Last year at Soccer ‘n’ Sweet Tea, we interviewed most of the PDL teams in the Carolinas, as well as then-PDL-director Todd Eason.

This year, I thought it would be fun to start our 2018 PDL coverage learning about Virginia’s Lionsbridge FC, the only team in the new South Atlantic division not based in the Carolinas.

As we detailed last week, the South Atlantic shrinks in 2018 to six teams, with five of those being familiar Carolina faces: the Charlotte Eagles, Myrtle Beach Mutiny, Greensboro’s Carolina Dynamo, Durham’s Tobacco Road FC, and Cary’s NCFC U23. Lionsbridge FC will face tough competition from our sides, but it seems like they’re ready for it.

After talking with Mike Vest, Lionsbridge FC Chairman and one of the club’s three co-founders, I’m excited to see what the team brings to the table in 2018. I think you will be too.

Thanks for talking with me, Mike. So what made you guys want to start a team in your community?

I was talking with Kevin Joyce and Dan Chenoweth, two of the other soccer dads in our neighborhood. Our families have seven boys aged 4 to 15 and they all love soccer. We noticed they are involved with the sport in all these different ways except for an important one: They didn’t have high-level soccer on the Peninsula to watch.

We are 30 to 45 minutes away from the nearest Division I school. Christopher Newport University is a really good Division III school here in our market, but there’s not a ton of opportunities to go see high-level soccer unless you drive to Richmond, which is an hour and a half away.

Another motivation was reading about Dennis Crowley’s Kingston Stockade, which led us to Chattanooga, which led us to Asheville, and we kept finding out about all these other teams. We started uncovering a level of soccer that honestly we weren’t that familiar with. We thought this would be a great place for a team, so we started down this road.

The team tent at the Hilton Hustle 5K. (Photo courtesy of Lionsbridge FC)

You just mentioned several NPSL teams. Why was the PDL the right league for Lionsbridge?

We looked very closely at both leagues and have a ton of respect for both the PDL and NPSL. When we talked to college coaches, they were unanimous in saying that, broadly speaking, the better soccer was in the PDL.

The other thing PDL has going for it is the infrastructure that USL provides. PDL does a really good job from a digital media standpoint, promoting their teams and players. Also, the PDL is well organized. We knew we were going to be able to get 14 league games, seven home and seven away. It was important to know we were going to have a good amount of home games.

We want to bring the best experience both on and off the field to our community, and we feel we are going to be able to do that in the PDL. We have a seriously competitive division. Charlotte won the PDL championship, but Myrtle Beach won the division last year. Tobacco Road is right there to recruit players from Duke and UNC. Carolina Dynamo has a long history of players who have gone on to become pros, including the Hermann Trophy winner last year. NCFC is a obviously a professional organization with a strong youth organization base.

So how do you plan on competing in this tough division?

That’s the exciting challenge. We have brought in Chris Whalley to be our first head coach. Chris brings 11 years of NCAA head coaching experience, and he has a fantastic track record of building programs and developing talent. He is building a staff and a roster of players who want to be a part of something special in our community. We are holding open tryouts on Feb. 25.

Why the name Lionsbridge?

There is an actual Lions Bridge here on the Peninsula. The Lions Bridge is a physical place within the Mariners Museum Park, and there are four large lion statues that sit on all four corners of the bridge. The lion that’s in our crest is a representation of one of the four lions.

Those statues stand for our community. They’ve been iconic locations here on the Peninsula since 1932, and 365 days a year there are people that come down to Lions Bridge. They go hiking the trail that goes around the park. There are people that bring the kids, kicking soccer balls, playing with dogs, and it’s just been this community gathering place organically for a really long time. We love what the crest represents and we are capturing that spirit and putting it into a soccer community/festival context.

The club’s crest, which was voted on by more than 600 fans before the team even had a league to play in. (Photo courtesy of Lionsbridge FC)

We aren’t too concerned with having a name that people around the country would know what it is. We are more concerned on tapping into our identity on the Peninsula.

I’ve heard interviews with the guys from Chattanooga FC. One of the things I thought was really just fantastic is people always ask them if they are trying to grow into a higher league, to reach a wider range of audience. They say they are instead trying to grow down, to drill down even deeper into Chattanooga even 10 years later, and we love that.

Our job is to serve our Virginia Peninsula community. If we do a good job of that, we’ll be locally relevant and plenty successful.

So how has the community responded to you guys starting the team?

It has exceeded all our expectations so far. The great thing about starting from scratch is that we’re approachable, and people want to help build a team for our community. We have asked fans to vote for our crest, scarves, food trucks, T-shirt designs, and the home jersey.

There was already a large soccer community here. The landscape is just so fragmented, and it just wasn’t pulled together outside of youth soccer. We have roughly 8,000 kids on the Peninsula playing soccer. We have partnered with seven youth clubs so far with more to come. We hosted World Cup qualifier watch parties at Tradition Brewing Company last fall and had great turn outs.

Chick-fil-A and Riverside Regional Medical Center have jumped in as our top sponsors. We’ll team up with them to host free community youth soccer clinics this summer.

The Peninsula is an enormous military community and some conversations we’ve had with the Air Force, Army, Navy and Coast Guard have led to some unique and exciting opportunities.

We’ve been pretty successful in finding people who see the vision and the value of building something for the community. We have talked with a lot of people and after we tell them what we are doing, we ask if they want to help us build it. A lot of them have raised their hand and said, yeah, we want to be a part of this and want to help bring it to life.

What’s your stadium situation?

We will be playing at POMOCO Stadium at Christopher Newport University. It is a football stadium with natural grass and it sits 3,000. It has a video board, which will be great for fan experience and sponsor activation. There is a track around the field, but the benefit in having it is that it’s going to allow us a place to stage a two-hour community festival before each game. That’s where we’ll put the beer tent, the bounce houses, and the food trucks within the stadium. So while you’re getting refreshments or while your kid is in the bounce house, you can still watch the game from fun perspectives like behind one of the goals.

How can Carolina fans watch when our teams come to visit you?

We’re about three hours from the Triangle, so hopefully visiting fans will make the trip across the state line. The tea is sweet here, too!

If not, all of our home games will be streamed on Facebook Live. All our games kick off at 7 p.m.

Thanks again to Mike Vest for talking with me and letting us learn more about the only non-Carolina team that will be competing in the South Atlantic this season. Even though Lionsbridge FC isn’t a Carolina team, I wish them luck, and I am looking forward to watching them host our Carolina teams this season!