The Brickyard Battalion offers a fan experience like few others in the NASL

Photo credit: Indy Eleven/Matt Schlotzhauer

Which came first: The Brickyard Battalion supporters group or an NASL club in Indiana’s biggest city?

In most new soccer environments, the answer to the question would be the latter. But Indianapolis is not simply any soccer environment. In three short years, the team has woven itself into the fabric of a burgeoning, millennial-centric city. And as Indy Eleven prepares to make its first appearance in The Championship, the league’s four-team postseason tournament, hosting FC Edmonton in a semifinal match on Nov. 5, the members of the Brickyard Battalion (BYB) and its half-dozen affiliates, are primed and ready to pack the West Goal Stand and Michael A. Carroll Stadium.

“The BYB was formed before the team was even an idea,” said Peter Evans, 29, the director of gameday operations and one of the founders of Slaughterhouse-19, one of the affiliate chapters. “Myself and a couple of friends came up with the name, which is from the Kurt Vonnegut novel ‘Slaughterhouse Five,’ but we use 19 to avoid being sued and also because Indiana is the 19th state in the union. Our idea was that most of us guys love punk, hardcore, and ska, and we want to be something that represents the better values of that music, inclusiveness, and equality.”

BYB, a volunteer group with more than 4,000 card-carrying members, pegs its founding to Aug. 3, 2011, and the name for a potential club was a homage of sorts to auto racing’s Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the home of the Indy 500 – Racing Indy FC. It was not until January 2013 that the NASL welcomed owner Ersal Ozdemir and the club into the league. The team, named for the 11th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment that served with the Union Army during the Civil War, revealed its name and colors on April 25, 2013, the anniversary in 1861 of the regiment’s mustering with the Union Army.

Evans, who grew up in northwest Indiana, close to Chicago, is in charge of constructing the BYB’s tifo displays for games – their painting and execution. Another group of Slaughterhouse-19 members is responsible for the smoke crew while others deal with the selected chants. You can listen to some of the group’s chants here.

“This is part of what I love about Indianapolis, there is no other place I’d rather be, I love it here,” said Evans, who manages a two-sheet ice skating facility in an Indianapolis suburb. “For years, all young people here talked about was moving away, it wasn’t a place people wanted to stick around. That’s changed. Now we have a young city with people who grew up here and don’t want to leave. We wanted to start and be part of a group that supports a beautiful, positive city.

“And I think we set a good standard for what is acceptable and what is not. What’s not is snuffed out pretty quickly. I’ve been to games in other places where that is not the case.”

With several thousand strong at every Indy Eleven home game, the members of the BYB have helped the club evolve into one of the most intensely supported teams in the NASL, averaging more than 8,000 fans a game so far in 2016. The Eleven takes its unbeaten record (12-3-0) at The Mike into Saturday’s final home contest of the regular season, against Puerto Rico FC, and then to the postseason.

“This whole season seems like some wild dream none of us want to be woken up from,” Evans said. “This season at home, all of the wins, has just blown us out of the water. It’s been an amazing turnaround that we’ve watched. We have an amazing team and an amazing coaching staff. All around, it’s been a great year for us, even on the supporters’ side we’ve gotten better. It’s Year 3 and we know what’s expected, what’s normal.

“This year has been incredible. We all want a title. But if we don’t win, we can all look back on the season and think ‘what a year.’”