World Cup. That’s going to be a big effort for us. As you know that’s not an inexpensive exercise, so we’re very excited about that.
We’re also starting to look at our plan for a PDL franchise, and we think that’s probably a 2016 plan, but from a soccer perspective, we’re already holding tryouts, we want to see if we can attract some more young talent. We had Max Alvarez and [Emrah] Klimenta come to us from those tryouts, and we think there might be another couple of kids that we might be able to find. We’ll also start in January, we’ll have at least two MLS friendlies in February if everything goes well, but really we’re just trying to open up the sport to more and more people and keep doing what we’re doing, expanding the brand, keeping excited, keeping other people excited, and just having fun.
Q: What’s the most satisfying part of being part of Republic FC?
WS: I think it goes back to our role in helping our community grow. Sacramento is not necessarily looked at in a favorable light. When Sacramento is referred to on the news here it’s usually because our legislature has done something silly again, so this has really helped us bring our community together. We’ve helped rebrand the community. To give you an example in our crest, through our research, you see the saying ‘Urbs Indomita’. Come to find out, this was brought to us by one of the people that was participating in our branding effort, and what it means is the Indomitable City. It used to be on the city crest until 1952, and it was put on the crest in 1851, and the reason it was put on was because Sacramento went through three successive floods, two fires that wiped out the city, and a plague, so there was this feeling of, ‘hey, nobody can stop us.’ We’re going to fight, we’re going to win, and at the end of the day, we’re going to grow this community. They literally moved rivers to make this town.
That, for us, to play that little celebration of the history has been very rewarding. In fact, the city of Sacramento has started an effort to put ‘Urbs Indomita’ back on the city seal, and that shows you the impact a sports organization can make. You probably have read that the Sacramento Kings almost moved out of Sacramento, and before Mayor [Kevin] Johnson was able to solve that, there was this feeling that we just couldn’t get things done. I think the Mayor’s effort to solve the arena issue, our effort to roll out this very strong Sacramento brand, to bring in a high-caliber league like USL PRO and then to compete in the first year, has really helped to grow the community’s belief that we can, so a lot of what we’re saying now is, ‘yes, we can, we can do this together,’ and it’s working. That, for me, has been the most rewarding piece, because we want to see our community continue to grow.
You only needed to see Sacramento Republic FC goalkeeper Jake Gleeson following Saturday’s USL PRO Championship Game victory to know.
After a scoreless first half, N.C. State took the lead in the 52nd minute as Conor Donovan’s long ball upfield was misjudged by the Louisville goalkeeper, and Wannamuehler stole in for his third goal of the season. Louisville had the chance to level 10 minutes later from the penalty spot, only for Alex McCauley to make a big save, and Norton then added a second with 14 minutes to go as he headed home Wannamuehler’s cross.
Shelton’s opening goal came in part thanks to freshman Timmy Mueller, who also had a hat trick and assist in the match. Mueller’s through-ball released Shelton in behind the Bears’ defense, and he finished well into the left corner of the net.
Seven former PDL and Super Y League alumni were named in the squad, led by Guzan, who featured for the Chicago Fire U-23 as they posted an undefeated regular season in the PDL 10 years ago. The current Aston Villa standout recorded eight shutouts in 13 appearances for the Fire U-23, and posted a 0.388 goals-against average as his side went 17-0-1 to take the regular season championship.
Kim, 18, scored one goal and one assist in 14 appearances in his first professional season with Orange County in 2014. His high-energy midfield play was an asset to the squad all season long, and he earned an Honorable Mention on the USL PRO Team of the Week during the week of July 21st-28th.
“Austin’s a great city that people want to live in, so even for the invitational combine I think we had 435 applicants, and we only invited, I think, 26 outfield players,” Aztex head coach Paul Dalglish said recently. “The demand for people wanting to come and play in Austin and USL PRO has been huge, and it’s up to myself and the rest of the coaching staff just to make the right decisions and get a good team on the field year one.”
“When I went to the All-Star Game in Portland, and soaked in all the information, that absolutely inspired me,” Pettis said recently. “It was one of those ‘build it and they will come’ moments, and it was an affirmation that we have some great things that we can accomplish here, and that is extremely motivational to me, and inspiring to me.”
Other players on loan shone too, with Union Homegrown Player Jimmy McLaughlin putting in another strong summer in Harrisburg, and Pedro Ribeiro finding the net multiple times before finding his way into the Union’s starting lineup of late. Arguably the player to benefit most, however, was defender Richie Marquez. A draft pick from Division III Redlands College, Marquez stepped into the City Islanders lineup to gain valuable playing time, and starred throughout the season.
DePuy scored the game-winner for the Gauchos as they took a 2-1 victory against Cal State Northridge, and then had the only goal in a 1-0 win against the Anteaters on Saturday night as he also took Big West Offensive Player of the Week honors. DePuy now has three goals in the past four games, and his finish against UC Irvine was also 
In his new role, Jacobs will serve as part of the senior management team for USL PRO and provide strategic management and direction for the under-23 PDL, the U-20s and USL’s youth leagues, while ensuring their integration into the professional league structure. He will also have an active role in the growth process for each of the leagues.
Q: When you began this club back in 2012, did you ever imagine it would get this big, this quickly?
WS: As a steward of the organization, it just brought a lot of pride to the work that the people are doing, and the belief in the program. Much in the way Preki runs his team, it’s a group effort. If we’re not selling tickets or we’re not competing on the field, or we’re not operating the stadium in a positive way, or we’re not paying our bills, everyone just performed on their end of the business, and I think there’s some room for growth, but the main feeling was a lot of pride for the group because it really is a group effort. There’s no one person in this organization that’s more important than the other, and it was really nice to see them be rewarded for the work the entire organization did.
WS: All of us here love the community. I’ve lived here since 1988 and have fallen in love with it, and we feel it’s our responsibility - and that’s one of the nice things in sports - it’s that you play teams from other cities, you have the opportunity to represent your community, and that’s very important to us. It’s very important that we; No. 1 are professional and; No. 2 are looked at kindly; and No. 3, that when people talk about Sacramento, that they talk about Sacramento in a favorable light. We are a chance for the city to market itself. We take that role and responsibility very seriously, and frankly enjoy that role as well.
No. 23 Oregon State vs. No. 1 Washington, Sunday, 6 p.m. ET, Pac-12 Network
This week saw a significant one for Saint Louis FC, which held its first invitational tryout at the St. Louis Soccer Park. As the club moves toward its inaugural season, the event was an exciting one for General Manager Jeremy Alumbaugh as a hand-picked group of players got put through their paces by Head Coach Dale Schilly and his staff.
