Some might call it beginner’s luck.

Despite this being their first ever run in the competition, the Milwaukee Torrent have made it all the way to the semifinals of the 2024 USASA Amateur Cup. This is no fluke, though, as they won the Midwest region to get to this stage, and they’ve done plenty of winning already this season.

Now they’re ready to make a statement, and set themselves up for the future in the process.

Origin story

So who exactly are the Torrent? Well, let’s start at the very beginning.

“I started the Torrent in 2015 when the late chairman of the board of the NPSL Joe Barone asked me if I can do something in Milwaukee as they just lost the Milwaukee Bavarians. The NPSL is not very expensive, but it costs money to play in there, and they had nobody to really raise the money for it,” said club owner & CEO Andreas Davi, who played for the Bayer Leverkusen academy as a youngster. “I told him I can do this, but I'll only do it if I can play with professional players, because at that point my thinking was the one thing that Wisconsin does not need is another club with amateur players.”

Milwaukee does not have a professional men’s outdoor soccer club at the moment, and it’s a market that hasn’t fully been tapped into considering the amount of high-level players in the area.

“That was not a problem in the NPSL, and so I made the Torrent in 2015 and we played in the NPSL for the first time in 2016. Since then the goal is to obviously get into the professional level. Getting to that level is tricky in this country, and that’s another story for another day, but this is how we started,” said Davi. “We’ve played in the Members Cup where we played against teams like the Cosmos, Detroit, Chattanooga, and the Michigan Stars. We played in the NISA Independent Cup for several years, and this year is the first year that we’re playing in the Amateur Cup.”

The next step was figuring out a name and a brand identity, and the focus was on making sure the club was unique to the region.

“I didn't want to have anything in the state of Wisconsin that had to do with beer, bricks, or cheese,” said Davi. “You have Lake Michigan here, Milwaukee is the clean water city, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has that whole section at the college about water. Torrential stands out as a strong name, and that’s where Torrent comes from.”

The Torrent logo is a standard minimalistic American soccer one, but it’s a clean design, with a light blue and dark blue anchor on a white background.

Amateur Cup calling

Before we get to the semifinals, let’s quickly go over how they got here.

They got a few bye weeks and entered the competition in the quarterfinals of region II, aka the Midwest region. Milwaukee came out hot, blowing past Chicago House Athletic Club 6-1 in a game they dominated throughout.

Next came a meeting with Vlora FC of Minnesota, and although that was a much closer contest, the Torrent still did enough to secure a win and their spot in the regional final.

That set up a derby day with local rivals Bavarian United SC, who are somewhat kings of the Amateur Cup. Regular time wasn’t enough to separate the two sides, but Milwuakee were ultimately able to find the winning goal in overtime to seal the marquee victory.

“The Bavarians are a nine-time national amateur champion. That's a big, big club in the United States, and this was actually the first time that we played against each other,” said Davi. “The game went into extra time, and we won in extra time. I think we were the better side, we hit the post and crossbar four times. I think it was a well-deserved win, it was a fun game to watch. It was a very intensive derby.”

Keeping things local, the Torrent will benefit from the finals of the Amateur Cup taking place relatively close to them. Sure, it’s still about a two-hour drive from Milwaukee to DeKalb, but that’s light work compared to the cross-country trips some other teams will make.

“We’ll drive there Thursday, we’ll go back home and then if we make it to the final, we’ll drive there again. If you see our opponent, Arizona, they have to fly. That means they have to come the day before the first game,” said Davi. “We know the experience of flying over, and it is nerve-killing from the point when you just sit in the hotel and wait for the game and there's nothing that you can really do. It’ll be an advantage for us.”

That takes us to the final four, where the Torrent are hoping that a run to the trophy will be the start of something bigger.

“At this level we’re all about trying to win cups. It was the first time in our history we got this far, and getting here beating a team like the Bavarians was big because they’re historic in this competition,” said head coach Jeff Pill. “We’ve built a good team here, and it’s exciting to see how it’s come together.”

“For us, getting to that next level and where we want to go, winning this national championship would be so helpful,” said Davi. “We’re already kind of on the landmark because of what we’ve done in the past with the Independent Cup and the Members Cup and all this stuff, but winning a national championship is obviously something unique. Now that you are in the semifinal, you obviously want to go all the way.”

“I think with a club like us who wants to keep growing, there's a difference. I don't mean this with any disrespect to other clubs, but you have some who are happy where they are. They will always be an amateur club at a lower level,” said Davi. “We're looking right now for potential investors, it's not a secret. Winning this tournament would be very helpful for reaching our goal. Getting to win a national championship, I mean that's why you play, right? You play to win a championship, and if it's a national championship, that’s like the best thing in the world.”

It’s also become a bit personal for Davi, in terms of developing a winning professional men’s team in the greater Milwaukee area. He’s someone who grew up in Germany, where they see the sport of soccer in a different light. It’s more pure there, the focus is on the game itself and supporting a team as they grow. It is different to the American model, which focuses on capitalism and putting on a show alongside the game in order to bring in paying customers, who are there to see the big name in town.

“This state is league over club, they’ll support whoever as long as it’s the highest level league. We’re the highest level of soccer in the city, we should be having a couple of thousand kids in the stands every game. I mean southeast Wisconsin has over 60,000 registered kids. You think about this number and there is just no support,” said Davi. “The entertainment is the 90 minutes of the game, not the halftime show. Some clubs do theme nights, like a superhero night or a superhero event where you dress like your favorite superhero. This is why they get 5,000 people to a game. Are those 5,000 going to come back when there's another game? No, they won’t, and that's a problem.”

“We thought about inviting youth clubs to games, but you run into the problem that more and more of those clubs have really long seasons. We can give tickets away and then they don't come because of their schedule,” said Davi. “One of the biggest things is that the little clubs start to struggle because there's no support. You have people here that want pro soccer, well come to a f**king game. They don't, though, they want to wait until you are on that level and then they’ll come. That's wrong. I'm glad when they go to games, but the way things are here in Wisconsin with soccer, it’s not easy.”

Despite all this, the Torrent have built up an impressive roster that’s ready for the moment, with some real standout names.

“Zakaria Daaou is an obvious one, he was on the roster of the Germany youth national team, and he’s a very good kid. Alejandro Martinez is an outstanding player, and actually he plays soccer at a Division II school here on the south side of Wisconsin,” said Davi. “Allaho Lopez is a kid from Colombia that I found playing basically in the backyard. He is here because of family, and he’s just playing somewhere all the time, whether it’s 5v5 or 6v6 or whatever. When he’s fit he is a good gold scorer. Then we have this defender with a tough name, Jayhea Bailey, who’s from Marquette, and Max Ludwig, one of our midfielders who’s out of college.”

“We have NPSL games coming, but we take that game by game. Those games come fast and furious, and we’re also in this Wisconsin Cup, but we’re so deep that we pretty much have half a roster and a half,” said Pill. “We’ve had some injuries, but so far we’ve been able to manage it.”

Whether one of those players ends up being the hero in DeKalb, or if another name steps up to the plate, that won’t matter to Milwaukee in the slightest.

The only thing the Torrent cares about is riding this wave all the way to a national championship.

- Adnan Bašić