What's your name and what's your role with Biscayne Bay SC?
This ties in with the second part of question #3! My name is Michael Schafer and I am jumpstarting this project with my good friend David Arroyo. We are both Co-Founders. I am/was heavily involved in getting Gray's Lake FC off the ground up in Des Moines. Before my time in Des Moines, I actually lived in Miami for 7 years, where I met David. He is born and raised in Miami. My family is currently in the process of relocating back down to Miami, so I will be throwing myself into this new project and leaving Gray's Lake in some very capable hands back up in Iowa!

With so many clubs, at so many different levels, in the Miami area, what prompted you to start a new one and what is going to set you apart; what's the most important aspect of your club?
David and I have been friends going back to 2010 or 2011. We were working together and found out we are both huge Arsenal fans, so we started going to watch events and playing pickup soccer whenever we had a chance. Being from Miami, David had experience with all of the iterations of Miami teams, going back to the Miami Fusion in the MLS all the way up to Inter Miami now. Miami gets a lot of bad press for being a poor sports town, but the passion for soccer that we've experienced is unlike anywhere else in the U.S. With Miami being such a melting pot of people from countries where soccer is THE only sport that matters, there is a ton of passion for the game here.

Miami has a rich history of soccer teams and iconic players

It's very brave to start a new club in the middle of a global pandemic; had you been working on this for a while? Is this your first foray into setting up and running a team?
We have been talking about this for years, but it really took off with more urgency as things started to fall into place - my move back down to Miami, David having some key connections down here, etc. It is a bit nuts to do it in 2020, but with all of us staying home so much the past year, it actually provided us with a great motivation to finally get to work on all the discussions we had been having for so long.

Your badge is beautiful, who did you work with and what inspired it?
Thanks! We actually designed it ourselves. It's probably more basic than what some look for haha but we went through quite a few variations and this early one just stuck with us as the perfect balance between simple and memorable. Definitely inspired by the actual Biscayne Bay, which is a huge feature of life here. Maybe too literal for some soccer purists! But we wanted to avoid cliché ideas like Miami City United Flamingos or something.

Selling kits, scarves and other items is a huge way for lower league soccer clubs to make a little operational money - with such a nice badge, do you plan on making custom kits to go with it? How do you hope to finance the newborn organization?
Absolutely! We're talking with a few independent suppliers right now, like Icarus FC, trying to create something that will be memorable and unique. It's a tall order, as we want to do it right. At the same time, we're not in a huge rush for kits. We're going to get our plans in place for 2021 and start selling memberships. so that fans will actually be the ones voting on the final kit design. We want it to be something that the majority approves of. In the meantime, we are setting up a website where we'll sell some t-shirts, scarves, things like that.

Right now we are 100% self-financing everything. It's purely a passion project right now, and for the foreseeable future. Neither David nor myself expects to make any money from this club. Probably ever lol. But that's totally okay! That's not our goal. We want to build something that people in the community take pride and ownership in. If we can sell enough memberships and merch to break even, we will be more than happy. But we're here for the long-haul, either way.

What league are you joining in 2021 and what does success look like in year one?
Again, members are going to play a big role in ultimately helping us choose a league. Florida is blessed with lots of soccer clubs, playing in all kinds of different leagues, so there are options out there. Everything from the Florida Gold Coast League, to the UPSL which has an entire division in South Florida, to the NPSL, which also has a conference just in Florida, to the National Soccer League. So there are a lot of options out there, and when we open up the memberships, we will be laying out the pros and cons of them all and letting the members decide what is best for the club.

Long-term success: we don't have huge dreams of playing in the MLS or anything. That's not why we are starting this club and it's not what Miami needs. Rather, we'd like to turn this club into something that is really FOR the community. For example: We're committed to holding open tryouts with absolutely no fees to try out (this could be a topic for another article, but tryout fees are insane for some clubs...), because everyone should have a shot at playing for us. We'd like to get to a point where we have field a youth team, again, with no insane youth team fees like seem to be so common in US soccer these days. We've been given a lot by this region in our personal and professional lives, and we want to give some of that back and establish this club as a real part of the community and somewhere people can have a voice in their team. Stay tuned!

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