Kingston Stockade FC’s inaugural season ended less than two weeks ago, but the club’s chairman, Dennis Crowley, is already thinking about next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, and beyond.
Crowley, who co-founded and is currently the executive chairman of search-and-discovery app Foursquare, has an undeniably entrepreneurial spirit, as outlined in the Stockade manifesto, “So, Let’s Build a Professional Soccer Team From Scratch,” which was published and extensively shared on social media upon publication in early May, just prior to the beginning of the National Premier Soccer League’s 2016 season. In the piece, Crowley evokes the spirit of everyone from Ray Kinsella, Kevin Costner’s character in Field of Dreams, to the Little Rascals, who seemed to put on an impromptu show in around half of their short films. The major difference, of course, is that Crowley explained how he did it.
Officially, Stockade FC is around a year old. They submitted their application for an expansion team to the NPSL late last summer, and a lot has happened since. Crowley is always quick to credit the people who’ve worked with him to bring the club to fruition, but that number was considerably smaller as recently as last spring, when Stockade FC held its first in a series of tryouts.
“To be honest, we didn’t really know what to expect,” said Crowley last week. “The very first tryout that we had, it was me, [General Manager] Randy [Kim], and my buddy Mike. This was before we’d seen [head coach] George [Vizvary] in action, before we knew that [lead scouts] Nick and Dan [Hoffay] were as well connected to the scene as they were. We didn’t know how many people would show up. ‘Are we even going to have enough people here to have a scrimmage at this tryout? Are any of these people going to be good?’ We just weren’t sure who would show up. We were 30 minutes into it, and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s something really special brewing here.’”
The community seemed to agree, coming out in droves and nearly packing the venerable Dietz Stadium stands for each home match, including a season-high 936 for the final game in Kingston of the season, a 4-0 win over the Seacoast United Mariners on Sunday, July 3. The season ended on the road a week later, with a 1-1 draw against New York Athletic Club and a 6-0 evisceration at the hands of the New York Cosmos B, a result which showed that even during a fresh campaign which included a three-game win streak and a solid highlight reel of exhilarating plays, there’s still a long way to travel. The team finished the year with a 5-8-3 record.
“It’s kind of like the puzzle reveals itself over the course of the season,” said Crowley. “At the end of the Cosmos game I went out onto the field and talked to the guys. They were a little banged up physically and emotionally, because that’s kind of a lousy way to end the season. But I was telling them, this whole thing that we’ve started here is more than just these 90 minutes that we just played on this field in Long Island. Think of this as a 10-year project, and look at all that we’ve been able to accomplish in this first year. With kids coming out to get autographs every game, and they want to play on this team. With tons of people in the Hudson Valley coming out to show support, with tons of people knowing about it and wanting to play for this team next year. I’ve gotten 50 e-mails over the last couple of months from people saying, ‘I want to play for this team; I play for a different team, and I’m three hours away, but how do I play for your team next year?’ These are great opportunities to have.”
In 2017, Stockade FC will operate with the benefit of experience; in their first season, it took a lot of grit, a lot of hard work, and a lot of faith.
“The big challenge in the beginning of the season was everything, with sponsors, with players, with coaches, with fans. The big challenge was, ‘Show me it’s a real thing; right now you’ve got a website and you’ve got a logo, but where’s the team? Give me something I can be excited about.’ And that’s what we set out to do this season, and I think we did a pretty great job of it. Win or lose, no matter where we end up in the table, the community will rally behind and support the team. And that gives us a lot of flexibility to build really great things in the future.”
The supporter’s supporter
Think about the biggest sports fan you know, whether they support the New York Yankees, the New England Patriots, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team or even Stockade FC. Double that, and you’ve got Dennis Crowley, who isn’t just laundering the team’s kits at home between matches and becoming all-too-familiar with the quirks of the copiers at local office supply shops; he also lives and dies with each goal. He’s a supporter’s supporter, who loves the game so much he founded a team. At Dietz, Crowley was like a hummingbird, anxiously stalking the sidelines one minute, dropping by the press box to add commentary to the club’s surprisingly professional live video feed the next. Five games into the season, Stockade was 3-1-1, with a three-match winning streak before the home faithful during which the team looked and played perhaps as good as they would all year long. Plenty of fans saw those wins and got stars in their eyes. Crowley was among them.
“There totally was that moment, where I thought, ‘Are we going to exceed everyone’s expectations? Are we going to qualify for the Open Cup in the first year?’” he said. “You let yourself run away with these fantasies, because everything is going so well in the beginning.”
Instead, the team lost five of their next six, and didn’t win again until a cathartic 6-1 drubbing of an undermanned United Seacoast Phantoms side on Saturday, June 25. Among the team’s many goals for 2017 is to manage expectations, roll with the inevitable rigors of a long season packed into a few short months, and win some games on the road.
“This is my first time managing a team on this level, day in and day out, and there’s a lot of things that you’re naive about going into it,” Crowley said. “You don’t realize you’re going to lose a couple of players to injuries. Our team was really solid coming out of the gate because we trained so much before the season. What we saw is that we came out really strong early on because we were really prepared, and it took some of the other teams a couple of weeks to get back into form. And once they were in form and we were in form, that’s when it started getting really challenging.”
As with all challenges, Crowley sees this as an opportunity for improvement. What will Stockade FC look like next season, not only their roster, but also how they approach every aspect of what they do both on and off the pitch?
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