Everything you need to know about Seattle’s newest championship-winning club.
Ballard FC joined the ever-growing list of Seattle soccer champions, beating Lionsbridge FC 2-1 in the USL-2 championship game on a last-minute goal in front of nearly 3,500 fans at Starfire Stadium on Saturday.
Being a rather new team which plays in a league that was itself renamed only a few years ago, though, it would make sense if the general soccer fan doesn’t really know much about them. Let’s change that...
Ballard FC first began play in 2022, shortly after announcing themselves. They were an immediate success, regularly selling out 1,500-seat Interbay Stadium and advancing to the USL League 2 Western Conference finals. Their roster was filled with players with connections to both the Sounders Academy and local colleges, and even had former USL Sounder Jason Farrell as the head coach. It also helps that they have some pretty cool looking merchandise.
Do you happen to remember the PDL? Well, this is just the renamed version of that league. Like that league, this is unofficially considered part of the fourth-division in the U.S. Soccer Federation pyramid, below professional leagues like MLS (Division I), USL Championship (Division II), MLS Next Pro (Division III), NISA (DIII) and USL League One (DIII). Although the USSF only officially sanctions the top three leagues, it does recognize USL2 as a national league and grants the league spots in the U.S. Open Cup. Although there used to be professional teams in the PDL, all teams in USL2 are fully amateur and participants retain NCAA eligibility. The league is formally considered part of the “pro pathway” and limits how many players each team can have that are older than 23. The vast majority of players are either still in college or recently graduated.
The league had 122 teams this year that were spread among four conferences and 18 divisions. Teams played anywhere from 11-14 games in the regular season and eight clubs from each conference advanced to the playoffs. Ballard won the Northwest Division, which has six teams spread out from Eugene, Ore. to Seattle. They went 10-1-1 with a +28 goal-difference.
Ballard is actually the second team from Washington to win this championship, matching Kitsap Pumas’ achievement from 2011.
Although the exact number of teams fluctuates each year and the format for 2024 has not yet been announced, USL2/PDL teams have always participated in the Open Cup. In both 2011 and 2016, Kitsap even got a chance to play the Sounders.
Thanks to their USL2 championship, Ballard now has the top priority to get into the Open Cup, all but ensuring their participation.
In order for Ballard FC to play the Sounders, they’d likely need to win at least two games, and one of those would probably be against a professional opponent. Like I said, however, this is hardly unprecedented as one or two amateur teams make it to the the third round almost every year. A bit has changed since Kitsap last played the Sounders, too, as there’s now more of a formal draw that creates the specific matchups in each round. Still, it’s pretty fun to think about.
As you may have gathered, USL2 rosters tend to change a lot from season to season. That’s an even bigger issue for the Open Cup, which usually starts about two months before the USL2 season. The good news for Ballard is that all but a few players are based in and/or from here, so it’s at least reasonably feasible that they could throw together a team that looks vaguely similar to the one that just won the league.
The unquestioned star of the team is a 22-year-old forward named Stas Korzeniowski, who is going to be a senior at Penn this year and is coming off an 11-goal, seven-assist campaign for the Quakers in 2022. He scored 19 goals during the entire USL2 campaign, including six in the playoffs. He didn’t win the Golden Boot, which is awarded on regular-season goals, but he did lead the league in goals across all competitions. Among his playoff goals were a hat trick in the Western Conference final and a goal in the National Final, a game he played much of with a bandaged head before being ejected late. He’s listed at 6-foot-4 and 194 pounds, so he has some attractive physical attributes. The Sounders have definitely been watching him, even if there are still some questions about how his skillset will translate to the pro level.
Honestly, there are too many to detail all of them, but there were four starters in the final who spent at least some time in the Sounders Academy. Peter Kingston, who was credited with the championship-winning goal, spent most of his youth career with the Sounders and played a couple of seasons at Seattle University before transferring to the University of Washington this year. Danny Robles actually played professionally with the Tacoma Defiance for a few seasons. Leo Burney played several years for the Sounders and even made three appearances with Sounders 2 in USL. Charlie Gaffney played a year with the Sounders Academy before joining the Timbers Academy.
In fact, there were only two starters and just a couple of others on the roster who didn’t grow up and/or attend college here.
Former USL Sounder Jason Farrell was the head coach for the inaugural season and for most of the second season before leaving to take an assistant job with Seattle University. He was replaced by Ethan O’Neill, an Irishman who has previously coached at the youth level with both Seattle Celtic and Seattle United. Ballard went 7-0-0 under O’Neill, including the playoffs.
Former Sounders Lamar Neagle is one of the co-founders, along with Ballard High alums Sam Zisette and Chris Kaimmer. Zisette, who played in college and with the Pumas in PDL, seems to be the most involved on a day-to-day basis.
Their supporters group is called the Bridge Keepers and they do a march from a local bar to the game, very similar to what ECS does ahead of Sounders games. It’s obviously a bit smaller of a group, but everyone I’ve talked to raves about the atmosphere they’ve helped create at Interbay Stadium, where they often pack in about 1,500 fans. They managed to get more than 3,400 out to Starfire on short notice for the final.
As recently as a few years ago, it was very common for many top MLS players to have come through the PDL. Most players who get picked in the MLS SuperDraft still have played at this level, but it’s far less common now to find top players who follow this path. That said, I know the Sounders have been tracking Korzeniowski and I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least a few others continue their careers after college.
When I interviewed Zisette and Neagle on Nos Audietis, they pointedly didn’t dismiss the idea, but gave no indication that any such move is imminent. As successful as Ballard FC have been — selling out games and winning championships — the step up from semi-professional to fully professional is massive, probably bigger in a relative sense than going from the lower pro divisions to MLS. Players in USL2 aren’t paid, they travel by bus and the season is only a few months long, even including the playoffs.
If Ballard were to even move up to USL League One — the next step on the pyramid — they’d suddenly be responsible for paying all of their players, funding travel all over the country and navigating a season that runs from April to October. They’d also have to find a different place to play to meet league standards, since their current home at Interbay Stadium is pretty limited and a significant part of their charm is that they’re basically a neighborhood team.
But with Memorial Stadium due to get a massive renovation and not being that far from Ballard, it becomes a little easier to imagine what their pro pathway might look like. I don’t necessarily think that’s the most likely scenario, but based on what they’ve accomplished with such limited resources in such a small amount of time, I wouldn’t bet against the possibility either.