Kickers Director of Soccer and Head Coach Leigh Cowlishaw is optimistic about the latest change, calling USL PRO a “financially viable model that, long term, is set up to be a lot more stable than in the past.” Cowlishaw was born in Burton upon Trent, England but has been a Richmond resident since crossing the Atlantic to play for the University of Richmond in 1989. He’s kept his Burtonian accent, but is fully fluent in American soccer lingo, as you would expect from a man who has been involved with the Richmond Kickers ever since their inaugural 1993 season. Cowlishaw was part of the US Open Cup winning team of 1995, and has been head coach since 1999.
That past instability Cowlishaw refers to means more than just the variously acronymed competitions the Kickers have competed in. It’s also about rival organizations failing to make ends meet. There’s a particularly dramatic example to be found just two hours east of the Kickers on Interstate 64, where the Virginia Beach Mariners franchise was terminated by United Soccer Leagues in 2006 and dissolved in 2007 after discovering their supposedly wealthy owner—who had big plans for the team—was actually bankrupt.
So what keeps the Kickers on target while other organizations have careened so spectacularly out of bounds? Cowlishaw says the Kickers made a conscious decision to become more than just a professional sports team. “The reality was with the crowds that were coming to the games it wasn’t going to work long term with that being the core business,” he says. So the Kickers decided to invest in the Richmond and Central Virginia community through youth soccer and charitable works.
“Where that really started making a difference was in the late 1990s when we had a strategic meeting--many, many meetings, over the space of several months--where we recognized that the community really appreciated these professional players being in town and playing, but also helping with programming, instructions and youth soccer camps. There was huge demand for that and so we took that model and created, in my mind, a hybrid of the old European model of a soccer club, with a pro team all the way down to youth teams, but also took in the very important positives of a conventional traditional US youth soccer club.”
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