Can Gregory Richardson, shown here scooting past USL-1 player of the year Cristian Arrieta of the Puerto Rico Islanders, lead the RailHawks into a successful new league? (Photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
In an interview Thursday afternoon, Carolina RailHawks president Brian Wellman confirmed that the dissident group of USL-1 club owners known as the Team Owners Association (TOA) would be submitting an application to the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) to form a new league.
“We’ll be submitting an application to USSF for a new league as soon as tomorrow,” Wellman said in a phone interview from Charleston, S.C., where he was meeting with Andrew Bell, president of the USL-1 Charleston Battery, to coordinate the scheduling of friendlies next season.
“Nothing’s changed as far as the teams go,” Wellman said of the composition of the proposed new league. The TOA consists of five former USL-1 clubs (Minnesota , Miami FC, Montreal, Vancouver and Carolina) and three ownership groups (in Atlanta, Tampa Bay and St. Louis).
Wellman suggested that the TOA has heard from other member prospects, as well.* “We have at least one conversation a day with people representing new markets. Even without media coverage [of the dispute], there’s a lot of interest in the league.”
Furthermore, Wellman left open the possibility that the new league might follow the FIFA calendar, playing during the winter months.
If the TOA settles on a winter schedule, Wellman said, “It wouldn’t be this winter. It would start sometime in the summer, and prorate as our fiscal year went along.” Continue reading »
Fans from the 204 Depot after the RailHawks' 2-1 victory over Puerto Rico on Sept. 12. (Photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
Last night the Vancouver Whitecaps and the Montreal Impact advanced to the USL-1 finals with victories in the two-leg semifinal round. Not only will there be an all-Canadian final, but this represents the victory of the No. 5 and No. 7 seeds over the league’s “big four” of Portland, Carolina, Puerto Rico and Charleston that had dominated regular season play.
And there’s an irony at work, too, for the two remaining teams are also members of the dissident USL-1 owners’ group known as the Team Owners Association. Last week, the USL took steps to sever ties with Carolina, Miami FC and Minnesota, by sending emails purporting to release those teams’ players from their contracts, and by removing links to those clubs on the USL Web site.
We spoke with RailHawks president Brian Wellman over the weekend and he clarified a number of issues, including the fact that Vancouver and Montreal have not renewed their franchise agreements with the USL, but were not included in the league’s actions last week simply because they are still playing.
“The day [Montreal and Vancouver] stop playing,” Wellman said, “they’re going to receive everything we received because they’ve not renewed.” That day will be Oct. 18, the day after the second leg of the USL finals.
Wellman also said that the Carolina players are under contract to the RailHawks, rejecting the USL’s position that the players are now free agents. He noted that the players have not been released by the United States Soccer Federation, the sanctioning body for American soccer.
We also discussed the options facing the TOA—including possibly partnering with the MLS—along with the status of the RailHawks player contracts and the surprising fact that, despite the decline in reported attendance, the RailHawks actually experienced a rise in paid attendance this year.
TRIANGLE OFFENSE: It sounds like the USL sent out a note to the three teams (Carolina, Miami, Minnesota) that the players are not under contract anymore. Is that right?
BRIAN WELLMAN: Contractually speaking, while it is true the RailHawks have not renewed their franchise agreement with the USL-1 for the 2010 season, there’s still a chance that could happen-and several other teams haven’t either. There was a specific date when the franchise agreement ran out which meant our contract expired with the USL, but our players are under contract with the RailHawks and they’re still under registration with the federation—the USSF [United States Soccer Federation]. It’s a little misleading because under normal circumstances when you let a player go out of contract he goes onto the list and anyone can talk to him. Under this situation its very unusual that all the TOA teams are getting the same information but at the same time the federation is not releasing any of our players from their registration with our club. It’s a little unfortunate, it may have been a bit of a posturing, scare tactic technique on the part of the league due to the nature of the negotiation. It was unnecessary and unfortunate. We met with our players today [Saturday, Oct. 3] for about an hour and a half to explain the entire situation. Our players are under contract with us, and they’re under registration to the federation whether we play in the USL, in a new league or partnering with the MLS, wherever we play next year, our players are under contract with us. That’s the bottom line. Continue reading »
The confrontation between the new ownership of the United Soccer Leagues and a dissident group of first division owners led by the Carolina RailHawks has escalated a notch.
Three dissident clubs, including the RailHawks, haven’t paid their fees to participate next season. On the USL’s Web site, work has begun to remove links to the RailHawks, as well as to the Miami FC and Minnesota Thunder clubs. On one page, the soccer-ball icons for those three cities has been removed. On others, the clubcrest and mascot names have been removed.
In a just-published post on Inside Minnesota Soccer, blogger Brian Quarstad writes that Minnesota Thunder management confirmed that USL President Tim Holt has sent out an email informing players for Carolina, Miami and MInnesota that they are released from their contracts.
However, it’s not clear that the USL has the authority to do so (unlike the MLS, which owns all player contracts under its single-entity structure). According to Quarstad, Minnesota is taking the position that the league does not have that authority. Quarstad promises to post a copy of Holt’s email later today.
We haven’t been able to get a comment from RailHawks management yet. We’ll keep working on it.
The other bit of news—which Quarstad doesn’t support with a source—is that the other two main dissident owners groups in the Team Owners Association (TOA)—Montreal and Vancouver—have both signed on with the USL-1 for the 2010 season. Vancouver, of course, is headed to the MLS in 2011.
The TOA consists of Carolina, Minnesota, Miami, Vancouver Whitecaps, Montreal Impact, the 2010 expansion club Tampa Bay Rowdies and ownership groups without active teams in Atlanta and St. Louis.
There are now eight current USL-1 clubs that have active links on the USL site. The two expansion clubs, the Tampa Bay Rowdies and FC New York (which is not a TOA member), also have active links.
One club, the Cleveland City Stars, is for sale—sketchy Internet reports of a buyer that will keep them in Cleveland have not been confirmed—but appears to be a USL-1 member in good standing.
The current brinksmanship was not unexpected: After the late August sale of the league to NuRock Soccer Holdings, the TOA, which had seen nearly two years of negotiations to buy the league themselves come to naught, announced a “chill” in relations with the league. In a subsequent interview with Triangle Offense, RailHawks majority owner Selby Wellman laid out the likely scenario in the near future.
But I would expect somewhere in the next 30 days or so they’ll start coming out to us, wanting us to recommit to play in 2010 in USL. If they don’t come to the table with us having the ability to control our league, we won’t play with them.
Finally, Miami-based blogger Kartik Krishnaiyer adds this intriguing tidbit of analysis to the Quarstad post:
The breakaway league that now is likely to be pursued by Minnesota, Miami and Carolina would need to be approved by the USSF and FIFA. These approval processes could take anywhere from a month to several months, leaving the three clubs affected and its potential allies in other markets in the limbo for the start of the 2010 American calender season.
However, if the new league seeks to adhere to the international calender, and begin play after the 2010 World Cup, the three affected clubs, in fact have plenty of time to try and put this new organization together and receive the requisite approvals.
Daniel Paladini, seen Sept. 18 against the Montreal Impact, will need to be on form this afternoon. (photo by Rich Bostwick)
After the RailHawks lost 1-0 Thursday night at Vancouver, they’re in the unenviable position of needing a two-goal victory margin to move on in the USL-1 playoffs without throwing themselves into the crapshoot of a penalty-kick finish. Kickoff is at 5 p.m. at WakeMed Soccer Park. Tickets here.
Against the Whitecaps on Thursday, the RailHawks attack was notably punchless despite having Matthew Delicâte in the striker role for much of the game. Of the seven shots mustered, only a second-half look from close range by John Cunliffe posed any real danger to Whitecaps keeper Jay Nolly.
However, the RailHawks would likely have shown more pace and threat in the final third if Joseph Kabwe and Gregory Richardson had been selected for the match. Although the USLLive.com commentators speculated that Richardson, a Guyanese international, had encountered visa problems, he did not make the trip (nor did Kabwe, Sallieu Bundu or Amir Lowery).
What’s apparent, then, is that coach Martin Rennie decided to keep some of his best legs in reserve for this afternoon’s return leg. He’ll need all the pace he can put on the field: The RailHawks have only been in one PK tiebreaker this season, and it was a dismal one, the sour finish at the end of Wilmington’s shocking equalizer at the last gasp of extra time in the U.S. Open Cup second round.
Prior to Thursday’s match, I looked at the RailHawks’ record of scoring goals on the road against the six other playoff teams. I discovered that the ’Hawks had been notably unprolific in this regard, notching only four goals in 10 games (although they extracted 10 points from those contests).
Unhappily, the RailHawks would not change this pattern against Vancouver last Thursday.
However, I got an interesting note from Tim Candon, RailHawks blogger and a far more astute observer than I am, in which he argued that I was paying insufficient attention to the quality of the RailHawks’ performances on the road. With his permission, I’m publishing his response here:
I like your deeper look at the RailHawks road record, but I will counter by saying look at more than just the results. Look at the performance, too, because that’s the focus for Martin. If the performance is up to snuff, the result takes care of itself.
Of the road matches against the other USL-1 playoff teams:
1. PORTLAND: The RailHawks got screwed in the first game. Josh Gardner was pulled down in the box in the 2nd minute. Not only was a penalty not awarded, but the ball was cleared off the line as it was about to trickle into the goal. If that call goes the other way, it’s a completely different game. Continue reading »
Gregory Richardson made his RailHawks debut against the Whitecaps in July, scoring a goal that was later ruled to be an own goal. (photo by Rich Bostwick)
It’s Thursday, Sept. 24, and the RailHawks playoff run begins tonight in Vancouver. Tune in at 10:30 p.m. to www.usllive.com for the Webcast, and/or follow the tweets from the RailHawks’ Tim Candon @RailHawksFC. I published a short print preview in the Indythis week (with a great picture of Gregory Richardson during his dominating first-half performance against Puerto Rico).
We also heard coach Martin Rennie on 850 the Buzz yesterday. While it was great to hear the RailHawks featured on a local AM sports chat show, the quality of the interview was a little discouraging.
The host, David Glenn, averred that he’d been attending games and even mentioned that he himself is a coach of his kid’s U-7 team. Unfortunately, he didn’t ask Rennie a single tactical question, nor were any RailHawks players’ names mentioned in the interview.
There was, however, a question about how Rennie’s American wife, Amy, liked living in Scotland, but no question about the experience and quality Scottish Premier League veteran Greg Shields has brought to the back line. (Shields, by the way, was named to the 24th and final USL-1 team of the week and, remarkably, he’s the 18th RailHawk so honored this season.)
After a discussion of soccer’s potential for growth in America and an amusing recounting of Rennie’s encounter with a water bottle in Montreal, Glenn inquired about the family friendliness of WakeMed Soccer Park. Rennie dutifully enumerated all of the children’s activities available, along with the half-time shows and the promotional games. It was as if he was being asked to justify a night out to something intrinsically uninteresting—a soccer game.
Questions about Matthew Delicâte’s subbing (or Matthew Watson’s broken leg)? Nope. Questions about Rennie’s strategy in a two-leg playoff? Nope. Questions about matching up with Vancouver’s Charles Gbeke and Marlon James? Nope. Questions about the difficulty the RailHawks have in scoring on the road (more on that below)? Nada.
The whole interview was quite pleasant, and Glenn was genuinely enthusiastic and not condescending. I’m sure the RailHawks are happy to have the radio exposure, but we await more mature, sophisticated soccer coverage from the area’s broadcast sports media. Rennie himself said on the program that increased media interest is key to soccer’s growth in America–and he told the Indy’s Chris Gaffney as much back in March: “To tell the truth, I hope that the press becomes critical here, because that means they’re interested.”
In our continuing effort to, ahem, do just that, we recently took a closer look at the RailHawks’ road record against the six other teams in the playoffs. Although the RailHawks’ overall road record is a strong 5-5-5, for 20 points in 15 games, the team has had more difficulty against the playoff teams. This is to be expected, of course, but we thought we’d look at the numbers. Continue reading »
Carolina RailHawks majority owner Selby Wellman (Photo courtesy of RailHawks)
On Monday, we spoke with Selby Wellman, majority owner of the Carolina RailHawks. Wellman is also the spokesman for the Team Owners Association, which has announced a “chill” in its relations with the USL and declared that it will pursue aggressively all options—including the formation of a new league—as a solution to establishing the owner-controlled league it says is vital to the success of their clubs.
Wellman gave us more details about the buildup to the sale of the league to NuRock Soccer Holdings (a group unknown to him and his fellow owners), and about why he and his fellow club owners think an owner-controlled league is vital. He suggested that the declining attendance experienced by the RailHawks and other clubs is an issue of poor-to-nonexistent league marketing and reiterated that the owners have decided it’s time to “take control of our own destiny.”
He noted that the USL-1 clubs make single-year commitments to participate in the league, and that in a month or so, the league will approach the owners about committing for next season. But, “If they don’t come to the table with us having the ability to control our league, we won’t play with them,” Wellman says.
For background on the sale, see posts here and here. Also, Kartik Krishnaiyer of majorleaguesoccertalk.com and others are working on a multipart, in-depth series on the USL sale. Here’s today’s Part III.
Triangle Offense: Last Wednesday, after the Miami game, I spoke with Brian [Wellman, the team president] and he said there was nothing but silence coming from the USL about where they were on the sale. Did it all come down Thursday? Did it catch everybody by surprise?
Selby Wellman: Nike called the group in St. Louis that we were teamed up with to buy the league and told them that ‘we had changed our mind and we were selling it to another group’ after a month of negotiations. And the issue is they sold it to a group, basically it’s a non-team, non-USL-1 team entity, it’s a large real estate developer in Atlanta along with his partner who owns a PDL team. So we were upset with that, and we didn’t think it was right, because we’ve been working for almost two years [inaudible] and Nike to restructure this league to where it would have the ownership control like all other sports leagues around the world. The USL did not promote itself, did not do anything at all that a league should do. So we wanted to buy it and take it over. Continue reading »
John Cunliffe, skimming on the Whitecaps (photo by Rich Bostwick)
The RailHawks and the Vancouver Whitecaps traveled an aggregate total of 10,000 miles in four days to emerge with two points apiece. Following Saturday’s 0-0 stalemate in Vancouver’s Swangard Stadium, the two squads battled fatigue and humidity Tuesday night in Cary for a 1-1 draw. After falling behind on a 66th-minute Vancouver goal, late sub Andriy Budnyy settled a ball from John Cunliffe and scored to salvage the draw in the 87th minute.
The thing of it is, it was a decent result for both sides. Vancouver got two points from a tough opponent to keep them in the playoff hunt. And, despite the results, the RailHawks are still in a strong second-place position—which some might consider a better prize than first place, with the first-round playoff bye that comes with it.
Right now, Portland is in the driver’s seat for regular season title, with 48 points to Carolina’s 44, with both teams having seven games to play. Here’s how the playoff contenders stack up, ranked by points-per-game. The top seven make the playoffs.
Luke Kreamalmeyer (in orange) battles Portland's David Hayes on June 11 at WakeMed. (photo by Rich Bostwick)
The USL-1 Carolina RailHawks are flying high on a league run of six victories in their last seven outings. The news only gets better as we see signs that midfielder Matt Watson—who hasn’t really gotten uncorked this season—may be ready to return to the field.
They have a tough eight-day stretch ahead, with a Tuesday home game against Vancouver sandwiched between away matches in Vancouver tonight and Rochester next weekend. Still, they’re keeping up with the blistering pace at the top of the table, matching Portland victory for victory.
(In a subject for another day, it’s worth noting that the bottom of the table is a dungeon of futility. Austin and Cleveland are out of contention for the playoffs with 14 and 13 points, respectively, while Minnesota just picked up three points with just their fourth victory of the season, to bring them to 18 points, seven behind Miami. Compare this ineptitude to the points totals for the bottom four of last year’s table: 37; 34; 34; 31. Carolina had 37 and missed the playoffs. Three guesses who had 31. Give up? Portland.)
Things are different in Portland this year, though. The first-place Timbers have only lost once at home in PGE Park, where attendance regularly approaches 10,000. Their opponent then was the MLS Seattle Sounders, in a US Open Cup third round game. Continue reading »
RailHawks keeper Eric Reed surely didn’t intend for his endorsement of rock-solid—and taciturn—defender Jeremy Tolleson in team blogger Tim Candon’s profile, posted today, to sound backhanded:
“He’s so dependable,” said goalkeeper Eric Reed, who played with Tolleson last year in Cleveland, too. “A lot of teams, because he’s not a physical presence back there like [Mark] Schulte or Brad [Rusin], you don’t think a lot of him. Teams will put forwards directly on him, and Jeremy will handle them no problem. You can count on him 99.999 percent of the time. Very rarely will he ever do something that will hurt you.”
Obviously, if defenders were perfect, they wouldn’t concede any goals. In fact, the RailHawks have given up 13, the second-fewest in the USL-1. For his part, Tolleson has been an unsung hero, fortuitously stepping in after missing the first few weeks of the season due to injury. He made his season debut in the same game that saw the towering Jack Stewart go down with a broken fibula. Tolleson, who played with coach Martin Rennie in Cleveland the last two seasons and with the PDL Cascade Surge before that, was expected to see time at left back, but the Stewart injury moved him to the middle. Candon’s appreciation is here.
Elsewhere in RailHawksiana today, the N&O’s Rachel Ullrich has a nice piece about the RailHawks’ foreign players that performs the useful service of nailing down which players are officially foreign, under USL rules, and which are not. (In the latter category: Sallieu Bundu, Andriy Budnyy, Gavin Glinton, Caleb Patterson-Sewell.) This story, by the way, ran above the fold on the front sports page. Kudos to the N&O for giving Ullrich space this summer. She’ll be missed when her internship ends.
The RailHawks are back in third place after victories by the Charleston Battery and the Portland Timbers. They have three games in hand on Charleston and one on Portland. They travel to Vancouver for a game against the Whitecaps Saturday, Aug. 15, at 10 p.m. EDT. Watch it on USLLive.com.
Lost in the hubbub over player-of-the-week Gregory Richardson’s nifty hat trick last Sunday was the fact that his first goal with the RailHawks, scored against the Vancouver Whitecaps July 17, was what the Brits call a “dubious goal.” The English Premier League, in fact, has a Dubious Goals Committee that is charged with reviewing goals in which the identity of the scorer is in dispute.
In the Whitecaps game, Richardson took a lay-off from John Cunliffe and juked his way to the byline before crossing. Before his ball could reach Cunliffe at the near post or Sallieu Bundu at the back, it deflected off Vancouver midfielder and captain MartinNash and squirted through the legs of keeper Jay Nolly.
According to Tim Candon, the RailHawks were alerted after that game that Richardson might lose his goal; it’s now official. It must be said, however, that this particular goal was much easier to review for the fact that the game was broadcast by Fox Soccer Channel. Good luck getting this clear, professional coverage on USLLive.com.
By the way, the large Vancouver defender with the dreadlocks that you see at the end of the play, putting his hands on his knees? That’s Wesley Charles, a longtime Irish club pro who was in his second season with the Whitecaps. I say “was” because the club released him last week after a pattern of violent incidents, including this one (scroll to 7:25 mark):
Kyle on "UNC holds off pesky NCCU with big second half, awaits selection committee": Mike Potter does Triangle sports fans a wonderful service by providing a unique perspective of events that may not otherwise receive media coverage. Thanks Mike for all you have done and continue to do in your outstanding career as a journalist and an ambassador for the Triangle.
caniacgirl on "Peters and pipes pickpocket a peck of prickly Penguins": I absolutely love the headline! Games like this one definitely reignite the little bit of playoff hope I have left in me. It should be an interesting few weeks that's for sure.
Greg Nccu Student on "Miller leads NCCU to 11th victory": There are a lot of Rumors on Campus about Joanna Miller leaving NCCU next year. Please Coach Robinson, We need to keep this player from gong to another College.
