"But I would not listen to them, and shouted out to him in my rage, 'Cyclops, if any one asks you who it was that put your eye out and spoiled your beauty, say it was the valiant warrior Ulysses, son of Laertes, who lives in Ithaca.'”—Homer’s The Odyssey

Four years ago, Billy Schuler was the latest Next Big Thing. After missing his 2010 college season recovering from surgery to repair a subluxed shoulder, the Allentown, N.J. native scored 16 goals and added five assists as a redshirt junior to lead the North Carolina Tar Heels to the 2011 College Cup championship. A month later, the first-team All-American and Hermann Trophy finalist was offered a Generation adidas contract by Major League Soccer (MLS) to leave school early and enter the league’s SuperDraft, where predictions had him perhaps the first overall pick.

Instead, Schuler eschewed a multiyear deal with MLS and signed with Hammarby IF, a venerable Swedish soccer club based in Stockholm. Hammarby had recently hired former U.S. international (and Tar Heel) Gregg Berhalter as their manager, only the second native American ever named the full-time coach of a European club.

Two days after arriving in Sweden in January 2012, Schuler gave an interview to this writer for INDY Week:

“MLS is great, but it’s Europe that has the most potential,” Schuler said. “I’m at Hammarby now and I could stay here for the rest of my career or maybe I get picked up by another team. Who knows? Maybe I come back to MLS after a failed stint with the team. I don’t know … But, I feel like there’s a lot more potential in Europe to do something, and do it for a living, than maybe in MLS.”

“I regretted a bit saying that,” Schuler says today. “It definitely raised some eyebrows.”

Two months ago, Schuler signed with the Carolina RailHawks, bringing full circle a four-year soccer odyssey that has traversed Europe, MLS, the USL and now the North American Soccer League (NASL).

Siren song of Europe

Berhalter was Hammarby’s first non-Swedish manager since 1925, and the club and its rabid fan base were eager to climb out of the second division Superettan and back into the first division Allsvenskan league.

“I had Gregg as my coach, which looking back was huge having an American coach” Schuler says. “Over there, you usually have a European coach who doesn’t wait for you. If you don’t know the language, you’re learning on the fly. You have to integrate yourself into the culture right away.”

Schuler describes his two years at Hammarby as “a roller coaster.” He dealt with several early obstacles off the pitch: “Dealing with the language barrier, six months out of the year it gets dark at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I got thrown into an apartment by myself without knowing anybody.”

Still, everyone around the club appeared eager for Berhalter to apply a disciplined American influence to steady the ship. Schuler responded well early, getting some starts and notching his first goal early in the season. But as Schuler’s minutes declined midway through his rookie year, he split time with Nacka FF, Hammarby’s developmental team, to find some much-needed playing time.

The amazing atmosphere around Hammarby’s home games was everything Schuler hoped, even when matches were interrupted due to fighting in the grandstands. But as Hammarby struggled to earn promotion back to the first division, the fans’ passion spilled over in uneasy ways.

“I remember games where we were locked in the locker room afterwards because the fans wouldn’t let us leave after a bad loss or three losses in a row,” Schuler says. “We would have to leave the locker room out of the back, which led into the city. Fans were standing and kind of blocking us from getting to our cars, Our security thought it was too dangerous for us to leave at the time. So we had to stay in our locker room for an hour or two, and Gregg finally went out there and had to speak with them because they wouldn't leave.”

Sometimes Schuler personally felt the fans’ ire.

“People come up to you at dinner or on the street, and tell you that you’re not good or go home,” Schuler recounts. “It would be 10 o’clock at night, and they’d say, ‘Why aren’t you training or practicing right now?’ … You think, ‘I don’t know if I want to go out on the streets tonight.’

“When you have fans like that, it’s great and they want to be a part of everything and know what’s happening. But it was very extreme and I’ve never experienced that before.”

Hammarby finished fourth in the Superettan in 2012. The club sacked Berhalter midway through the 2013 campaign, replacing him with Swede and former midfielder Thomas Dennerby.

“I know when the new Swedish coach came in,” Schuler says, “me and the other American guy on the team, Baggio Husidić, were kind of left out. It felt like the club was going back to its Swedish roots.”

After the season, Hammarby declined to re-sign either American player. Husidić joined the LA Galaxy. With two goals in 26 appearances over two seasons, Schuler returned to America for his delayed arrival to MLS.

Between Scylla and Charybdis

Only two MLS teams entered a weighted lottery to determine where Schuler would play in 2014, with the San Jose Earthquakes winning his rights,

“Luckily, I was able to go to MLS because for two years I was out of sight, out of mind over in Sweden” Schuler says. “I was two years older, and I only scored a few goals over there. So [MLS] teams were taking chances on me if they were going to bring me in.”

Despite showing well during preseason, Schuler found himself down the depth chart on a club already stocked with forwards: Chris Wondolowski, Alan Gordon, Adam Jahn, Steven Lenhart and Mike Fucito. Meanwhile, San Jose’s new affiliation arrangement with the USL’s Sacramento Republic offered little alternative for playing time.

“Their coach, Preki, was going to play his guys and they were very serious about their team in USL,” Schuler says. “[San Jose] wanted to send guys there a day before games to slot in, and he wouldn’t do that.”

As a result, Schuler found himself in a playing purgatory where he wasn’t getting minutes at any level.

“There was a four month period in San Jose where nothing was happening for me,” Schuler says. “I wasn’t getting games, I wasn’t subbing in, sometimes I wasn’t on the bench. I really didn’t understand it. I was performing well in practice, I was scoring. But after a while, you’re like, ‘What is going on?’ You talk to the coach, who only says how good you’re playing.

“That starts to hit your confidence, and when it goes for a long time like that, you fall into a rut. I never knew what was going on, and I never felt like I had straight answers.”

Earthquakes manager Mark Watson was fired before the season ended. The club informed Schuler after the season that it wasn’t bringing him back next year, either.

After an unsuccessful trial with the Colorado Rapids prior to the 2015 MLS season, Schuler had few options. He stayed in contact with Dewan Bader, the RailHawks’ longtime assistant and Schuler’s former coach with the U23 Cary Clarets when Schuler was at UNC. But roster and budget constraints stymied a move to Carolina.

Instead, Schuler lept at an offer from Whitecaps FC 2, the USL reserve team for the Vancouver Whitecaps. Schuler saw the move as a chance to finally find much-needed playing time while still tethered to an MLS organization.

Once again, Schuler began his tenure with a new team well, notching a couple of goals early in the season. But the reality of playing for a USL club owned and operated by a MLS parent soon came into focus.

“I got stuck between [the Whitecaps] wanting to push their academy guys and wanting them to play, and the MLS guys who came down (to get minutes) … There were long times between starts, because Caleb Clarke or Erik Hurtado would come down to play. You’re getting instructions from the MLS team to send guys down to play.”

Now 25 years old, Schuler was sandwiched between these two forces. Although he made 26 appearances for Whitecaps 2, he had only 9 starts and 890 minutes.

“On paper it looked great,” Schuler confesses. “I’ll go with [Whitecaps 2], play really well and hopefully get a chance with the [MLS] team. But it worked out that I didn’t get as many games.

“I knew after I left [Whitecaps 2] that I didn’t want to be a part of a USL team owned by a MLS team in the same area. The atmosphere of the team wasn’t about winning. It was just about getting academy guys or first-team guys games. There were a few of us who were there to win and wanted that team environment. But that wasn’t how it was.”

Back to Ithaca

“I knew after the Whitecaps 2 experience what I wanted: to be on a team that wanted to win every game,” Schuler asserts. “That wanted to compete and had professional players instead of where things are given to you and it’s about development and not about winning a championship.”

That desire rekindled conversations between Schuler and Bader, who saw a role for the former UNC star on the RailHawks revamped 2016 roster.

“After Vancouver, I thought this would be a great place for Billy to regain his confidence,” Bader says. “I think he felt the same way. He hasn’t been on the field that much [the past few seasons], so he needed to come back to a place he feels comfortable … He felt like his confidence was lacking, and he felt like he needed some place to regain some momentum in his career.”

After signing with Carolina in January, Schuler came to Cary a month early before camp opened to train with RailHawks already living in the area. He enrolled in a class at UNC this semester to earn the college degree he forewent four years ago. He’s caught up with Carlos Somoano, his former coach at UNC, along with other members of the Tar Heels’ soccer staff.

According to Bader, Schuler has already impressed his RailHawks coaches and teammates with his striking, work rate and ability to hold the ball. Yet rebuilding Schuler’s shaken confidence remains a work in progress.

“His athletic ability is fine,” Bader says. “A lot of it is mental right now. When things aren’t quite going his way, he’s getting down on himself quicker than I remember from four years ago when things were going well for him.”

Schuler has also joined a deeper, talented RailHawks roster than previous years, where he knows he must compete with experienced attackers for starts. Like Odysseus, Schuler has returned home to find it full of suitors.

“Obviously, coming off a bunch of disappointing seasons, I want everything to be great. I want my decisionmaking to be perfect, my finishing to be perfect. But at the moment it’s not quite there yet.”