USL Feature
Friday, August 12, 2011
By NICHOLAS MURRAY
Since the club’s inaugural season in 1996, the Michigan Bucks have been one of the preeminent clubs in the PDL.
The first side from the league to defeat a Major League Soccer side in the U.S. Open Cup when they beat the New England Revolution 1-0 in 2000, Chad Schomaker’s goal in stoppage time earning a 1-0 victory, the Bucks have only missed the playoffs twice in their 15-year history, winning the PDL Championship in 2006.
The Bucks have become the league’s most successful team in the process. Earlier this season, the Bucks became the first PDL club to win 200 games with their 4-3 victory against the Akron Summit Assault and they can also claim the leading goal-scorer in league history after Kenny Uzoigwe, who finished this season with another seven goals to give him 83 for his career.
Michigan has also been a hotbed for player development, with more than 30 former Bucks currently playing professionally, including 2011 MLS SuperDraft selections Zarek Valentin (Chivas USA), Kofi Sarkodie (Houston Dynamo), with 2011 PDL award winner Mitch Hildebrandt (Goalkeeper of the Year) considered the second-best goalkeeper available for next year’s draft by TopDrawerSoccer.com.
USLSoccer.com sat down recently with Bucks Chairman and CEO Dan Duggan to talk about the club’s success and what the future might hold.
Q: What was your original motivation to form the Bucks?
DAN DUGGAN: My brother [Jim] and I started the team in 1996, on the heels of the World Cup. Jim had hosted the World Cup committee in Pontiac, so we were very involved in the area and we brought all of the local soccer people together and thought if there was ever a time to get into the pro soccer business again, that would be the time to do it. We had started the Detroit Rockers in indoor in Detroit in ’89-’90 and that was OK, but it was indoor, it wasn’t the outdoor game, so that was the motivation and the timing of it.
Jim got to know [USL Founder] Francisco [Marcos] very well through the World Cup and all of that and soccer over the years and indoor and so on, and so Francisco had been talking to us for years about needing a franchise in Detroit. At the time we got around to doing it in ’96 there was a franchise in Detroit, so we moved up the road 60 miles to Saginaw, Mich. and put our franchise there. … When the Detroit Dynamite folded in about 2000, we played up there for four or five years, and then in 2003 we came down to Detroit, moved the team when we hosted the [New York/NewJersey] MetroStars in the Open Cup, and that’s kind of when we brought the Bucks to Detroit in ’03 and then started playing there full-time in ’04.
Q: Since the Bucks were formed you’ve only missed the playoffs twice. What has been the biggest key to the club’s success?
DD: It comes down to the coaching staff, really myself and the coaches run this year-round and everyone knows what my objectives are, No.1 each year is that making the playoffs is mandatory and the other goal is qualifying for the U.S. Open Cup, and we know to do both of those things, we know we need to be recruiting year-round to get the top players away from the other top clubs including the clubs that are very close to us here with MLS ties. The guys right now have already started recruiting for next year, we’ve got our hit-list of 75 players that we went out and found the year before, and we’ll spend from August to May 1, literally, getting them committed, signed and selling them on the positives we have to offer them for the summer, not only a positive playing environment but a professional environment that will get them ready for the college season and help drive the kid to get to the next level whether it be USL PRO, MLS or moving them on to Europe depending on how good they are.
Q: As the club’s reputation has grown has it become easier to recruit players to become part of the Bucks?
DD: Absolutely it’s easier, but the problem is everybody in our division has gotten so much better. It used to be years ago it was two or three of the nine teams that were the places to go and now you can go top to bottom and everyone of the nine clubs including the three clubs that are in Canada that are in our division, they’re just as high caliber as we are. In some cases they put more money into it than we do, so it’s harder from the standpoint that there are a lot of good players, but it’s not just you go to the Bucks or you go to Chicago if you’re in the Midwest, you’ve got options of about 10 other teams. That’s made it more difficult, but we rely on our reputation and in 16 years we’ve only had two players that I can think of that didn’t come back to our team after playing with us that we wanted to come back, for whatever reason, so we’ve been able to retain the ones that we want and we’ve been able to hold on in recruiting against the Fire’s and the MLS-caliber clubs, which is the hardest thing we have to recruit against.
Q: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in building the club to the level it has reached?
DD: Once you get past the financial part of it, that’s obviously the biggest issue because this team is obviously funded by myself and whatever funds we can raise though sponsorship and ticket sales, I think the biggest challenge we have, and if you look at the 64 teams we may be one of only a handful, or maybe less, that do not have a youth component tied to it.
The Bucks are a stand-alone entity, there is only the Bucks and the PDL. We’re going to build our way up and put a pro team over the top of the Bucks and try to build our way up and follow the Seattle model to eventually have an MLS club, but we’re going to rely on linking ourselves with the youth clubs that are already intact as opposed to saying we’re going to go in and form the Bucks Juniors and go and start stealing players from the other clubs, which would create a whole lot of havoc in our area. We haven’t had the natural progression of having the U-6 kids all the way up until they’re 12 and 14 knowing they’re going to be Bucks, but at the same time we’ve got a lot of clubs that are in the Detroit area, over 100,000 registered players in the state of Michigan that we’ve got to choose from that hopefully only have their eye on one thing when they get to the level of 14, 15, 16 and that is to go on to college and play for the Bucks in the summer.
Q: The Bucks became the first PDL side to defeat an MLS side in the U.S. Open Cup in 2000 when they beat the New England Revolution. What do you remember about that night?
DD: The atmosphere, from driving in on the bus into the stadium, at the old Foxboro Stadium, and being in the visitors NFL locker room, the guys walking out onto the field, I think we did a very good job of preparing them for what they were in store for and tried to have them not be awe-struck or star-struck by the level of what they were walking into, but that these guys were just the same guys as they were, they were just at a higher level, they were getting paid and they were going to play a helluva lot quicker than anything they’d ever seen before.
Once the game started, after the first 10 minutes or so, the guys understood what that was and we defended well and we did what we had to do, we got an open look on our side and it turned out to be a 1-0 victory in the 92nd minute off a counter-attacking goal. It was a fantastic effort, and you’ll never forget the smiles on the faces and the party we had at the end of it all, but the accomplishment of being the little guys and everyone saying you can’t do it, and then having a similar result two weeks later against another MLS club [the Miami Fusion], I think that really said it all.
Q: What do you take more pride in: having the most wins in PDL history and a national championship, or the number of players the club has sent on to the professional ranks?
DD: Without a doubt, the number of players that we’ve helped to get the opportunity to do what they love and play professional soccer or go on to coaching. We’ve got a lot of guys in MLS, we’ve got a lot of guys playing professionally in eight countries right now, but more importantly we’ve got six or seven of our guys who are coaching first division in the NCAA or have gone on to form their own youth clubs, some of the powerhouses around the country. So these guys are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do and that is either play at a high level or give back and take their skills and teach the younger kids so our future is going to be a lot brighter.
Q: Kenny Uzoigwe became the new all-time leading scorer in PDL history this season, what did that mean to the club?
DD: It meant a lot to the club, you really have to know Kenny to really appreciate that. Kenny is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever known. If you talk to him for five minutes it doesn’t matter if you’re at Christmas or you’re at a summer vacation, the word Bucks will come out of his mouth. He’s appreciative of what we have to offer him and the opportunity that we gave him, and the fact that this guy, at 32 years of age, plays like a 20-year-old, what he’s done for all of our players, pros, college, academy kids that are 16 and 18 that train with us all summer long, they see a consummate professional in someone who’s never really been paid to play, but is playing because he loves the game and looks like he could play for another six or seven years.
Q: Which players have been your favorites to work with?
DD: We have had a great cast of characters over the years, I could go on and name all the different pros, but from the very beginning Stephen Armstrong, who is now playing in Charleston, who went on from our place to be the first Bucks player ever drafted by D.C. United, went over to Watford and then came back to MLS for a several years, was just a quality individual, a great young man.
Kheli Dube, who we inducted into the Bucks Hall of Fame this summer, who was one of the great soccer success stories from a kid from Zimbabwe who came over here, worked his butt off, signed a contract with MLS for $13,000 and turned down a six-figure contract in Scandinavia because he wanted to play in America and prove he could do it and if he’d not had an injury would have been rookie of the year in 2008. Those are the kind of guys, and there’s plenty more of them like them, that they remember where they came from, and their hard work and dedication and their love of the game is really what they’re all about and exemplifies in their game day-in and day-out.
Q: What do you believe the future is for the Bucks?
DD: I would like to think that somebody’s going to take this and run with it over the next couple of years because it’s time for me to start spending some time watching my daughters grow up and play and enjoy a little more time in the summer. I do have other businesses, so I have to get some more people involved in this as a strictly financial thing, but I’d like to think that whoever does get involved with us, with the Bucks, is going to understand my passion and the level of professionalism and the expectation of winning, and regardless of whom I put in charge, whether it’s myself or [Coach] Gary Parsons or the next young person to come and run this team for the next 10 years, they’re going to understand the standards and I suspect you’re going to see us winning a lot more games and hopefully we’ll be around to see the 300th win and see Kenny get his 100th goal scored in the next year or so. So we’ve got a lot of short-term goals but at the end of the day we got into this for the long haul and soccer in America has still got a long way to go and we want to be a major part of that.
Q: How do you plan to accomplish that?
DD: Part of it would be the addition of the professional team. Our plan was to have a USL PRO team that would play over the top of the Bucks and then tie some academies and youth structure under that, and when you start to tighten that all together with one entity, we have the largest indoor soccer facility in the world in Ultimate Soccer Arenas, so we’ve got an $18.5 million facility that we can use as our training grounds.
We’ve got a lot of our nucleus in the Detroit area, in the Michigan area, to do something that a lot of places only dream about, but we haven’t completed the pieces or joined the dots for a lot of reasons, some of it being financial, some of it political with land and things like that. But I see it all happening with the addition of the pro team, because the pro team is something everyone can call their own and really get behind. The Bucks are the Bucks, we’ve been there and they’ve proven themselves, but they’re not a professional team, and we have professional players and we have the top college players, but they’re not professional, but there’s a very important place for them between the pros and the youth, and I think that professional component would really help to take the whole program to the next level in Michigan.