While San Antonio FC supporters’ groups the Crocketeeers, Mission City Firm and 210 Alliance were working to create a more unified front this offseason, Steve Arters and Danielle Gawronski saw an opportunity to do something bigger for soccer fans across Texas.

The idea was to bring the state’s four USL Championship teams (SAFC, Rio Grande Valley FC, Austin Bold FC and El Paso Locomotive FC) together in a supporter-driven cup competition, similar to the Southern Derby and Four Corners Cup.

Arters, who helped in the founding of The Crocketeers in 2009, sat in on meetings between the three supporters’ groups and the SAFC front office as they discussed various plans for the 2019 season, including moving into a single supporters’ section of Toyota Field. While assisting with those efforts, Arters also used the face-time to bounce some framework ideas for the cup off everyone involved.

“At some point, somebody had to take the idea and start to drive it,” Arters said in a phone interview last week. “I called Danielle [Gawronski] and said ‘Hey, would you wanna work together on this Cascadia Cup-like concept idea?’ She said yeah, and we started working on it almost right away.”

Gawronski, a fellow SAFC fan who created Las Rojas FC – a local supporters’ group dedicated to women – immediately got to work. She began generating ideas for a name and got in touch with supporters’ groups from Austin, El Paso and Rio Grande Valley to make sure they would all be on-board.

“We’re chatting with them a couple times a day on Twitter about different things,” said Gawronski. “Right now, we’re in the process of finalizing the design of the logo. So, we’ve all had a couple suggestions on what we wanted, what we were looking for and things like that.”

After about two months of planning, the fruits of their labor paid off as they announced Copa Tejas would begin in the 2019 season.