You (Arik Housley) are one of several minds who came together to found the club - can you tell us what your role is, who else helped set up the organization, and if they're still involved?
I was drawn to Sonoma Sol and how well they had done, as well as curious about NPSL. At the time I was running the local youth club and wanted a men’s team for the players to aspire. My vision and intentions were to help guide local Hispanic youth to get good grades and be good enough at soccer to open doors to college and beyond. Got some information from a friend Greg about what NPSL was and started down the path. One of our minority owners and I decided to take this concept and run with it. After the 2016 AOM in Orlando, we were introduced to Michael Hitchcock and his partner. After getting our first phone call we offered them to buy into the ownership team and Napa Valley 1839 FC was born. That same week, I was introduced to Josh Goss, our other majority owner. To this day, Josh and I run the operation from Napa. We are the primary owners, with minority ownership from a few others including Hitchcock and my brother Adam Housley and his wife Tamera Mowry-Housley.

What was the founding mission of the club? What influenced that and had that evolved since then?
The founding vision was to provide family-fun entertainment that is soccer centric. That is 100% still our focus and we discuss that nearly every meeting of the operations team. Napa Valley is known for its food, wine, and hospitality yet there is not a lot of activities and other things to do. Having a sporting event that we try to treat like a professional game environment with food, team merchandise, beer and wine garden, kids walking out players, autographs after the game and a kid-zone. This year we are excited to have added the WPSL option. We wanted to offer a woman’s program earlier but covid had us slow things up a bit.

With so many options for leagues to join, why did you choose to set up in NPSL and WPSL respectively: how often does the organization re-evaluate their league situation?
We chose NPSL because it’s what we knew and started on the path. We are constantly evaluating our options, as we’ve been encouraged to go the NISA, USL and MLS NEXT PRO route. Monetizing at division 3 in the US is difficult, there needs to be regionalization due to travel costs. We aren’t Germany, Holland, England, or Spain where you can get somewhere in a 4-hour train ride, yet we act as if we are one country, it just doesn’t make financial sense. We know from when we were involved the NPSL Members Cup in 2019. It was minimum $20K/weekend and that was cutting it closer than desired with a red eye flight going out to save on an additional hotel night. Plus, since we don’t pay our players, they all have day jobs and couldn’t take longer off. We really like the NPSL Golden Gate Conference. We get along well with the other owners; we try to create good games and environments. I know some areas of the country other leagues may be stronger but not in Norcal. UPSL level doesn’t come close to what NPSL puts out. I hear that is different in SoCal, but I can’t say for sure as I haven’t seen any of the teams from either league.

How important are tournaments like the US Open Cup and USASA Amateur Cup? Would you consider participating in a future NISA Independent Cup? If there was a women's open cup, would you participate?
We are definitely interested in other cup options. There has been stirring discussion of creating a California cup with North and South meeting up for the final, which would be a fall tournament. Again, just a concept. We are definitely looking to enter US Open Cup and other cup options as well, especially if they can help us qualify for US Open Cup. As for the ladies, it is such a short season. We are hoping to do an international friendly with the ladies if we can make that happen.

We've admired your kits in the past, and even given a few away, could you remind us of who you work with for design as well as manufacturing. They do great work, what makes them so awesome?
We work directly with production for our kit designs, and we actually have them manufactured directly. We do some work for other clubs to help them create designs that are their own. This path began after year 1 cost of nearly $60/jersey for the team to use Adidas, and it was a boring look, green with stripes and gray with stripes. We loved them as it was exciting but there was no customization option. We then found a company that won’t be named for year 2 and worked with them to customize which we did, yet their customer service was poor, so we started to research going direct. Our logo and brand strategy designer Chris Payne set us on a great path, so we try to stay true to those parameters. It also allows us to do something that is meaningful to us. Our Cause Kits are something we look forward to doing every year. We’ve now raised over $20K for Alaina’s Voice Foundation as well as Cancer Causes. Annually we choose something meaningful and look to generate awareness. Our first season was for breast cancer awareness due to one of our founding members fight. 2019 was the ENOUGH jersey (during members cup) recognizing the 12 victims of Borderline and the victims of the shooting at the Veterans Home of California, both which effected our valley as my daughter was one of the lives lost at Borderline. We also listed 54 cities that had mass shootings from January 2017 to September 2019 when we as a team were in existence. The number is astounding and getting worse, but we wanted to bring awareness. This year, we created TOGETHER with messages of mental health, kindness, and inclusivity because we believe TOGETHER we will be better as a nation and as humans. My wife and I personally sponsored the Jerseys on behalf of Alaina’s Voice Foundation and $5k raised from the sales go 100% toward mental health services in the Napa Valley.

We will continue to create our own kits and our cause kits because it is part of what we do and what we love.

This year, your men did the double over the Sonoma County Sol - are they your rival? Is there anything more to it than just a game of soccer? It looks like the Sol do not have a WPSL team, do your women have a rival yet?
Sonoma Sol are a great rival. We are good friends with Vinnie Cortezzo that has been their backbone for years. These past two seasons our Coach Mark Corbett has really created a great chemistry within the team. He has to ask people not to come to practice sometimes as our numbers to get into the squad are large. We try to treat our players like professionals, since we can’t pay them, they get all their training kits, warmups, jackets and lots of other gear at no cost to them. We feed them when going to games and we take them in the team vans that we had wrapped and “pimped out” haha. We have running lights that light up green as well as wheel wells, exterior speakers and all. We love using the vans in the community to shuttle to the games or for community events. As for the women, we are still getting our feet wet. We have a great relationship with FC Davis, I didn’t see a rivalry start this year for us but it was a whirlwind of 6 weeks. With the men we have time to ramp things up. We intend to try to treat our ladies like we do the men with our after-game party at Barnhouse Napa Brews and make sure they get all the gear as well. Hopefully that will continue to bring a quality of player that wants to be treated with respect and to enjoy the fan atmosphere we create.

In the past you've had some pretty big friendlies, tell us who has come to play, why you do it, and if you could bring any club to the fans, who would it be?
We first brought Monarcas of Morelia as we have a big contingent of people originally from Michoacan in Napa. It was their second team, but we had a great event. From then we brought Club America U20, then Chivas U20. The die-hard fans come to watch their teams and it is a fun event. The BIG one came last August of 2021 when we brought the Legends of Guadalajara, former Chivas players. We had some huge names like Claudio Suarez, Carlos Salcido, Ramon Ramirez, Ramon Morales and so many more. The game changer and for some controversial. Chivas is a team for Mexican’ only. In this game, we were lucky to have Mattias Almeyda join the Leyendas squad. Controversy for a few, as he is Argentinian, but he is a legend for them as a coach. Napa Valley 1839 didn’t have an issue as we didn’t play the Chivas, we played a group of legends that used to played or coached for Chivas. We were also excited because my friend Jimmy Conrad, joined the 1839 squad and was given the #10 jersey for the first time in his life. We had to cut admission due to mask mandates being re-instated. We had about 4500 people in Napa Memorial Stadium. The next game is being discussed and we are working on logistics and timing. Unfortunately, we can’t tell you as its top secret at the moment. Our primary focus is to make a woman’s international friendly happen which is hard to work it into such a small window, but we are working on it.

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