The College Team Reinventing College Soccer
For years, USC had no men's soccer team. Now, Trojans FC, a club team more worried about serving the community than the campus, has different ambitions.
Sanjay Sujanthakumar has a vision.
Actually, he has several of them.
First, the University of Southern California graduate student in public diplomacy wants to turn the Southern California Trojans Fútbol Club into a robust minor league soccer team. Going into its fourth school year, after losing one to COVID-19, the Trojans seek to further entrench themselves in the void that was left when USC cut its men’s soccer program in the 1980s. In 2017, a group of students began a club team not to compete against other college clubs—USC already had one of those—but to build an organization for everyone in South Central Los Angeles, not just the campus community.
That year, Trojans FC was the only college-based team to enter into U.S. Soccer’s storied U.S. Open Cup, a national competition that includes teams all the way up to Major League Soccer. The next year, it became the first college team ever to win a game in it.
Now, Sujanthakumar, the team’s head coach and vice president, also hopes to create a club that will help American soccer grow and serve the local community along the way.
“We’re just a student org with big dreams,” he says.
Also, his biography on the club website notes that he’d quite like to become president of FIFA one day.
An interesting thing is happening in college soccer. Its relevance as a credible talent development pipeline has steadily declined. Even the premier programs have effectively been put out of business by Major League Soccer’s own academies and a maturing landscape of elite youth clubs which can feed players straight into the pros, either at home or abroad.
But some teams are reinventing themselves and perhaps the entire college game. Late last year, I wrote about Appalachian State University’s men’s soccer team, which was axed in a budget cut but spun off into a semi-pro team instead. That’s when Sujanthakumar, ever ambitious, reached out to me, to tell me about his own program.
Trojans FC isn’t exactly reinventing itself. After all, USC didn’t have a varsity men’s soccer team despite a clamor for one in the form of a petition signed by more than 1,300 students a few years ago. The Trojans never intended to be a stand-in for a college program. USC already had a men’s club team, after all. Trojans FC wants to be something different. Something modern. Something that better fits into today’s soccer scene.
Their founders were inspired by Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and his Kingston Stockade in upstate New York. Crowley created a semipro team as a kind of open source code to work out how to build a sustainable soccer club at the lower levels and then provide the blueprint to others. Crowley’s idea, quite defensibly, is that in order for America to get better at soccer, it needs more soccer—more paths to the top from a broader base of adult soccer. He wants for the game’s grassroots to burrow deeper into the American soil.
Sujanthakumar sees a new role for colleges in an American soccer landscape that has finally begun turning out internationally credible talent with regularity. “In terms of college soccer, it’s viewed as either a great safety net for kids playing soccer or as a secondary track for player development,” he says. “We need to come up with American solutions to American problems in terms of soccer. We can look at what countries in North and Western Europe are doing and learn from that but, at some point, we have to take advantage of what we have here and universities are a huge, obvious advantage. No matter how many divisions of professional soccer there are, they can’t totally cover the map. Universities cover the map in a way that nobody else does.”
Colleges, he argues, can provide more competitive playing environments. That’s especially true when their teams function as open clubs, rather than competing within the NCAA’s restrictive structure, keeping them cloistered and available only to two dozen students. That way, the colleges can make soccer more accessible and widen that base, allowing them to include whoever happens to be around and deserving of playing time, whether they are enrolled or not.
“Instead of just being something for fraternity guys to have fun,” says Sujanthakumar, “let’s do something for the greater good.”
There was plenty of talent for the Trojans to choose from. USC has a huge number of international students, plenty of whom could have played division 1 college soccer but decided against it, for whatever reason. So the club quickly ditched its Sunday men’s league and instead joined the UPSL, a sprawling minor league.
When the Trojans made it into the second round of the U.S. Open Cup, they were finally able to make a case to the university for more resources. They had begun by simply claiming whatever field on campus happened to be free for their practices. But this bit of earned prestige got them onto a real field with a real booking, albeit so early in the morning that the players had to get up at 5 a.m. and stretch before sunrise on the unlit pitch. Soon, they hope to have access to the women’s varsity field, which would allow them to draw spectators.
But the sporting piece is only part of the point. Through the LAFC franchise in MLS, Trojans players have been tutoring local South Central kids, helping them with resume workshops, standardized testing prep, that kind of thing. Ultimately, the club would like to establish a system of youth teams free to the local, low-income Hispanic kids and to help establish a pipeline for them to earn places at USC—where the acceptance rate has fallen below 12 percent. Several local players who aren’t USC students already play for the team, which hopes to be built from locals, current students and alumni, with all costs covered by sponsorship and gameday revenue.
“A soccer club is supposed to be an integral part of the community and reflect and support it,” Sujanthakumar says. “I was obviously excited about the potential of the team on the field, but the chance to do something bigger than that was very obvious. USC has so many resources and so much human capital that we can tap into and leverage to help the community.”
Like most colleges, USC is a bit of a bubble. The campus is insulated from its surrounding area, South Central, where life is lived in stark contrast to that on the lush campus.
Trojans FC wants to help pierce that bubble.
“That’s the big, long-term vision: to be a proper club with not just a first team but to have youth teams and be doing camps for kids from the community,” says Sujanthakumar. “The idea, eventually, is to really provide access to the game in the community.”
There’s a joke that goes around, apparently, that USC actually stands for University of Spoiled Children. Instead, Sujanthakumar says, he’d rather that, with help from Trojans FC, it stand for University of South Central.