How Charlotte FC is making sure first team features plenty of homegrown soccer talent
When Tucker Lepley was 16, he had to make one of the hardest decisions of his life. He had to tell his parents and twin sister in Charlotte that he wanted to move out and live with a new family in a new city almost a thousand miles away, all in the hopes of one day playing professional soccer.
“It was kind of crazy,” said Lepley, now 18.
Lepley moved to Kansas City before the start of his junior year to join a Major League Soccer academy team with Sporting KC. He lived, as his father Erm described, like a “domestic exchange student” with a local host family.
The transition paid off for Lepley. The central midfielder spent the last two preseasons training with Sporting KC’s first team, competed with their second team last year and now has a professional contract offer from the club, in addition to getting called up to the U-17 and U-19 national teams. He has signed a national letter of intent to play soccer at UCLA this year.
So when Lepley heard the news that his Charlotte hometown was getting a Major League Soccer team, he said he was “ecstatic” because he knows how big the soccer culture in the region is. He also had a message for the first kids in the expansion club’s academy.
“I hope they realize how lucky they are,” Lepley said. “Because once I left for Sporting (KC), it definitely made me appreciate how blessed I am to be there. All the training was just next level. I hope they know that being in the academy, you have the legit chance to become a pro.”
Now that Charlotte landed an MLS expansion bid, kids like Lepley won’t have to go far to try and “make it.” Homegrown soccer talent instead has an opportunity to come through Charlotte FC’s academy teams, which began training this week, over a year before the club’s first team hits the pitch in 2022. While it’s unlikely that more than a handful of players will ever graduate to the first team, as is standard across the league, the Carolinas provide a hotbed for youth soccer talent, and Charlotte FC now gets first dibs on that territory for its academy teams. Club leadership said fans could realistically see a couple players from the inaugural academy teams on the first team roster in a few years.
“Growing up in Charlotte, I dreamed of playing in MLS but knew I couldn’t do it at home,” retired MLS defender and North Carolina native Jared Watts, 28, tweeted last week. “Now Charlotte kids can play for their own club. Amazing.”
Scouting networks
Charlotte talent makes up over a quarter of the inaugural rosters between the U-17 and U-14 teams, the only age groups with completed rosters so far, according to the club. There will also be part-time academy teams at the U-12 and U-13 levels. While most players on the U-17s and U-14s are from outside Charlotte, there is still a good chunk directly from the city. Only five players of the 32 signed, between both teams, are living with a host family. Charlotte FC’s technical director Marc Nicholls said the club prioritized recruiting from Charlotte first, partially because of the pool of talent and also because of the pandemic.
“Our territory of North and South Carolina is, we think, a potential gold mine for talent,” Nicholls said. “But it’s going to take a little while for us to get our hands around 16 million people, which is, on one hand, a daunting task, but on the other, a really exciting project for us.”
Both Nicholls and academy director Dan Lock, who was recently named the head coach of the U-17 team, joined Charlotte from the Seattle Sounders. Nicholls formerly served as the director of player development for the Sounders and oversaw 15 academy players transition to a professional league, either MLS or USL, over the past three seasons. Lock previously served as a full-time head coach for the U-15 Sounders academy team and the head of academy affiliations.
Charlotte FC has established a connection with the two-time MLS Cup winning Seattle Sounders through its front office hires. In addition to Nicholls and Lock, Charlotte’s head of analytics and U-14 academy coach Mark Simpson formerly worked with the Sounders as a scout before serving as the technical director for local NC Fusion soccer club. In fact, a previous partnership between the Sounders and the Fusion helped Lock and Simpson scout and sign three players to Charlotte’s academy.
“We’d come out here (to Charlotte) every year to scout the area,” Lock said. “We actually had a couple of players play for the Sounders when we were there who are now on our (Charlotte FC) Academy team here.”
The model bodes well for the burgeoning club since Seattle’s academy has produced successful homegrown players, such as professionals Jordan Morris, DeAndre Yedlin, Sean Okoli and Henry Wingo.
Still, Nicholls and Lock said Charlotte FC is committed to developing its own unique culture and is looking to partnerships with local clubs first and foremost to recruit talent. Most of the academy signings so far have come from local soccer clubs: Charlotte Soccer Academy (CSA), followed by Queen City Mutiny, Charlotte Independence, North Carolina Football Club and NC Fusion, in that order.
“We’re trying to be positive and ambitious to sign two homegrown players per year from 2023 onward,” Lock said. “That’s two, two and a half years out, and the kids we have on our Under-17s will probably be getting towards the age of 18 or 19 by that point, so that’s quite potentially realistic.”
The academy teams, a group Lock and Nicholls described as “young,” will essentially be the first players to take the field representing Charlotte FC. They now have the opportunity to set the tone and culture for the new club. Nicholls said the additional year before the club’s inaugural season has helped emphasize the academy pipeline and make those players more “first team ready.”
“It enables that extra year of maturity,” Nicholls said. “As we know, players develop at different times, whether physical or mental or whatever else, so it gives us a little bit more time to establish a culture within the academy to make the players more prepared.”
Path to pro
The preparations started this Monday and continue throughout the week as the teams undergo their first five-day training sessions at Manchester Meadows Soccer Complex in Rock Hill, SC, where the club will practice until a more permanent home is established. Most of the players, if not all, have not played in a formal setting since before the pandemic hit, so this week of training will be used for health screenings, in line with MLS’ “Return to Play” protocol.
The week also includes introductions and implementing the team’s principles of play and culture, which will include three “pillars,” according to Lock. Those pillars are a progressive attitude, ambition and working with the collective.
“How we see that (progressive attitude) on the field is going to be mostly using an evidence based approach,” Lock said. “How we progress the ball quickly through the thirds of the field, but also a progressive approach off the field in terms of diversity, having players question and be intelligent and seek feedback.”
The pillars and culture, Lock said, will develop over time and through tournament play with the MLS Youth Development Platform and Generation Adidas Cup. Lock said he expects a fall schedule for the Youth Development Platform, a new, MLS-created tournament for academy and youth teams, in the coming weeks, which should give the teams a first opportunity to compete in their hometown representing the new soccer club.
Lepley remembered a similar moment, when he made a professional appearance with Sporting KC’s second team last year playing the Charlotte Independence in Charlotte in front of his parents, grandfather, family and friends. The decision to move out of state was one of “the hardest” but it brought him to a moment he called “the coolest” in his young professional career.
“I don’t know how to describe it when I was playing,” Lepley said of the experience. “I just felt this added energy, because I had all these people there supporting me.”
Young Charlotteans could now get that same opportunity, with that chance to progress to the pro team over the next few years.
“There’s a chance you can really make your dreams come true,” Lepley said.
This story was originally published July 29, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
