Jide Saba was walking around the pitch, picking up cones, carrying a ball bag over a shoulder.

A player leans over to a coach, and asks who is the man picking up after the Maryland Bobcats pre-game warm-up.

“That’s the owner,” the coach replied.

That kind of thing is common around the Bobcats. Everyone wears a lot of hats - the owner picks up cones and slings ball bags over his shoulder, assistant coaches design graphics, the general manager ensuring the jerseys are clean. From the top of the club all the way down, being for all is a common message.

That message might get a little louder soon, however.

The Bobcats recently announced their intentions to become a professional team. In late July, they submitted their application to the National Independent Soccer Association. This move makes the Bobcats the first outdoor professional team in Maryland. They played in NISA’s Independent Cup this year while preparing to make the jump into full-time professional soccer.

Don’t tell the Bobcats that they’re just now making the jump to the professional level.

“We are a professional club from how we trained, how we arrived to training, how we travel, how we try to make our guys behave on social media,” said Evan Raimist, the Bobcats’ general manager and director of operations. “For all intents and purposes, the last year or so, we have been a professional club in our minds, regardless of who says what level we’re at.”

The Bobcats have been a club for about 10 years now. They started as a Sunday league team playing under the name World Class Premier Elite in the Maryland Majors Soccer League. The team had originally been created as a way for Saba and his college friends to stay in touch and shape.

They joined the United Premier Soccer League in 2018 and quickly found success. In the spring of 2019, the Bobcats made it to the UPSL National Quarterfinal. They followed that up with an undefeated fall slate and claimed the UPSL National Championship in January.

But to the Bobcats, there was a bigger goal in mind.

That bigger goal came from Saba and those who started the club: be a professional team. And now, they have reached that goal. The Bobcats have grown from that Sunday league team to a pro team in about a decade. And the “for all” message has been with the team since the start.

Saba preaches humility in all things he and his club does, which is why the club wants to ingrain itself in the community, and to never forget where they came from.

That message of “for all” is seen everywhere. On social media, on the top of the website. It’s not just a marketing message, it’s something that’s believed by everyone in the club.

“It’s not just a tagline. It’s not just something we can tweet out or whatever,” Raimist said. “It’s kind of what the club was built on.”

To Saba, to Raimist, to the Bobcats, soccer should be for everyone. For the people in the community. The Bobcats hosted what they called the Community Cup for amateur teams in Maryland to raise money for league dues and other charges that may come about. The Bobcats, as a team just about ready to make the jump to NISA, might not have the money to throw around for all the teams, but they want to continue to grow the game in the soccer-rich Maryland region.

Pictured: Evan Raimist, Jay Saba, Phil Nana

Investing in the community goes a long way in building the culture in the area for the first outdoor professional team in the state.

Sure, that’ll help put the Bobcats in a foothold as the first outdoor professional team, but it’s more than that for them. And it all goes back to being for all.

“We want to be more than a club,” Raimist said. “We want to use our platform, however small that may be, to do something better in our community, to make it a better place.”

It might be a while before the Bobcats see themselves compete in a professional game — according to Raimist they are looking at the fall of 2021 or spring of 2022. That’s because the Bobcats have a lot to do before they go full on.

That won’t stop them from continuing to run their club through that simple message of “for all.”

Whether that’s Saba, as the club president picking up cones and setting up water jugs on the sideline. Whether it’s Raimist, the 25-year-old general manager, making sure jerseys are washed and the field is ready to play on. Everyone in the club does things for all. For Maryland, for the players, for the kids that can grow up and watch a local professional team. That’s where the Bobcats will be, and have been since growing from the Sunday league team to one of NISA’s newest members, whenever that may start.

“We got in this because we love soccer,” Raimist said. “(But we also) love our state, and we want to give players a platform to be able to play.”

- Trevor Colgan