The Ballard FC Player Pipeline

The recent signing of Peter Kingston and Charlie Gaffney to the Tacoma Defiance brings the total number of former Ballard FC players in the Sounders organization to six, along with defender Leo Burney, goalkeeper Lars Helleren, midfielder Danny Robles, and defender Demian Alvarez. Other former Ballard players have also moved up to professional sides since leaving The Bridges, including Stas Korzeniowski, who was drafted by the Philadelphia Union, and Kojo Dadzie who signed with Gainare Tottori in the Japanese J3 League.

All six players now in the Sounders system were part of the Ballard FC 2023 National Championship squad. 

This is a remarkable promotion record for the young USL2 club, and one that is worth examining both in terms of the work of the club itself and the Seattle soccer landscape as a whole. It turns out that while Seattle soccer systems — including select leagues, college teams, and academy programs — have long been among the best, most competitive in the country, the emergence of Ballard FC and the other Puget Sound USL2 teams has created a vital link connecting players from academies and colleges to the professional level. This all led me to take a deeper look at the overall Seattle soccer landscape and Ballard FC’s role in the game.

A Brief History

If you ever wondered if the Seattle soccer ecosystem is unique, I can save you some time. The answer is a verifiable yes. The question is why? 

It is hard to get good data on youth sports participation going back very far, but using what information is available and reflecting on what was happening in the 1970s in the area, it’s clear that youth soccer began to explode somewhere around 1975-76. Built on the efforts of Walter Schmetzer’s (yes, that Schmetzer) Seattle Youth Soccer Association that began in the late 1960s, the early ‘70s saw an explosion of soccer participation. It isn’t a stretch to suggest that the foresight and organizational efforts of coaches and advocates such as Schmetzer, Rick Crudo and Robin Chalmers laid the groundwork for what is happening today. Players like Michelle Akers, Ian Russell, Jason Farrell, and a guy named Brian Schmetzer all came up through the SYSA and each helped pin soccer to the Seatle sports landscape in their own way. Incidentally, Jason Farrell went on to become the first head coach in Ballard FC’s history. 

On the weekends in the ‘70s, thousands of kids came together under the banner of a variety of local soccer associations to kick the ball around on neighborhood fields, most of which wouldn’t pass as goat pastures by today’s standards.

Back then we (yes, I am that old) played on fields that had “uphill” and “downhill” goals. We played on fields that turned to mud after a morning rain. We played on Centrex, the crushed brick surface that kept the mud at bay but left us picking crushed brick out of our knees and elbows for days and that played alternately like concrete and sand. We thought twice about sliding tackles, because if you were going to make that challenge, you knew you’d be feeling it for days. But we played. In huge numbers. But again, why? It’s not like we were watching soccer on television. To follow top-flight soccer in the 1970s one had to seek out magazines and newspapers that posted Premier League scores. While most other major cities saw their kids playing baseball, basketball, and football, why did Seattle’s kids, tucked away in the return address corner of the country, play soccer?

Exactly why soccer took hold in Seattle so completely would be a full study in its own right, but it may help to recall that in the 1970s and ‘80s, Seattle was a fairly bleak industrial city. The diverse, tech-focused Seattle of today was far off. This was the period of the “Boeing Bust” when layoffs at the aerospace giant led to a 12% unemployment rate in Seattle, which was the highest in the country at the time. When I tell you that everyone worked for Boeing back then, it isn’t much of a stretch. At the same time, neighborhoods like Ballard and West Seattle were still transitioning from industrial economies to the more diversified modern economies of today. 

Folks, it was rough. Readers of a certain age can back me up here. Seattle was going bankrupt. Luckily for us, this grim legacy was also the seed of one of the more important cultural movements this city has produced: grunge rock. But this piece is about soccer…

So the simple answer, and the one that uses the most obvious variable, is that soccer was cheap to play. When you ask why soccer is the world’s game, the answer is essentially the same. Tackle football is incredibly expensive. Basketball relies on limited gym space or good weather for outdoor play. Baseball requires equipment and custom field space (and good weather). You can play a version of soccer on any flat surface with any round ball and in any weather. 

Of course, it’s also true that Seattleites have always been just a little bit counter-culture. I’m open to the fact that we were just cooler than other cities. But I can’t objectively prove that. 

By the late-80s and into the ’90s, Seattle was changing in many ways. The city was seeing an influx of immigrants from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, many of whom were arriving with soccer already embedded in their lives. The numbers tell the story: Seattle’s population grew by 10% in the 90s, with much of that growth driven by immigration. The percentage of people of color in the city jumped from 25% in 1990 to 30% in 2000. Entire neighborhoods — Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley, White Center — were becoming home to vibrant immigrant communities, and with them came a passion for soccer that only deepened the game’s roots in the city.

For a lot of kids in these communities, soccer wasn’t just an after-school activity, it was a piece of home. The game was played in backyards, city parks, parking lots, and in the increasingly crowded youth leagues across the region. These new Seattleites brought styles of play, energy, and a level of cultural connection to the sport that took what was already a growing soccer scene and turned it into something bigger and, I argue, better. Programs like those at El Centro de la Raza helped organize leagues and provide access for kids whose families were building new lives in a new city. This wasn’t just growth; it was transformation. The game didn’t just survive in Seattle, it thrived, fueled by the very people who were making the city their own. 

All of this is to say that we have long had a robust youth soccer culture that grew and changed along with the city and developed the sport’s leaders of today. And it never stopped growing. 

Since all sports are essentially pyramids that require high participation at the lowest levels in order to thrive at the top, this culture fueled the collegiate and professional growth of the sport. More on this later…