That Ottawa Fury FC was even able to kick off a new era of professional soccer in Ottawa last year was impressive in itself.

This year, with TD Place built, Fury is comfortably moved in and in the swing of its second season in the North American Soccer League, team president John Pugh can finally take a bit of a breath and look around, admiring what has turned into a first-class sports operation in the capital.

“Last year was a bit of a whirlwind experience,” said Pugh, an Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group partner but the lead behind bringing Fury to Ottawa to begin with, before it's current professional incarnation.

Fury only got to play the fall season at the club's Lansdowne home, kicking off the spring season at Carleton University while TD Place was receiving its finishing touches.

“Obviously starting off at Carleton wasn't ideal, but our fans had been waiting for many years for pro soccer and we decided that would play last year,” said Pugh. “We got through that and then there was the stadium opening, which was great.”

That first game at TD Place against the famed New York Cosmos set an NASL attendance record, a mark broken this season by the expansion Jacksonville Armada.

“It was great to hold that record, at least for 12 months,” Pugh said. “We'll have to see if we can match it again.”

While the wins didn't come fast and furiously for Fury in its expansion season, Ottawa managed to remain on the outskirts of the playoff conversation well into the fall season.

“Obviously we would like to have done better, but it was late in the fall when we finally gave up hope of getting a playoff spot and started looking towards this season,” Pugh said.

But otherwise, pro soccer's arrival in the capital has to be seen as a success, especially under tight deadlines.

“It was a herculean effort on behalf of everyone,” Pugh said. “It's quite a feat to bring a 24,000 stadium online when you have a deadline you can't miss.”

Coming into Season 2, improving the on-field product was a top priority. With the carefully-selected hiring of Marc Dos Santos going into Fury's first year, Pugh was confident the club's fortunes would change quickly.

Through three league games, including an Ottawa win against 2014 regular season champions Minnesota United FC, those improvements haven't gone unnoticed.

“The first piece in this puzzle was hiring Marc,” said Pugh. “He's a great coach, he's great with the media, has a lot of contacts and speaks four languages. He was the ideal person to put a squad together from scratch. He's very methodical, very organized and he knew the players he wanted from the start.”

With a coach like Dos Santos and new additions like Canadian men's national team captain Julian de Guzman in the mix, not to mention a brand new stadium, Pugh expects it to become even easier to draw high-end players to Ottawa.

“The environment we're providing the players here is second to none,” Pugh said. “We've been able to have the players buy into the vision of the club and where we are. It's an attractive place to play NASL soccer.

“We feel like we have a lot to offer and we were able to, over the summer, attract more good players to build on the core from last year.”

All of those successes will translate into increasingly large crowds showing up at Fury games as the club continues to build interest and accessibility to the game. Those efforts have included the Fury Fanatics program, which has so far signed up 26 local minor soccer clubs, making more than 26,000 young players 14 and under eligible to attend all Fury games for free.

“It's growing,” said Pugh of the uptick in soccer interest in the city. “We've given a lot of thought to how we want to grow our fan base and the Fanatics program has been rapturously received.”