Westchester County is getting its own professional soccer team next spring, thanks to a Rye resident whose new United Soccer League franchise is scheduled to play in Mount Vernon.
Mitchell Baruchowitz, a 49-year-old private-equity investor, has assembled a Rye-based investment group whose partners include Simon Baines and his New York Premier Football Club, a Westchester-based youth-soccer academy, and Danny Dekker’s New York Dutch Lions Football Club, a top-level amateur women’s soccer team that currently plays in Brooklyn.
The men’s team, known for now as Westchester Soccer Club, or “Westchester SC,” will play its home games in Mount Vernon’s Stadium at Memorial Field, a recently renovated pitch at the corner of Garden Avenue and East Sandford Boulevard. Baruchowitz, an accomplished two-sport athlete in high school who played first singles in tennis at Brandeis University, is majority owner and chief executive of the new club.
“The plan, now that we have a 3,900-seat place to play, is to recruit available players so we can start next spring,” Baruchowitz said. “Westchester and the contiguous areas in Rockland, Connecticut, and northern New Jersey are a hotbed of soccer, and we hope to capitalize on that fervor with a team that will play in America’s largest soccer league, the USL.”
Photo courtesy Micah Lloyd
Westchester Soccer Club really began with Baruchowitz’s son Braden, a youth soccer player himself who started announcing high school soccer games for LocalLive, a network based in Stamford, Conn. Soon, Braden was broadcasting on other platforms LocalLive worked with (like NHSF, which streams 27 different sports). When his father began to dig deeper into the business models around sports streaming, his dream of investing in a team began to take shape.
Joined by Rye friends like Sara Whalen Hess, who played on the 1999 Women’s World Cup team, Baruchowitz launched a fund called Profluence to focus on business opportunities the booming sports world might offer. It soon became clear to Baruchowitz that forming a soccer team in Westchester was more than a dream — it was a possibility.
Pairing up with Dekker, who had been owner of a summer league soccer club, created the opportunity to play in Mount Vernon. Also important in the planning process was Rye High School’s boys soccer coach Jared Small. He connected Baruchowitz with Baines, who ran the New York Premier Academy and will now be Westchester’s sporting director.
Professional soccer in the U.S. operates at three levels: Major League Soccer is atop the men’s side of this “pyramid” in Division I, alongside the National Women’s Soccer League and the all-female USL Super League.
Division II currently has just one league, USL Championship, whose all-male teams are one step below MLS.
Division III has three competing men’s leagues: MLS Next Pro, a 29-team group consisting mainly of reserve players for Division I MLS teams; USL League One, which Westchester SC is joining and which hopes to grow from 12 to 19 teams next year; and the National Independent Soccer Association, a small league with teams in the Southeast and Southwest U.S. as well as Michigan and Maryland.
Photo courtesy Micah Lloyd
There’s also a Division III women’s league in the works for next year — WPSL Pro — organized by the Women’s Premier Soccer League, the top amateur league for women in the U.S. soccer pyramid.
The Tri-State Area is already home to two MLS teams: New York City FC, which plays at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and the New York Red Bulls, in Harrison, N.J. In addition, a USL Championship team (the league between MLS and USL League One) is scheduled to debut in Brooklyn next year.
The Westchester Flames, based in New Rochelle for more than two decades, is one of several teams in the New York metropolitan area that play in USL League Two, in the amateur-team tier known as Division IV.
Baruchowitz said his thinking is that New York’s two MLS teams present quite a trek for pro-soccer fans living in Westchester, southwest Connecticut, or northeast New Jersey, given traffic and parking concerns.
He also noted the Westchester team’s open developmental pipeline, abetted by its partner programs, should allow it to develop top-notch local soccer talent.
Baruchowitz’s group staged a community kick-off event at the Mount Vernon stadium on June 15. Those who attended each received a “Westchester SC” scarf — a quintessential piece of club-soccer gear — to commemorate the team’s launch.