Semi-pro soccer comes to Newport News – Daily Press
Three Newport News residents plan to bring semi-professional soccer to the city in 2018.
Mike Vest, Dan Chenoweth and Kevin Joyce all live in Hilton Village. The three friends have seven sons between them, and all the boys love to play soccer.
“One day, our boys were playing soccer behind Hilton Elementary School, and we said, ‘It would be great if we could take them to see a high-level soccer game right here in our own backyard,'” Vest said. “Then we said, ‘Could we build something like that?'”
That marked the birth of Lionsbridge F.C., named after the famous Newport News landmark.
While the name of the soccer team came several months later, Vest started researching the process of starting a soccer team in February, soon after the idea sprung up in his conversation with Chenoweth and Joyce.
When Vest approached his friends and told them the idea could work, Chenoweth and Joyce jumped on board.
Vest has a background in college athletics, including stops at Wake Forest, the Big Ten Network and the Atlantic 10 conference. Chenoweth and Joyce have a background in finance; Chenoweth is a partner with PBMares accounting firm, and Joyce is a financial adviser at Financial Security Advisory.
“We thought if we all put our heads together, we could make this happen,” Chenoweth said.
“I think about my kids having a place to go and a team to call their own,” said Joyce said. “Being a part of that would be really special.”
Vest now is dedicated to Lionsbridge F.C. full-time. He has spent the summer talking with the city of Newport News, the Hampton Roads Sports Commission, potential sponsors and potential home fields.
The trio expects to finalize the league affiliation for the team by the end of summer.
If all goes according to plan, Lionsbridge F.C. will join either the National Premier Soccer League or Premier Development League, which both sit at the highest rung of the amateur soccer ladder or the lowest rung of the professional one, depending on which way you look. The NPSL fielded 96 teams across North America in its 2017 season, the PDL 72 teams.
Lionsbridge F.C. aims to play its first game in May 2018.
Vest, Chenoweth and Joyce pulled inspiration for their venture from Kingston Stockade F.C., a team founded by Dennis Crowley, who also co-founded the app Foursquare.
Stockade F.C. began much the same way as Lionsbridge F.C.: Crowley and his wife sat at their home in Kingston, N.Y., one weekend and talked about how they wished they had a soccer game to attend.
A little less than 11 months later, in May 2016, Crowley had a team up and running in the town.
Throughout the process, he has published several long blog posts detailing the ins and outs of starting a soccer team, from the expenses ($125,000 in Stockade’s first year) and revenue ($93,000 in the first year) to attendance totals and merchandise sales.
“I googled ‘how to build a soccer team from scratch’ and nothing came up, so I decided to put together an instruction manual,” Crowley said.
Vest attended a Stockade F.C. game in the first week of July to talk with Crowley and get a first-hand look at the operation.
“They kind of give us a blueprint,” Vest said. “How do we take their success, put a Peninsula spin on it, and make it work here?”
Lionsbridge F.C. wants to replicate the community enthusiasm Stockade F.C. has been able to bolster, but across a larger area. The population of Kingston, N.Y., was estimated at 23,000 people in 2016, compared to 181,000 in Newport News.
Vest, Chenoweth and Joyce plan to turn games into community events, with live music, food trucks, a beer tent and a bouncy house.
“It’s a full night out, and the soccer is in the middle of all that,” Vest said. “We think we’ll have something for everybody.”
The team rolled out its website, LionsbridgeFC.com, and social media in June. The co-founders have started asking for community input on social media and have set up a community ambassadors program.
“The way these teams work is they stay really true to their local roots and get fully ingrained in the community, and that’s what we’re in the process of doing,” Vest said. “What’s really going to make this successful out of the gate and sustainable is if the community is all in.”
If Lionsbridge F.C. joins the NPSL, the team will compete against Legacy 76, an NPSL team created by the Virginia Legacy Soccer Club in Williamsburg. So the Lionsbridge group has met with Legacy leadership to work out the details of having two neighboring teams.
“We’ve been trying to find ways to work together so they can make this work,” said Bobby O’Brien, the technical director of Virginia Legacy. “Having another team in the NPSL could be good for soccer in the area, and it could be good for our exposure as well, but we want to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s.”
O’Brien knows the teams could be competing on and off the field, but a local rivalry could also inspire local passion in the teams and the game of soccer.
“Other youth clubs are sometimes unsure about supporting Legacy, but maybe they could support this team,” O’Brien said. “For all of us, it’s all about growing the sport.”
Next steps for Lionsbridge F.C. include securing a home field this fall, hiring a coaching staff this winter and holding tryouts next spring. The roster likely will be made up of college soccer players and recent college graduates, Vest said.
While the team just started introducing itself to the public a month ago, its co-founders said they have been encouraged by the response so far.
“I heard someone I didn’t know talking about the team, and I was like, ‘How did you know about that?'” Joyce said. “We just started, and now it’s becoming a reality.”
Yanchulis can be reached by phone at 757-298-5176.
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