SACRAMENTO, Calif. – San Antonio FC Managing Director Tim Holt praised the expansion of the regular-season schedule for the 2017 season on Saturday night during his club’s trip to face Sacramento Republic FC at Bonney Field, saying the league continued to go “from strength to strength.”

The USL announced last week the expansion of the regular season to 32 games, with an adjustment in the schedule that would ensure teams in both conference would play a home-and-home series against every other member of the conference next season.

“Thirty-two games is good for the fans,” Holt told Sacramento Republic FC broadcast team Rob McAllister and Kevin Goldthwaite during a halftime interview. “It’s more soccer, it’s more high-quality soccer, so not only getting 16 home games in the regular season plus the playoffs, but the format of seeing every team in the Western Conference at least once in your stadium is something we feel our fans are excited about in San Antonio.”

• TRENDING - 11 Things: Raising Arizona

The former President of the USL, Holt joined San Antonio earlier this year to lead the club into its inaugural season, which has seen the club perform strongly on and off the field. Having led the league through its first four seasons, Holt said the USL, and soccer as a whole, had come a long way in his time with the organization.

“It’s night and day,” Holt said. “The sport has changed so much in this country, Major League Soccer has led that growth, but it’s not just Major League Soccer. The USL has grown by leaps and bounds, look no further than what we have here today in Sacramento. It’s unfathomable 15 years ago to think you’d have this type of situation week-in and week-out, sold out stadiums. It speaks volumes about the league.”

Holt is aiming to achieve the same level of success in San Antonio as Republic FC has found over its first three seasons. Having worked previously to bring Sacramento into the USL, Holt said he was enjoying getting to learn from Sacramento’s executives while he was in town.

“We want to emulate what Sacramento’s done,” Holt said. “It’s done one of the best launches in professional soccer history in the United States, so [we want to] learn from Warren Smith and Erika Bjork and Joe Wagoner and just see how they’ve built what they’ve built, and try to apply that to what we’re trying to build in San Antonio.”

With the backing of Spurs Sports & Entertainment, and with a strong soccer community behind the club, Holt believes the future for SAFC could be as bright for the club locally as it is for the USL as a whole.

“It’s unbelievable,” Holt said. “When you combine such a great sports market as San Antonio, who have supported soccer in the past, we have Toyota Field, a soccer-specific stadium that seats 8,000, and then Spurs Sports & Entertainment powering that from an ownership and executive management point, the sky’s the limit for us. We have big ambitions for what we want to do for professional soccer in San Antonio, and it’s a pleasure to be a part of it.”