Destination Soccer Chattanooga: Part 3 - CFC Academy

June 19, 2019 by Dan Vaughn

Chattanooga FC is headed into their eleventh season of action. I have spent most of my life about thirty minutes from Chattanooga and CFC was the team to get me into grassroots soccer. I got the chance a few months back to talk to some of the most influential people in Chattanooga’s vast soccer ecosystem. These are the stories of what I consider one of if not the best soccer destinations in the United States.

Chattanooga’s off-the-field impact is much, much more vast than their impact on the field. From their academies to their charity work, the club has had such a vast impact on the city and the surrounding areas.

“The academies in the area were fractured,” said Chattanooga FC general manager Sheldon Grizzle. “The best players were split up and other players were driving to Atlanta, Knoxville, Nashville.” “Chattanooga just wasn’t punching its weight,” adds club president Tim Kelly. The idea of forming a single elite academy in the area was a huge undertaking at the time, but now they are the best academy in the area. It all started back in 2012 when the club held a summit with thirty of the top youth clubs from the city to discuss how to improve the youth game. The result was a more unified system that over the years has seen more and more clubs join.

A lot of the players on the men’s and women’s team coach in the academy. “Some of them are our best coaches,” says Grizzle. The quality coaching and the CFC name has helped grow the number of kids playing elite soccer in Chattanooga from a few hundred to over a thousand just in CFC’s academy. “They’ve got one of the most impressive youth clubs in Tennessee, for sure, in terms of curriculum and coaching,” said Justin Haskell, a coach in the CFC Academy, “There are some really, really good and really, really experienced coaches here… I love the setup here and the curriculum and it’s just a really cohesive vision for how the kids should play. Every team in the academy is being taught play out of the back, keep the ball on the ground, possession, high pressing, quick counter-attacking, composure under pressure.”

Besides giving the kids somewhere to play and grow their abilities, the academy offers college prep to help athletes take that next step and get into a college. They do this through showing their players how to get recruited. They also hosted their first ever College ID camp this past summer with college soccer coaches from all over the Southeast attending. This academy’s 2019 class has thirty-four college commitments.

What they’ve done with the academy is phenomenal and should be applauded, but personally, I don’t think it even begins to match up to what they’ve done through the CFC Foundation. The Foundation is comprised of two major programs, the Chattanooga Sports Ministries and Operation Get Active. OGA works with elementary schools, middle schools, rec centers, and adults and children with disabilities. It all started with the elementary schools and branched out from there. Fun fact: OGA is also the first North American program to receive funding through the VW Workers Foundation.

“We are a health initiative trying to encourage kids to get more active through the game of soccer. We do this three times a year in the spring, summer, and fall,” says OGA Director Peter Woolcock. It’s a ten week long program that is in twenty elementary schools and three middle schools. They practice twice a week after school. Halfway through the program they have a tournament at Finley Stadium and then at the end they have another tournament for championships. “I think the Foundation is hugely important,” said Woolcock, “There’s still a big barrier to participation in soccer in this country. It’s not cheap. I think what we do well is have a really very affordable program that kids can access soccer, be part of a team, represent their school, have a jersey, and really introduce them to the game of soccer.”

OGA isn’t just great for the kids. Seeing the kids out there is so impactful for the adults. “It’s really awesome to see the kids score a goal and celebrate,” says Woolcock. “It would be awesome to see a kid that plays does Operation Get Active play for Chattanooga Football Club."

On top of OGA, the CFC Foundation also has the Chattanooga Sports Ministries. Their mission is to “impact urban youth in Chattanooga at the intersection of faith and athletic engagement.” Like OGA, they have soccer leagues going on throughout the year, but they don’t work directly with schools, but focus more on developing character through the sport rather than introducing kids to the sport to improve fitness.

The CFC Foundation also works closely with the Highland Park Commons. It’s a group of three futsal fields that have been built in the middle of one of Chattanooga’s most diverse neighborhoods. There’s often pickup games, and it is the host of the Chattanooga Football League.

What the club has accomplished off the field is almost more impressive than the things they’ve done on the field. The lives they’ve impacted and kids they’ve helped are a testament to how much this club cares about the community.

Even though these are ran by Chattanooga FC, they are still charities. If you would like to donate to the CFC Foundation, you can click here. If you would like to donate to the Chattanooga Sports Ministries specifically, you can click here. If you would like to donate to Operation Get Active specifically, you can click here.

- Aarik Long

For the rest of this series on Chattanooga Soccer, go here.

Destination Soccer Chattanooga: Part 2 - Red Wolves

June 18, 2019 by Dan Vaughn

Not sure if this helps or hurts. Image courtesy of Red Wolves Twitter.

Oh, boy. This has been quite the story since everything started up. On August 1st, 2018, it was announced that the USL had granted Chattanooga a team for the newly created USL League One. Not longer afterwards, former Chattanooga FC General Manager Sean McDaniel was announced as the new general manager for the Red Wolves.

“I think Chattanooga is ready for pro soccer,” says McDaniel, “I don’t think it’s something Chattanooga would have been capable for ten year ago. I think year-round soccer is something the area is ready for and I’m glad the opportunity arose.”

However, there has been a lot of backlash on social media to the announcement of the team. The team has been backed by Bob Martino, a real estate developer from Utah, which most Chattahooligans are not a fan of. They are viewed as a team that is coming in to simply try to take over a market that has already seen great grassroots success and trying to pour money in to win over the market. “Alexi Lalas says ‘Let the market decide,” says CFC’s Tim Kelly, “But that only works if someone doesn’t have their thumb on the scale.” Kelly went on to say “I hope they fail, but if they don’t, we’ll do our best to put a better product on the field.”

Chattanooga FC also claims that the Red Wolves made them better “That rivalry makes Chattanooga more of a soccer city overall,” Kelly said, “I learned a long time ago to not worry about things we can’t control. We’re gonna fight as hard as we can for the club and we’re 100% sure that we’re wearing the white hats.” “This new thing hones our focus,” says CFC’s Sheldon Grizzle, “It won’t distract us.”

Although there has been a ton of backlash throughout lower league Twitter, the casual fans in Chattanooga have been getting behind the new team already. “We’re surprised by the support… in a good way!” McDaniel also says that he doesn’t let the negativity get to them. “Anytime I lose focus on the Red Wolves, it’s a distraction to what we are trying to do here,” says McDaniel, “My focus here is on the Red Wolves and it’s on building a professional organization. We’re building a stadium. There’s plenty more to be concerned about. That’s really where our whole focus is.”

The team isn’t short on resources either as owner Bob Martino has helped throw resources in and bring players from around the globe to Chattanooga. The club has players from England, Jamaica, Argentina, Albania, Brazil, Ireland, Spain, Libya, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Canada, and, of course, the United States.

“I’m so proud to say the team we’ve built internally in the office and our coaching staff is spectacular,” says McDaniel, “We couldn’t have found the right teammates without them, and that’s a credit to Bob Martino. His vision and his desire to make this spectacular would never have happened if he didn’t have the investment and the desire to do so.”

The team is building a stadium, like McDaniel mentioned, but for this first season, they are playing at Chattanooga Christian School’s field. They’ve laid out plans that look absolutely phenomenal. Locker rooms for the men’s, women’s, and academy teams, therapy rooms, weight rooms, film study, and a media room are all in the plans for their new soccer facility.

The club currently has two USL League Two teams, as well. The Park City Red Wolves play in Martino’s home of Park City, Utah. Their other League Two squad is much closer to home, playing in my hometown of Dalton, GA. The Dalton Red Wolves play in one of the best areas for high school soccer in the whole nation and have a few players actually from the area.

So far, in the inaugural season for the Red Wolves, they sit relatively low on the League One table, but there’s still time to turn the season around, as the season runs until the beginning of October. A big key will be winning on the road. At the point of writing this, the team has not won a game on the the road (editor’s note: Red Wolves won on the road against Richmond on 6/15). They lost four and drew once in their five matches away from home. There is always room to grow, however, and seeing the team gel could help them get something going.

- Aarik Long

Destination Soccer Chattanooga: Part 1 - CFC

June 17, 2019 by Dan Vaughn

2019 will be the eleventh season for the “Chattanooga’s Team,” “The Boys in Blue,” or whatever nickname you want to throw out there for Chattanooga Football Club. When hearing their story, there’s no doubt in your mind that they would have succeeded, but things were not always that simple. The club started in 2008, which was still in the heart of The Great Recession. The economy in the Chattanooga area was as bad as it was anywhere in the nation.

“We would have been happy to have five-hundred people show up,” said team co-founder and president Tim Kelly. That’s all they hoped for. Five-hundred people per game would have been their “wildest dreams” according to the club’s head coach and general manager, Sheldon Grizzle. The first game on May 16th, 2009, against the Atlanta Silverbacks had over 1,600 fans in attendance. Over their first ten years, they have brought nearly 400,000 fans to Finley Stadium, about eight times as many fans as they had originally hoped for.

One of the things that the guys at CFC believe helped them out is looking professional from the outset. A beautiful crest, nice kits, playing in a big stadium instead of at a little high school field. It all added up to a professional looking club built by a bunch of volunteers. They even got Volkswagen to sponsor the kits, sort of.

Volkswagen has been a key sponsor for CFC.

Volkswagen was coming to town to build a massive facility. CFC knew that Volkswagen has a history of supporting soccer, and they’re a fantastic partner anyway. Well, Volkswagen wasn’t going to support a little club just starting out, so CFC got the next best thing, the local VW dealer. “The first year, we just did it. He gave us $500. I don’t know if he ever even wrote the check. We just kind of put it on there,” explains Kelly. They did, however, eventually get the legit sponsorship, which would lead to a partnership with German first division side, VfL Wolfsburg.

Another thing they said had a huge impact was the fact that they weren’t all about soccer. Obviously, they love the game. They started a club after all. But that does not mean everyone else is just as passionate about the game. “If we came out and said ‘Soccer soccer soccer soccer’ then there would have been a lot of yawns. We have more people show up, even to this day, who are more passionate about Chattanooga than they are about soccer,” says Grizzle, “Tapping into that localism spirit is really important.”

“You can’t be about one person trying to make a buck,” adds Kelly, “One of the cancers of US soccer is the idea that you have to have one owner who controls the whole thing and is trying to leverage it into the New York Jets.” The club has spent almost eleven years now putting an emphasis on the community and working to make the club work instead of making a dollar. “We’ve literally reinvested almost every dime back into the club over the years,’ says Grizzle, “I think at most the ownership has taken maybe a couple thousand dollars distribution check. And we even distribute an equal amount to the Foundation. On average, we earn about $200 a year.”

The team has also had a fantastic impact through their work with their foundation and with their academies (I’ll get into some of that in a future installment of this), but they’ve also made waves across the NPSL. A lot of the NPSL’s Southeastern division has Chattanooga’s thumbprint in it. Three teams currently in the division (Inter Nashville FC, Greenville FC, and Asheville City SC) all got help starting up from Chattanooga. Tim Kelly joked that “We made life harder for ourselves. It used to be a lot easier to make it to the National Championship.”

Tim Kelly being kept to his word by Tim Blekicki of You’re Smarter Than Us Podcast.

Two of the more prominent teams across the NPSL were also impacted by Chattanooga. Sheldon Grizzle told a story of how random chance helped their path cross with the founder of Detroit City FC. “The founders of Detroit City FC was in Chattanooga having beers with me and a couple of friends right across the street over here. I started telling him about what we’re doing with Chattanooga FC and they were looking at each other like ‘We’re doing this in Detroit.’” Grizzle also said that they helped out with the Kingston Stockade. “We became friends with Dennis Crowley of the Kingston Stockade. Helped him through the whole process of figuring out how to get a team off the ground. And not only how we do it, but why we do it. He was able to bring that into a new community.”

“We will never move the team. We are permanently in Chattanooga.”

— Tim Kelly

The club has done something that so many other clubs have failed to do. They connected with the community to find long-term success. “Authentic grassroots thing. By Chattanoogans for Chattanoogans. It is authentically Chatanoogan. We were able to create that at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot to root for.” What they’ve done here has been insanely impactful and has really set off a chain reaction throughout the city’s soccer scene. In the next few installments, we’ll dig into those. From the CFC Academy and their foundation to the local high school and college soccer programs all the way to the Red Wolves coming to down. “The Club that Chattanooga Built” had an impact on it all.

- Aarik Long

Tomorrow we’ll run another piece from this week-long deep dive into the Chattanooga soccer scene.