FC COLUMBUS JOINS THE NPSL
The National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) is proud to announce that FC Columbus (Columbus, Ohio) has joined the league as an expansion team. The club will compete in the Midwest Region’s Great Lakes Conference.
“We are thrilled to bring the NPSL to Columbus, one of the truly great soccer markets in North America,” NPSL Chairman Joe Barone said. “We have been working with this group since early summer and we are excited to have them as part of the NPSL family. Ohio deserves great soccer and we are confident that FC Columbus will deliver an exemplary product on and off the field.”
The leadership of the team will include Owner/Coach Maziya Chete, Co-Founder/Coach Seymour Alleyne, General Manager Darrell Hughes, and Game Day Manager Analisa Trares.
Chete, who played in Jamaica’s Major League from 1979-1981 for Cavaliers FC, attended the University of Maryland on a soccer scholarship and received Honorable Mention All-American honors in 1983. In 1995, he established Santos Futbol Club of Columbus where he has been able to share his knowledge and understanding of soccer with youth and adult soccer players in Central Ohio.
Alleyne played on the junior and senior national teams for Barbados at the age of 17 and was named National Player of the Year in 1977. In 1980 he was offered a scholarship to attend Long Island University to play varsity soccer, where he earned several awards. He was then invited to train with Real Madrid and that experience has given great insights into player development.
Hughes was a two-time NCAA All-American distance runner while at Indiana University. After college, Hughes attended law school and became a business transactional attorney in Central Ohio. He has been involved with FC Columbus since 2012 and was an integral part of FC Columbus’s opening of its indoor soccer facility.
Trares is a member of the Grandview Heights community and an indispensable part of FC Columbus. For the past nine years, she has organized club tryouts, managed the uniforms for all teams within the club, and has assisted with the planning and preparation of all club events.
FC Columbus has had great success developing youth players, placing several in Spain and Sweden. Currently, there are 300 youth players as part of the club. The club is in a great position to have a strong pipeline of players who will be able to make an immediate impact on the NPSL.
“FC Columbus wants to put a competitive team together and be in a position to challenge for the NPSL championship for this upcoming season,” Chete added. “We found the NPSL to be a great opportunity to develop elite athletes who aspire to play soccer at a professional level.”
FC Columbus will be playing its home games in Grandview Heights, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. The local stadium seats 1,500 fans and has a newly installed turf field making it a great environment for NPSL soccer. This location was selected due to Grandview Heights’ success with soccer as evidenced by both its boys and girls high school programs reaching the state semi-finals in 2017. In addition, Grandview is one of the most walkable communities in Columbus, and features some of the most popular restaurants and breweries in the city.
For more information about the club, please visit fccolumbus95.com or follow the club on Facebook (@fccolumbus95), Instagram (@fccolumbus95), and Twitter (@fccolumbus95).
ABOUT FC COLUMBUS
FC Columbus was founded in 1995 as the Santos Futbol Club of Columbus. FC Columbus started with a single U-15 girls team and has grown to over 300 athletes. The club operates under the governance of the Tri-Village Soccer Association (TVSA). Some of the more recent successes for the club includes the opening of an exclusive indoor soccer training facility in 2017 and the placement of one of its athletes with SD Huesca, a soccer academy in Huesca, Spain.
