In their final game of the 2025 season, Kingston Stockade FC played host to NY Braveheart SC, winning 6-1 in an overwhelming tribute to the nearly 1000 fans who packed Dietz Stadium last Saturday.
“I think that was a good win for the fans,” said Stockade chairman Dennis Crowley. “It was a big crowd for a game that really doesn’t mean anything in terms of the postseason. But it was great that we scored a bunch of goals, and it was just a fun atmosphere.”
In its tenth year of existence, Stockade FC has reliably managed to both provide for and to embrace a fun atmosphere. After two seasons in exile at Marist University in Poughkeepsie during a lengthy renovation of their home pitch, Kingston’s return to Dietz Stadium did not go according to plan. The semi-pro soccer club finished 4-1-5 overall, good enough for the top half of the Northeast Conference in the inaugural season of the League for Clubs, but well shy of playoff contention.
While the fans want to see them win, they love Stockade FC no matter what, from longtime supporters’ group the Dutch Guard to the families, kids, and new soccer fans turning up each week. There’s a lot of love for the orange and black.
In Saturday’s win, all that was on the line was pride. That and the chance to go out with a bang. That result was all but decided in the first half when David Barnes scored a hat trick. The home side never let up. Barnes shared the wealth on the first goal of the second half, feeding Noah Robinson, and by the time it was all over Mambaye Niang and Gabe Garcia had also found the back of the net.
Kingston’s other wins this season were also fairly dominant: a season-opening 5-1 victory over Kensington SC back in early May, a 4-2 win over Braveheart, and a wild 10-0 celebration over visiting Lighthouse SC on June 7. But the club was also inconsistent, suffering a three-match losing streak in May to fall to 1-0-3 on the year, and a draw and two losses ahead of Saturday’s finale, a streak that began with the playoffs still within reach.
“We have a good thing going”
“This season was like a win from the perspective of being back at Dietz and just bringing the club back to Kingston and getting a crowd together,” Crowley said. “But we kind of knew as soon as we started losing a couple games in a row, we’re not going to see a trip to the postseason, which is really what I think the fans deserve. You know this season. I think we just didn’t know we didn’t live up to the potential of the club.”
This was meant to be the club’s tenth season, but the global Covid pandemic kept their former league, the NPSL, off the field in the summer of 2020. But it’s been a decade since Stockade FC founder Crowley announced the arrival of semi-pro soccer to Kingston. Combining local history and a modern approach to community sports, Stockade FC quickly won many hearts. Roger Bennett, co-host of the popular Men in Blazers soccer podcast, wore and featured a Stockade FC jersey during an episode.
Kingston was already cool. And Stockade FC, from the start but even today, was its cool soccer team.
“We have a good thing going,” Crowley said. “We’re not at the point where there’s 1000 fans every game, but there’s enough fans every game to make it feel full. And I think it’s just like a superauthentic expression of soccer and Kingston.”
After the announcement of the club in 2015, Crowley talked about looking at Stockade FC through a five- and-ten-year lens. How has the last decade looked compared to what he had hoped for when he founded the club?
Crowley said he was contemplating that question a few days earlier after he reread an essay he wrote back in 2015 about why he and his co-founders started Stockade FC in the first place.
“We were so naïve about so many things, but at the same time, my gosh, we blew some of these goals out of the water,” Crowley said.
In 2017, under the direction of first-year coach David Lindholm, Kingston went 7-4-1, topping the NPSL’s Atlantic White Conference, making it all the way to the league’s regional final, and earning a spot in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, a tournament that includes soccer clubs across all levels of play, right up through the MLS. Though Stockade FC has had terrific seasons since, including three winning seasons and two conference finals games under longtime head coach and former team captain Jamal Lis-Simmons, the 2017 season was still their most successful.
“We qualified for the Open Cup in our second year, and we haven’t done it since,” Crowley said. “We won a piece of hardware in our second year, but we haven’t done it since.”
Crowley is pragmatic about why the club’s on-field successes have ebbed and flowed over its decade.
“We’ve gotten lucky some seasons and not lucky other seasons,” he said. “I feel like there’s two opportunities we should have, you know, the title, but there were just bad calls by refs and just weird circumstances.”
A success in the stands
The club’s fortunes have largely been a success in the stands, not just in Kingston, but also on the road, where traveling Stockade fans sometimes outnumber the home crowd. But in terms of growing that fan base, it’s unclear whether they’re where they imagined a decade ago. In past seasons at Dietz, some home games saw well over 1000 fans in the stands. Though this season Kingston topped that mark just once, Crowley said average attendance over the course of the season was higher than in years past. And it’s not all Stockade supporters from the inaugural season filling those seats.
“One thing that’s really stood out from this season with the first year of being back in Dietz is that there’s a lot of new fans,” Crowley said. “There’s a lot of people that this is the first year that they’ve gotten to see the club. I’ve had more people come up to me and just be like, ‘I had no idea that it was like this. I’ve heard of this before, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was so big, it was so awesome.”
And that’s something that, win or lose, hasn’t gone away: Kingston Stockade FC still generates buzz.
“It’s a good environment, even if the team is not winning and even if we’re not going to the playoffs,” Crowley said. “Because people are still showing up, kids still want to be involved, they’re still fighting for autographs, still fighting to be ball kids. It’s like a cultural thing, and I like that, and some way that’s a goal that we didn’t set, but it kind of makes up for the fact that we’re not winning trophies every year.”
Returning to the newly renovated Dietz Stadium is almost like a rest in terms of club goals.
“I feel like we’re in a spot again where we can continue to build because we’re back at Dietz,” he said. “The new infrastructure at Dietz kind of gives us the ability to do more, like to have more food trucks and to do more stuff look like a halftime show and a camera running around and stuff. It just gives us some more flexibility to have some more fun with that.”
Where have Stockade FC’s plans not kept up? While the U23 and U20 men’s teams have been a success, another Stockade FC team has yet to get off the ground. “I said I was going make a women’s team,” said Crowley, “and I was like, I swear we’ll have it by my daughter’s fifth birthday, and you know she’s nine and we don’t we don’t have a women’s team.”
He’d also like more youth opportunities and year-round programming.
“I think I expected to make Stockade like my full-time job by now, and I haven’t done that,” Crowley said. His vision is to remain chairman and to be able to hire someone to run Stockade FC full-time. But that’s a goal for the next five to ten years. And who knows? Maybe it’s a goal that’ll be realized sooner than anyone thinks.
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