Founding

The Rosevelt Soccer Club was co-founded in 2014 by Aaron Graffam and John Morgan, after the two former high school classmates met at a bar in the Frenchtown neighborhood of Westbrook, Maine and sketched out the outline for a more affordable and accessible Maine-based soccer club. Morgan had just stepped down as the boys’ varsity coach at Westbrook High School for family medical reasons, Graffam’s son was a freshman in that program, and both wanted to develop programming that would provide more access for players in Maine’s blue collar and immigrant communities.

The Westbrook Soccer League (now known as the Westbrook Soccer Club) initially served as an incubator organization for our club, and our initial core communities were towns and cities connected by the Roosevelt Trail, a road built in 1914 that’s also known as Route 302.

Our club’s inaugural season featured three teams (18U Boys, 16U Boys, and 13U Boys), and our charter coaches were Marty Bressler, Joel Costigan, Aaron Graffam, Mark Hamblen, Rob Krouskup, John Morgan, and Ram Tray.

In 2016, our club established its own Board of Directors, and our charter directors were Aaron Graffam, Wally LeBlanc, Shari Levesque, John Morgan, Jen Mull-Brooks, Darren Thayer, and Greg Thornton.

Independent Club

After being part of the Westbrook Soccer Club for our first six seasons, we incorporated as an independent club in 2021.

As part of the incorporation process, we implemented a co-ownership model that provided our directors and coaches an opportunity to become vested as co-owners of our club based on their years of service.

As of July 2024, we have 21 current and former directors and coaches who are also co-owners of our club. Six of our co-owners are charter directors and charter coaches, and one of our charter players became a co-owner in 2024.

10 Years, Ten Milestones

Our club celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024, and celebrated ten milestones from our first decade:

Qui Plantavit Curabit

Our club’s motto is Qui plantavit curabit, or “he who has planted will preserve.”

Since our club’s founding in 2014, we’ve steadily grown from three teams and about 50 players to eighteen teams and about 300 players. Our growth has deliberate, though, and we’ve always been deliberate about balancing our growth with our club’s mission statements and value-added programming.

Iceland Capstone

Our club first developed a relationship with Icelandic soccer clubs in February 2019, when one of our co-founders and chairman visited Iceland's federation and three clubs for a whirlwind 72-hour tour of Iceland's federation and three of its clubs--Breiðablik, Grindavík, and Víkingur Reykjavík.

We had hoped to further develop those relationships by planning a 3-game tour for our 19U Boys team in April 2020, but that trip was unfortunately canceled when international travel was shutdown by the outbreak of COVID-19 about a month before our team was scheduled to fly to Iceland.

But we reconnected with all three clubs with another set of administrator-level meetings in Iceland in April 2022, which laid the groundwork for our 19U Boys and 16U Girls teams' 3-game tour in Iceland last April.

That inaugural trip featuring 78 of our members was such a positive and successful experience that our club's directors have identified it as a culminating experience we'd like our club's oldest players to continue to experience in the future.

The planning, logistics, and resources required for a recurring trip to Iceland are too daunting for us to undertake every year, or even every other season. 

But it's probably realistic for us to plan a similar every third year, which will play a factor in how we structure our youth pathway to try to ensure our 17U, 18U, and 19U players have the opportunity to play in Iceland at least once before the end of their youth careers with our club.

Our members' on-field experiences during our inaugural trip were eye-opening, and our off-field cultural and social experiences were enriching. And our continued partnership with Icelandic clubs can be just the latest example of growing connections between Maine and Iceland.

Members’ Savings of $2 million

Member Mentality

Since our founding, we've become pretty familiar with the characteristics of what might be called the youth sports industrial complex: Professionalized amateur organizations; a disorganized and confusing alphabet soup of competing governing bodies, organizations, and competitions; mergers, acquisitions, and the growth of multi-state (or even multinational) franchises; de facto fiefdoms that are based on exclusivity and scarcity; consistent up-selling; capitalizing on FOMO; frequent recruiting and program-hopping; increased travel demands for players and their families; a focus on narrow self-interest instead of broad mutual interests; a disconnect between the organizations and the communities their members live in; and basically the overall customer-ization of youth sports in the U.S.

.Instead of looking to squeeze as much out of our members as possible, we've always tried to organize and deliver quality programming and positive experiences for as little as possible. And instead of creating an organization that is based on transactional relationships, we've tried to create an organization that is based on collaborative relationships and a social contract of sorts.

We essentially act like a cooperative that determines the most efficient and effective uses of our players' families funds, collects those funds, and acts as responsible stewards for those funds to ensure we pay our bills and deliver on our programming. We've also adopted a self-imposed participation fee (registration fee + apparel costs) cap that ensures our biennial participation fees don't exceed 2% of the median household income in the least affluent community among the four communities a vast majority of our players come from. 

That approach and other more organizing principles (see below) is what has allowed us to consistently charge anywhere from $1,000-$1,500 less for participation fees than other franchise programs in the area (and even greater savings if we compare our fees to those charged by other franchise programs in other states), and that's also what has enabled us to have the financial flexibility to do things like pay our members prorated refunds each of the last two seasons when COVID-19 severely impacted the programming we were able to provide in 2020 and even when it mildly impacted our programming in 2021.

Besides leading to more affordable outcomes, our member mentality has extended to our processes and decision-making. 

We've always been inclusive and transparent with our governance, and we've formally re-structured our club, so that our Board of Directors includes a Member Representative who is voted on by club members. We're also transparent about when our directors will meet, what topics we'll discuss, and members are invited to attend our meetings. And we give all our members the opportunity to weigh in on pretty much everything we do, both formally and informally.

This member mentality is a big reason why we've been able to keep our club relatively affordable.

We Keep the Money on the Field

Our club's annual operating budget has gradually grown as we've grown, and it's currently around $275,000. But our commitment to keeping overhead costs low has been a constant since our founding, which has enabled us to keep as much money on the field as possible.

A lack of full-time staffers allows us to offer our 10U-19U teams two indoor training sessions per week, even though we're paying $300/hour to rent an indoor turf field January-April. No administrative costs (office space, administrative staff, etc.) have also allowed us to not only register our teams for the same leagues and competitions as other clubs, but also to purchase a $1,500 Veo camera with an annual $1,500 subscription and record as many of those games as possible for our members. And on and on.

Even in situations when we are most like clubs when it comes to costs (our players' required apparel), we forego an additional $5,000-$6,000 in revenue in apparel royalties every other year so that our members have to order required apparel every other season instead of every season.

Small is Manageable

Another reason we've been able to deliver our members more than $2 million in savings is because we've remained relatively small, even though we've had opportunities for more growth.

When we first started our club we anticipated having only two teams, a U18 Boys team and a U16 Boys team. We ended up also including U13 Boys team that first year, and we've gradually grown since 2014 to include about a dozen teams that have spanned 10U-19U on the boys' side, and 10U-19U on the girls' side over the last couple years.

When we first started, we combined a couple age groups (12U, 14U, 16U, 18U, etc.), but we have gradually evolved to mostly rostering single birth year teams now that our player pool has deepened. We've been aspirational in our growth in the sense that we've worked to establish 9U-23U pathways within our club, but we've been mindful to grow more slowly than we probably could have. And we've also been focused on ensuring our pathway is broad enough, but not deeper than it needs to be.

That means we've never rostered more than one team in any particular age group, which has allowed us to broaden our pathway and focus more on quality instead of quantity. And it's allowed us to provide more equitable opportunities and experiences for all our members, instead of having players even within the same age group have different levels of opportunities and experiences. 

Another benefit to keeping our club small is it contributes to a more vibrant and healthier ecosystem in our state. Instead of rostering multiple teams in an age group ourselves, other clubs can roster those teams and give those players more individualized attention and programming. And we've also helped our members by cutting down travel time when we play in our leagues, because more competition exists in our area.

More practically, limiting our teams to only one team per age has enabled us minimize our overhead and keep our programming more affordable.

We're an Amateur Club, So We're Structured Like an Amateur Club

The biggest reasons for why we stay small enough to be manageable and keep as much as money on the field as possible is because we recognize we're an amateur soccer club trapped in a closed soccer system. So we're structured and we act like an amateur soccer club trapped in a closed soccer system.

In a more rational and open sports system like those that exist elsewhere, the professional sports organizations that have the most resources (gate revenue, concessions revenue, apparel revenue, etc.) to subsidize the costs of youth sports have the incentives and resources to make those investments, and the remaining amateur organizations are given a pathway to become a professional organization by utilizing resources (investors, training compensation/solidarity payments, etc.) other than youth players' participation fees to fuel their ambitions to become a professional club.

But the sports systems in our country aren't rational or open, so the professional sports organizations that are best-positioned to subsidize the costs of youth sports generally aren't making those investments, and the remaining amateur organizations who don't have a pathway to become a professional organization by utilizing resources other than participation fees (investors, training compensation/solidarity payments, etc.) choose between a rational route of nonetheless funding professionalized amateur operations with participation fees and an irrational route of remaining an amateur club that needs to be funded with participation fees.

We've chosen the more irrational route.

So that means the tens of thousands of hours our club's directors have devoted to administering the club and handling off-field logistics have up to this year been largely donated labor. Even now that we've recently restructured our club to allow us to compensate our directors for their work, those stipends are relatively modest ($1,250-$2,500 each season) considering the time and effort we all put into giving our members a quality experience.

Likewise, even though we've always paid our coaches a stipend, those stipends are similarly modest ($675-$1,750) compared to what other youth coaches are paid at other professionalized amateur clubs.

Fortunately, more professional soccer clubs in the U.S. are getting involved in offering more affordable opportunities for youth players. But most of the youth soccer landscape consists of professionalized amateur clubs who need to primarily rely on participation fees to fund their clubs, because they lack the opportunities and access to resources that exist for amateur clubs around the rest of the world. And that has the most direct and consequential impact on the affordability of youth soccer in the U.S.

American Dreamers

We're proudly amateur, we're stubbornly small, we're focused on keeping as much as our members' money on the field as possible, and we're member-focused. But that doesn't mean we don't have big dreams for our club.

We're still chipping away at our goal of becoming a professional club by 2050, but we're focused on doing so by fulfilling a couple tenets of the American Dream: To build something from scratch, and to help our stakeholders with as many opportunities as possible while doing so.

Continuing our efforts to be outspoken and proactive about how American sports need to be reformed for the common good, and keeping our programming as affordable are two ways we're working towards those goals.

But we're proud of this milestone, and we need to acknowledge not only our current and former members, but also a long list of directors, coaches, and team managers whose contributions of their time and effort have helped us reach this milestone.

RSC 2030

We've met every metric for success we established for our fledgling club eleven years ago--and yet we still lack the same purpose that exists for most every other club in the world.

That's because in pretty much every other country in the world, our relatively small club tucked away in a relatively remote part of a country would nevertheless still have a clear-- albeit relatively irrational--purpose: To build a multigenerational club whose first teams have the opportunity to earn their spots in the highest league their country has to offer. 

It doesn't matter if you're sitting in the boardroom with a director for a club that represents an Icelandic town of 3,000; or if you're supporting a 7th-division English club that just got bought by a handful of soccer legends; or if you're watching the latest edition of El Clasico on TV.

In all those settings you're sharing experiences with clubs of all types and sizes who nonetheless share the common experience of competing in open systems that provide opportunities for promotion (and relegation) for all that hasn't existed in the United States.

In 2021, we adopted a plan called RSC 2050 which set as our club’s goal to field professional men’s and women’s teams by 2050. That date is still about 25 years away, so in the meantime we’ll be working throughout our 2025 season to analyze every aspect of our club’s organization and programming to try to achieve a short-term goal, which will require higher levels of deliberate and energetic effort on and off the field: