Rob Salvatore slid into the parking space at MUSC Health Stadium, got out of his rental car, stretched, and took in the scenery.

It was one of those perfect spring days in the Lowcountry. A cloudless blue March sky overhead, the smothering heat of the summer still weeks away. Salvatore had flown into Charleston from New York City the night before and wanted to see the stadium on Daniel Island first thing that morning.

His March 2019 visit wasn’t the first time Salvatore had been to Charleston. He had been coming to the Lowcountry with his family since he was a kid. His parents owned a home on Hilton Head Island, which the family had dubbed ‘Salvatore South’.

Salvatore, 44, was in Charleston along with close friend Brandon Lieb on a fact-finding mission about the viability of becoming the new owner of the Charleston Battery soccer club. Salvatore had spent the previous decade serving as CEO of Tongal, a venture-backed community driven creative platform that he co-founded. He left the company at the end of 2018 and was looking for a new challenge.

A lifelong sports fan, Salvatore had spent the best parts of his childhood going to New York Giants and Yankees games. He wanted to own his own team and had his sights on the Charleston Battery.

The club had been on the market for nearly a year and showed up on Salvatore’s radar in November 2018. He was definitely interested in purchasing the USL soccer club. The only problem was that MUSC Health Stadium wasn’t going to be the home of the team in 2020. After nearly 20 years, the facility was about to be sold by Battery owner Eric Bowman.

Unless Bowman and Salvatore could find a new venue for the team the future of the Charleston Battery – the oldest continuously running professional soccer club in the United States – was in jeopardy of closing its doors or, at the very least, going dark for the 2020 season.

The Charleston Battery and Salvatore needed a partner.

Enter College of Charleston.

Bowman, Salvatore and the school eventually hammered out a deal to keep the club in the area, playing its home matches at Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant. The club broke ground on a new stadium, expanding the seating capacity of Ralph Lundy Field to more than 3,900 seats for the club’s home opener against Philadelphia Union II on March 28.

Without the collaboration of College of Charleston, Salvatore and Bowman, the future of the Charleston Battery could have been much different. The Battery will open its 2020 USL season — Sunday on the road against Atlanta United 2 — in a different city, playing its matches in a different venue and with a new owner.

“In many ways, Rob Salvatore and the College of Charleston saved the Charleston Battery,” said USL President Jake Edwards, who played for the club from 2002-03. “I think all soccer fans in the United States owe them a debt of gratitude.”

'We’ve got to do this'

When Salvatore rolled into the parking lot at MUSC Health Stadium a year ago this month, he wasn’t sure what to expect.

He had seen plenty of images of the nation’s first soccer-specific stadium, but he had made a point to come when the facility was empty. He took a photo of the field through the East gate that he still has on his iPhone today.

“I thought it was a pretty cool venue,” Salvatore said. “I intentionally came when there wasn’t a game so I could understand the dynamics and the geography of the area. The branding of the stadium was better than I thought. It looked like an intimate home, but I could also see why they struggled to draw people because there wasn’t much else around.”

Salvatore and Lieb spent the morning touring the facility.

They left Daniel Island and headed downtown to check out Stoney Field and Johnson Hagood Stadium. At the time, Bowman had been in negotiations with the City of Charleston and The Citadel in search of a new home for the club.

In March 2019, Bowman was in the process of selling MUSC Health Stadium – the club’s home for two decades – to Holder Properties for $6.4 million. The deal would be announced in May. By the spring of 2019, interest in the club had dwindled along with attendance.

Longtime supporters of the club were in open rebellion.

“It is sad that the stadium will be no more and had I known this would have been the outcome when I sold the team in 2016, I would never have done so,” said former Charleston Battery owner Tony Bakker in an email after the Daniel Island facility that he built was sold.

After selling the stadium, Bowman said he wanted to move the team back to Stoney Field, which had served as the Battery’s first home from 1993-99. Stoney Field, which is used by Burke High School and the City of Charleston Recreation Department, was undergoing renovations and wouldn’t be ready for use until the fall of 2020.

The Battery then shifted its focus to playing at Johnson Hagood Stadium, The Citadel’s 11,000-seat facility across the street from Stoney Field. However, issues with the installation of new turf on field for the 2020 Citadel football season forced the Battery to look elsewhere.

He targeted the College of Charleston’s Ralph Lundy Field at Patriot’s Point. Again, he saw the potential in the site. It was close to downtown – an easy Uber or Lyft ride over the Ravenel Bridge – and in Mount Pleasant, one of the state’s soccer hotbeds.

But it needed a facelift.

“We had to find a new home,” Salvatore said. “I thought if we could get a facility like MUSC Health Stadium and put it in the right place, then, yes, I was in.”

Salvatore’s next stop was to travel to Kentucky and meet with the USL's Louisville City FC to talk with the club’s ownership group and front office about the league.

“We got the lay of the land from the ownership group,” Salvatore said. “For me, that’s when the deal started to get real.”

In May, Salvatore returned to Daniel Island for his first Battery home match. Attendance had been dropping since Bowman had raised ticket prices two years earlier. The days of getting more than 4,000 fans at the stadium were long gone. Late goals from Zieko Lewis and Nicque Daly produced a 2-2 draw against Pittsburgh.

“It was a small crowd, probably a thousand people,” Salvatore said. “You could tell though that the supporters were really into it. But the stadium lacked energy and an identity. I wasn’t here during the glory days when the place was rockin’ and rollin’. I thought if you could get a couple of thousand people in this place, it would be pretty exciting.”

Later that month, he and his father, Lou, went to the USL headquarters in Tampa to meet with league officials.

“We got a real sense of the vision for the league and what they were working for,” Salvatore said.

On the drive back to Hilton Head, the two discussed their options.

“That’s when it got emotional for me,” Salvatore said. “I was so stoked after meeting with the USL. That’s when it went from ‘We want to do this’ to ‘We’ve got to do this’.

'Christmas Came Early'

Selling the Charleston Battery and moving the club from Daniel Island to Patriots Point wasn’t a simple transaction. There were too many entities involved to get a deal done quickly.

First there was the Patriots Point Development Authority, which is run by the state of South Carolina, and owns the land. Then there’s the town of Mount Pleasant and finally College of Charleston, which has had a footprint on Patriots Point for almost two decades.

College of Charleston leases the property at Patriots Point, which is home to its baseball, softball and tennis teams, from the Patriots Point Development Authority (PPDA).

Over at College of Charleston, Paul Patrick, who is the chief of staff to school president Andrew Hsu, called the school's athletic director, Matt Roberts, about the possibility of having the Battery play its matches at Patriots Point.

“We had had some early conversations with Eric about Patriots Point, but he had his sights set on Stoney or The Citadel,” Patrick said. “Eric really wanted that downtown demographic. I told him to keep us in mind if things didn’t work out. When I saw in the newspaper that Eric had sold the stadium on Daniel Island, I called Matt and asked him what he thought.”

Roberts loved the idea of having a partnership with a professional franchise. Since his hiring in 2016, Roberts had been trying to jump start capital projects at Patriots Point to enhance the facilities for all their athletic teams in Mount Pleasant.

Bowman and College of Charleston reached an agreement to host matches for their annual preseason tournament – Carolina Challenge Cup – that featured teams from Major League Soccer. Roberts was hoping for a longer term commitment.

“We made it known to Eric that we wanted him to look at us not only for the (Carolina) Challenge Cup, but for the 2020 regular season,” Roberts said.

Running out of options, Bowman agreed.

They still needed to get the okay from Bill Hall, the chairman of the PPDA, and the town of Mount Pleasant. Getting Michael Bennett, a major hotel owner and developer around Patriots Point, to come on board wouldn’t hurt either.

“We thought it was a great idea and a great addition to the city of Mount Pleasant,” said Mount Pleasant Town Administrator Eric DeMoura, who was a middle infielder for the Clemson baseball program in the mid-1990s. “To have a professional franchise, our first in the city, like the Charleston Battery was a dream come true. Win-win is an overused expression, but this was truly a wonderful thing for all parties involved. Christmas came early.”

There was one small snag. Since everyone involved in the transaction knew that Bowman was going to sell the team, they wanted to meet the prospective new owner before any contract was completed.

“We knew the league was really pressuring Eric to get a deal done, sooner rather than later,” Patrick said. “We were working on the deal with Eric, but we also knew we needed to meet with Rob to get his take on everything.”

In September, Salvatore met with all parties involved.

“The more we talked with Rob, the more President Hsu was convinced that this was the right way to go,” Patrick said. “Rob wants to bring back the mystique of the club to what it had been in the past. All of our anxieties were put to rest the more we got to know the plans of the ownership group. Rob’s vision is very community oriented. We know Rob is going to do it the right way because he’s immersed himself in the community.”

A two-year deal – with an option for a third season – to bring the Charleston Battery to Patriots Point was finalized in early October. Salvatore bought the team soon thereafter.

“This deal doesn’t get done without Eric Bowman,” Roberts said. “Obviously, we needed to meet with Rob and find out what his plans were, but Eric got it to the finish line.”

Salvatore is quick to deflect any credit toward College of Charleston. Without their cooperation, the Charleston Battery might still be looking for a home.

“Look, I’m no savior,” Salvatore said. “This doesn’t get done without College of Charleston. They stepped up with an urgency that was needed at that moment. If the deal doesn’t happen, I’m not sure what happens to the Charleston Battery. Do they find another venue? Do they go dark for a year or do they just fold? I don’t know. I just know they made this happen.”

There were certainly more than a few bumps along the way. There were times when the major parties involved wondered if pen would ever get put to paper and finalize a deal. Salvatore never lost faith.

“You try to take a linear path with every deal,” Salvatore said. “It’s probably never going to be that easy. Eric and I always joke that if it was just us talking about the sale of the club, we’d have gotten a deal done in an afternoon. Look, it was a complex transaction with a lot of moving parts. I think the reason we got the deal done as quickly as did was because everyone involved wanted it to happen.”

Long-term plans

It's another bright March morning and Rob Salvatore stands on the South end Ralph Lundy Field, pointing west toward the Ravenel Bridge and the Charleston peninsula.

Construction crews in the background are scrambling to get the field and the stadium in shape for the team’s home opener just three weeks away on March 28. The locker rooms are being finished but the stands that will make up the largest section on the West side have yet to arrive on site.

Salvatore is carefully studying the architectural drawings to try and orient himself on the field.

He is in his element. Salvatore has always been drawn to the creative side of projects – whether they be building tech companies or soccer stadiums. It’s why he gave up soccer just before high school and took up art.

Salvatore is deeply involved with the stadium construction, overseeing most of the details. He has leaned heavily on Turner Construction, where his father is a board member. Turner Construction is currently building SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, which will be home to the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers and L.A. Rams. The company also did renovations at Clemson's Littlejohn Coliseum and Memorial Stadium.

Salvatore knows there will be Battery supporters who will long to return to Daniel Island and MUSC Health Stadium (formerly Blackbaud Stadium), but he thinks the move to Patriots Point is the right one.

He’s not alone.

“I get that some fans might feel nostalgic for Blackbaud Stadium, I feel it too in some respects,” Edwards said. “But once you look past that, it’s an absolute no-brainer for the Battery to move closer to the Charleston peninsula. Patriots Point will help inject new energy into the club, it will attract a younger fan base, and it will give more people access to the club locally. It just makes too much sense.”

Salvatore considers this a relaunch of the Charleston Battery brand. A new logo was released in January.

“We wanted to bring the club back to market in a new way,” Salvatore said. “We’re hoping this will be a renaissance for the team.”

Salvatore and College of Charleston are hoping the current three-year agreement leads to a long-term deal.

“We want to have a more permanent solution for everyone,” Roberts said. “This is a trial period, but I think everyone realizes the potential of what we can build together at Patriots Point.”

Roberts believes this will help jumpstart new construction at Patriots Point for the school's baseball, softball and tennis teams.

“We have an aging 20-year-old facility on Patriots Point,” Roberts said. “We have a tremendous footprint down there, but we need locker rooms, weight rooms, medical facilities for the baseball, softball, soccer and tennis teams. Hopefully with this domino falling with Rob and the Charleston Battery, other dominoes will start to fall, too.”

Salvatore has a vision for success on and off the field for the Battery. The team has made the USL playoffs every season since 2011.

“If we are playing meaningful matches in late September and October, then I’d see that as a success,” Salvatore said. “Would I love to sell out every game and capture the hearts and minds of everyone in the city? Of course. This is a foundational year for us. If we are drawing more fans regularly at the end of the season than at the beginning of the season, I’d view that as a success off the field.”

Any success the club will have in the future can be directly traced back to the collaborative effort of Salvatore and College of Charleston.