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The USL Q&A – Jay Heaps

By NICHOLAS MURRAY - nicholas.murray@uslsoccer.com, 02/18/18, 9:30AM EST

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Going in-depth with Birmingham Legion FC’s new President & GM


Photo courtesy Birmingham Legion FC

TAMPA, Fla. – Introduced as the first President & General Manager of 2019 USL expansion club Birmingham Legion FC on February 1, former New England Revolution player and Head Coach Jay Heaps brings a remarkable resume to his new job.

As he and Legion FC leadership visited the USL offices this week, we sat down to go in-depth on his Revolution career, what led him to Alabama, the experiences that have guided him, and what he hopes the upcoming year before the club’s inaugural season will look like.

Q: Before your visits with Legion FC’s leadership, when was the last time you had been in Alabama?

Jay Heaps: I drove through it once with my wife many, many years ago. At least 12 or 15 years ago, but that was the last time I was there. I tell it like this: Birmingham sold me. I went down and visited, meeting with the ownership group and seeing their vision, so it was a Birmingham story first, and then after hearing what their direction was, what they wanted to do with the team, I really started to dive in on what USL was all about from the team perspective.

I had always worked closely with the USL with the Revs and with MLS and sending players to different teams, I had looked at the soccer side, the technical side, and where the league was going was unbelievable, but when I went down and saw where the USL is positioned in the marketplace from a business standpoint, it really opened my eyes to wanting to be part of this whole thing. Birmingham sold me, and then the USL story was what really captured me wanting to be a part of it.

Q: Building a club almost from the ground, where there’s some work done but a lot to be done, what drew you to that challenge?

JH: Being able to be a part of building a culture from the beginning. You don’t get many chances at that. As a Head Coach, you can build a culture in the locker room, and you try to build that throughout the club, but sometimes there are constraints and there are already tracks laid down that you can’t pick up. From the beginning on this, for me, when I saw the vision of what the owners were talking about, from being about Birmingham and what they wanted to have as a club and how they wanted to build the club, I aligned with them and really felt I could strengthen their culture from the top down. Not so much through the team, but top down through the entire organization.

Q: Who was your first call to after you accepted the position?

JH: There were a lot of people involved in the process, and a lot of dialogue I had in the process. I reached out to a few people before I officially signed on about what I was planning on doing, so the check-list included my dad, and my wife was very thoroughly involved, U.S. coaches, coaches that I had just completed the [USSF] Pro Course, but the first call that I was excited to make was my father. Not because of the soccer stuff, but because of the culture and the strategy of what we were trying to do.

I think for me I was always afraid he was going to be “well, you’ve put so much work into being a Head Coach, you’ve done a good job in head coaching, do you want to continue this path?” He was saying, look at this as a bigger picture, don’t look at this as your next job, look at it as a career, look at it as something you’ll learn from, look at all these things that will separate you from being a Head Coach – whether it was an MLS team or a USL team, or an assistant coach.

I think that all got strengthened when I was interviewing for a head coaching job, and I was offered an assistant coaching job in MLS, and this was right about the time this opportunity was coming. Talking with him and really putting it in perspective, his vision for what I was saying and putting it together solidified the strength of doing it. It wasn’t really a choice after that, it was really about, wow, this is an opportunity you can’t pass up.

Q: We seem to be at the top of a wave sweeping through the southeast when it comes to soccer. What is your impression of what you’re seeing in places like Louisville, Nashville and Atlanta, homes to clubs which are relatively new to the scene?

JH: For me, I love it, because it has a little bit of a feel of what happened in the Pacific Northwest, where you have really close rivalries – and not just professional, because you already have rivalries laid geographically in the sense of youth academies and teams already established in the area, fans and teams in different sports – so there’s already a built-in rivalry.

What I’ve been so impressed with is soccer is here, and it’s been more of a secret down here, and I think now it’s getting in, and in Birmingham in particular from the conversations I’ve had there’s a very knowledgeable fanbase, but they also have a lot of connections to soccer. For me to be able to get in here and realize Birmingham has a huge challenge, Atlanta’s doing what they’re doing, Nashville’s doing what they’re doing, Louisville as well, those are big-time markets, Memphis is coming in, so for us we’re excited we’re going to have that regional built-in rivalry.

Q: You were part of almost 500 games as a player and Head Coach for the New England Revolution. What does it meant to be so closely identified with a club in that way?

JH: It means a lot. I still think, for me, I felt like I was one of the first players in the league to stay at one club and to be a part of a team that I fell in love with that was also my hometown team, being from Massachusetts. When I was traded from Miami to New England, I really felt like that was where I wanted to be, and coaching the team felt very similar, from where I was as a player I wanted to try and take it to another level.

It’s a difficult process as well because now I’m no longer associated with the club in some regard as the coach, and they’ve always treated me in the greatest way possible, but I think for me, what I’ve done for that club will hopefully be remembered and stored, and now I have a whole other challenge which makes moving away easier. When you have a focus and a drive and goal it makes the transition a lot easier.

Q: What is the biggest thing you learned about yourself going from leading a team on the field to leading a team on the sidelines?

JH: There’s a big adjustment period, and as a player you think you know everything. You’ve been in so many games, and I don’t know how many games I played but by the time I finished playing I was like, “there’s nothing I haven’t seen in this game.” You become a coach, and you realize you don’t know anything. I remember being on Day 1, I was like, wow, there’s so much more to this game that I have to learn, I was excited to learn. All those years of playing gives you a base, but coaching for me opened my eyes to not just coaching, how to give direction to players, how to build a culture on the field and in the locker room, but then a really good experience in signing players, being part of the business side of it. Scouting players internationally, signing players to contracts internationally, making sure you’re following a salary cap, having a budget and trying to sign players to that budget. You think you know it as a player, but until you’re in it as a coach, you’re really not understanding of it.

I expect a similar transition now going into the front office in the sense that I don’t know what I don’t know yet. There’s an excitement to that, I’m not going in saying I know everything, I’m going to do whatever it takes to learn this side of the business and be the right person for Birmingham.

Q: It’s pretty well-known you were a two-sport athlete at Duke University, soccer and basketball, what did you learn from your respective coaches in John Rennie and Mike Krzyzewski?

JH: Two great coaches for me, and I will focus on John Rennie here because I think a lot gets said about Coach K, which is great because he’s a mentor of mine, but John Rennie was the one for me that believed I should be playing soccer at the highest level. When I got there, he pulled me aside and said “I see something in you.” MLS wasn’t even an option, and he was saying he thought I had what it would take to get to the next level. He gave me that belief.

Originally, I was just going down there as an athlete to play, but he opened my eyes to something bigger, and I think more than was said, the actual demonstration of belief was more powerful. I can tell players you’re awesome, you’re great, but the minute you know when a coach plays you, gives you minutes in games, that’s the true belief, so from my first minute down there to my last minute on the field with Duke Soccer was some of my best growth, because I grew as a person. Forget the soccer for a minute, I couldn’t tell you what formations we played back then, but I can tell you as a person and a player my belief in myself was solely on John Rennie. He made me believe.

While that’s going on, I was getting another look of coaching that was blowing my mind. I wasn’t playing, so I could observe a little bit more on the basketball side, but Coach K has a different concept of how to do it. Not that it was better or worse, but it was different than how Coach Rennie worked, so that was great, I got two coaches that worked differently, still got the best out of their players but in different ways. For me with Coach K, it was how he responded to players, how he motivated was palpable for everyone. I wasn’t playing, and I still wanted to run through a wall. I thought how he handled conflict and built his teams to believe in each other and look each other in the eye, things that good teams do, he just found a way to make teams do and created that culture, and I think that was vital for me not only when I became a soccer player, but then when I became a coach, he’s someone that I lean on as my baseline as my coaching philosophy.

Q: The reception you received at Good People Brewing last month seemed a fun one, how much did you enjoy that introduction to Birmingham’s fans?

JH: It was surreal, because I didn’t know how many people were going to come out, I didn’t know who was going to be there. For me, it was humbling. It really was, because I felt like there are three pillars we’ve got to talk about as a club, and that’s the passion, the pride, but the community was huge, and making sure this club felt like it was Birmingham, and authentic to Birmingham, and that’s what everyone wanted to say. It was, thank you for coming down here, when are you moving your family down here, when can we embrace you, when can you be part of Birmingham, that was what I felt was the big takeaway for me, how gracious everyone was to someone who had 500 games with a professional team in New England, far, far away, my family’s there, I was raised there, but to open their arms when I came down there to be part of their community, that what was really touched me the most.

Q: The club’s first home is going to be BBVA Compass Field, what are your impressions of the stadium?

JH: First and foremost, it’s a soccer pitch. It’s huge, 120 yards by 80 yards, it’s a perfect playing surface, so that checked box number one. The other side now is making it a soccer-specific stadium in that a lot of the feel we want to be built around the field. A lot of this was done before I got there, so I give a lot of credit to our ownership group, they really saw this as a great starting point, a great place for us to enter into the league in terms of the location, the atmosphere and the pitch. All three of those things fit perfectly with what we’re trying to do downtown. I’m excited we have a place to play, fans are already starting to put down deposits for season tickets, so we’re already starting to generate high numbers for that – more so than we expected – and we think it’s going to be an absolutely great atmosphere for professional soccer.


Photo courtesy Birmingham Legion FC

Q: A year from now, Birmingham Legion FC will be in the middle of its first preseason. What does the roadmap look like from here to there, for you?

JH: Busy. We have a lot to do. I think we’re early on some things, but I think we really have just enough time to put together the right club. I look at it in two ways; from the soccer side, the technical side, we’re going to be hiring a head coach, we’ll put his staff together, this summer we’re going to start really actively identifying players we want to sign, identify players we want to bring in, identify players from within the USL we want to sign, so for me that’s a really big process.

The other one is a practice facility. Right now, we’re in talks with places to have a practice facility that we want to be top-notch. We want to be one of the top in the USL in that the pitches are perfect, two pitches for the team and then a locker room, coach’s offices, training room, weight room, all of those things we need to make the team really good on the soccer side.

On the business side it’s to continue the dialogue we’ve had in the sense that we partner with and have sponsorships with companies that we feel like want to be part of what we’re doing, and we want to be part of what they’re doing. I think that there are really good partnerships that are happening, title sponsor conversations, sponsorship dollars that we think will benefit that relationship and help us on the business-side as well. Those are the two areas that I’m charged with going into ’19 with that roadmap in mind.

Q: This is a bigger-picture job, though. Five years from now, what do you hope to have accomplished?

JH: That foundation. A really strong fan-base, a really strong following and a culture that is authentic to Birmingham that is also a strong soccer culture, that we are a team that from a soccer-standpoint players want to come to, that players realize they’ve been treated right. We can’t guarantee playing time, we can’t guarantee they score 20 goals, but we can guarantee they’re going to be treated right and that while they’re here we’re going to do everything we can. We want to be very strong on that side.

From a community-standpoint, we want our fans to be part of the process, to realize why we’re doing things, what we’re doing as we move forward year-to-year-to-year and put a five-year plan into place. I look at it as we have a lot to do to make sure we’re up in ’19, but that’s not just for ’19, that’s for three years out, five years out that we have this plan in place and that it’s authentic to Birmingham and the community gets that.

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