On the attack: Birmingham Legion FC seeks to win on the field, win with fans

Birmingham has struggled for decades to find its place in major-league professional sports.

The city certainly has a proud place in the history of minor-league baseball.

The Double-A Birmingham Barons have been existence in various incarnations since 1885 and, before the pandemic, drew huge crowds to Regions Field.

The Magic City has also done a good job in hosting other large sports events, including The Regions Tradition, an annual PGA senior golf tournament.

But the city has also played host to numerous failed professional football teams that were part of doomed leagues, including the Alliance of American Football.

In fact, even in this football town, the team of the future may be the Birmingham Legion FC of the United Soccer League (USL) Championship.

The sport is growing in popularity in the U.S., where a couple of generations of suburban kids have grown up playing soccer.

The demographics in Birmingham have become more diverse, in part driven by the growth of UAB.

Not only that, but the USL is stable, with an ESPN TV contract and teams in major cities. A Division II league, the USL ranks just below Major League Soccer in the sport's hierarchy in America.

That stability is an appealing element for local media personality Scott Register of Birmingham Mountain Radio, who grew up playing youth and high school soccer in Vestavia and is a devoted Legion fan.

Register said: “This is a legit league,” Register said. “You look around...at the ownership groups, this not some fly-by-night league. It’s been around for a while. The names behind it are legit. The money behind it is legit. The soccer is legit.”

The USL has “been grown the right way, and the people behind it have made the right decisions,” he said.

The Legion — in its third year — is locally owned, has made admirable strides in branding the team and building a fan base, and has an attractive home pitch at UAB’s BBVA Field.

And the team has shown positive results on the field, even though the 2020 season was cut almost in half by COVID-19.

Iron City Ink talked to Legion FC head coach Tom Soehn and to the team’s president and general manager, Jay Heaps, about the team’s prospects in 2021.

They discuss the on-field outlook for the Legion, with a core of returning players and some promising new additions.

The Legion will play this year in the Central Division of the USL Eastern Conference and opens its regular season at home on May 1 versus division rival Indy Eleven.

Heaps talks about the efforts the team has made over the last two years — in part thanks to what he and Soehn say is a committed ownerships group — to prove that the team is here to stay, to win the hearts of local fans and to become part of the life of the city..

Report card for 2020

The Legion finished 7-5-4 in 2020 and made the playoffs. They made the playoffs in 2019, as well, but had a losing record in that inaugural campaign.

Jay Heaps, Birmingham Legion FC president and general manager, offered his assessment of the team’s performance on the field in 2020.

“We really started really well, and we came out of COVID-19 as a tight-knit group,” Heaps said.

However, the team was disappointed at how they finished, despite making the playoffs, he said.

“The best stuff came in the middle of the year,” he said.  “We ran a little out of steam and did not finish as strong as we would like.”

Tom Soehn, Birmingham Legion FC head coach, said the Legion improved in 2020, but the picture was mixed.

“We made some progress, but I was left wanting because we wanted to go further in the playoffs,” Soehn said.

“We went to being a scenario of being one in our group and we wound up second, which got us into the playoffs, but our goal was to have a home playoff game,” he said.

On the field in 2021

The team began practices in March at the Hoover Met, and Soehn is optimistic about the squad’s on-the-field prospects, in part because a lot of the teams “core guys” from 2020 are returning.

Those athletes “understand the way we play,” Soehn said.

All-League players Bruno Lapa and Alex Crognale will return this season, along with other Legion FC standouts Mikey Lopez, Matt VanOekel, Neco Brett, Anderson Asiedu and Prosper Kasim.

One key returning player is Lapa who, in his rookie season in 2020, showed the potential to be the team’s first home-grown star in the USL.

“We’re really excited to have him back,” Soehn said. “He’s a key element to our attack.”

Kasim, a forward, agreed to a new multi-year deal with the club. In 2019, Kasim won the Golden Boot as the team leader in goals scored in the regular season.

The team added “a few key pieces” to the roster during the off-season, Soehn said.

“As we get to those big games at the end of the year and the playoffs, we think we have the firepower to go further,” Heaps said.

The club made four high-profile offseason signings— defenders Ryan James and Phanuel Kavita, and JJ Williams, and Junior Flemmings, both playing forward.

Flemmings joins Legion FC after two seasons in Phoenix where he scored 31 goals and added 12 assists in 45 appearances. His 29 regular season goals the last two years were the most in the league.

Lapa, in particular, will benefit from the overall improvement of the roster, Soehn said.

“It highlights Bruno’s qualities even more because he has better guys to play with, and it takes some of the pressure off of him and opens up his freedom a little bit,” Soehn said.

The return of Neco Brett to the roster and the addition during the off-season of Junior Fleming, along with Lapa’s return, sets up the Legion as an offensive force.

“All of a sudden [the team] becomes a three-headed horse that I wouldn’t want to play against,” Soehn said.

“We scored a lot of goals (in 2020), and a lot of really exciting goals, which I think we’ll do again this year,” he said.

In fact, offensive firepower is not Soehn’s primary worry for 2021, but rather defense.

“The key is keeping people out and putting zeroes up on the board,” he said.

“One of the reasons I felt that we slumped a little bit last year was we conceded too many goals late, and that is something we want to make sure we’ve shored up this year,” Soehn said.

The team will benefit in that regard from the return of defender Alex Cognale, who was selected by his teammates as the Legion’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2020.

Now the team can partner Crognale with Kavita, who the Legion acquired in the off-season from St. Louis.

“I think the two of them complement each other quite well, and it will expand of their roles,” Soehn said.

Local favorite Mikey Lopez will be back in 2021.

“Mikey’s been here from the beginning, and he lays it out anytime he plays, and he has a lot of fans because of that,” Soehn said.

Lopez can also “play a lot of different positions and bring a lot of different elements to the game when needed,” Soehn said.

Building a fan base

The 2020 season got off to a great start for the Legion, and the team drew nearly 7,000 fans to its first home game, Heaps said.

“We had some great momentum before COVID-19 hit,” Heaps said.

However, when the USL season finally resumed, the team’s primary concern was making sure that fans, staff and players were safe, he said.

Due to the limitations on seating capacity at home games, the team also decided to focus on providing a good, safe experience for its season ticket holders, Heaps said. In fact, rather than having seating at 50% capacity, the team was probably at about 30% capacity, Heaps said.

This commitment “paid dividends” for the franchise in terms of building “good relations” with its core fans, Heaps said.

In addition, the team was able to keep all of its staff employed through the season.

“That was a good commitment we made as a club to the community, and we felt the same commitment to us from our fans,” Heaps said.

It seems that the team had already begun to create the beginnings of a loyal fan base in their inaugural 2019 season, according to data provided to Iron City Ink by the club prior to the 2020 season.

The team ranked eighth out of 36 USL Championship teams in merchandise sales, 12th in corporate sponsorships and 13th in average attendance.

The Legion also drew 4,550 fans on average to its 17 regular-season home games, filling BBVA Field at 85% capacity.

“Year three is important for us that we learn from the first two years not just on the field but in the stadium and a stadium operation experience,” Heaps said.

For example, the team now offers in-the-seat ordering of concessions using smart phones.

Heaps said he hopes to get area residents who know the team exists to attend a game. Then he wants to turn them into avid fans.

Register, who said that Birmingham Mountain Radio does some promotions with the Legion, said the team has done a good job with its branding so far.

Register said: “The branding is very Birmingham-centric,” Register said. “Everything they put into it was supposed to call out the history and the future of Birmingham.

“I think on the field, the uniforms and the branding are very professional,” he said. “There is nothing cheap about it. It does a great job of representing what they are trying to do as a club and as a league.”

Local backers

One important element in the team’s efforts to become part of the community is its roster of local owners, who were granted the USL franchise in 2018.

That list includes local businessmen Lee Styslinger III, James Outland, Jeff Logan, John Harbert and John F. Bryant.

The owners contributed to the renovation of BBVA Field at UAB for use by the Legion and the UAB Blazers.

“Their passion for Birmingham is amazing, and what they’ve done to get us where we are is second to none,” Soehn said. “We’ve had financial support. We’ve had emotional support. They’ve done everything to back us up.”

Heaps said the owners are devoted to the team and the community and that they attend all the games.

“It’s been all the more exciting because the owners are so committed,” he said.

Soehn has also been pleasantly surprised at the soccer knowledge of the Legion fans.

“Last year they had so many limitations as to what they could do, but the first year I was blown away at their knowledge—knowing when to cheer, knowing what the cheers were,” Soehn said. “It was a blast. They turned it into a real event, and that will continue growing.

“We have an awesome fan group,” he said.

“Birmingham is a great sports city, and you put a winner out there and people will come, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Soehn said.

Heaps notes that some cities with intense fan bases for MLS teams, such as Seattle and Portland, did not start out that way.

“They were in those markets for a while and had some changes in venue,” he said. “They started small, .but it was always about the fan experience. The product in the field is what the fans buy into. It takes a while to build.”

Register is pleased with the fan support the Legion has received in Birmingham so far.

He started playing soccer in Vestavia Hills when he was 6 years old and said, ‘There’s always been good soccer in Birmingham.”

UAB has helped create a “real international flavor with people coming here to go to school and work,” he said.

Plus soccer has grown in popularity in the United States, he said.

“It didn’t surprise me to see the city take to it as it has, and I think there is more to come,” Register said. “If the team is winning, people will get behind it, and there are a lot of soccer fans in Birmingham.”

“The pieces are in place to build something incredible here,” he said.

In a town that is crazy for college football, Heaps thinks the Legion can fill an important role, much like professional teams in a variety of sports in major cities.

“You can support Alabama and Auburn, which are big, historic teams, but we would like to bring those fans together to support one team during soccer season because we think there is an outlet for that,” he said.

“We feel like we are building something that is going to be really fun to watch and really fun to be part of,” Soehn said.

For tickets and information, call 205-600-4696 or go to bhmlegion.com.