I swear, this article isn’t about Peter Marlette, General Manager of the 2022 US Open Cup darlings Union Omaha - but while looking for pictures of the man and stumbling on these fun shots, we had to use them. It’s my sincere hope that whomever took these shots enjoys that they are being used in a fun and somewhat professional manner. That being said, the conversation with Peter was also fun and professional - the man knows the club inside and out and clearly loves his role.

After Union Omaha won USL League One in the fall, I wanted to reach out to the club. Then after they beat USL League Two’s 2021 Champions, Des Moines Menace, in the second round of this year’s Open Cup, I did reach out. The messaging wasn’t urgent, but then they beat MLS’ Chicago Fire in Round Three - it became more urgent. Then they beat fellow USL League One side, Northern Colorado Hailstorm in the Round of 32 and I was like… I should get this done! Finally, after Union Omaha went to St. Paul, Minnesota, punched another MLS team in the face and stole their lunch money, somebody else in the Protagonist ranks said they had the interview… so I stole it!

Many thanks to the club for rewarding my persistent procrastination and thank you to Peter Marlette for spending 20 minutes on the phone with me to talk about a pretty amazing club on a fantastic run in, what I think, is the most important soccer competition in our country. I start at the start with GM Peter Marlette…

Who is behind the beginning of the club; What is its mission; and where do you fit in?
Yeah, so Gary Green is our CEO, and principal owner, and he’s got Alliance Sports – which is his company that consists of an ownership group and then he was smart enough to recognize that having a local ownership presence was going to be really important to making this club authentically Omaha and really represent the metro that we’re in. He found some really involved, really good, local investors to join that ownership team back in 2019. They’ve been highly involved, and they’ve been really important to the formation of this club, so far.

My role is General Manager – so, I manage all day-to-day business of the club; whether that’s sponsorship, ticketing, stadium operations, player contracts. Whatever it may be, the management of the club falls to me.

2020 was the club’s first season, you finished runners-up, and in 2021 you won the league championship;
what are the goals for the season and what are markers of success?
The goal, every season, is to compete to win every competition that we’re in. Whether that’s USL League One regular season; USL League One playoffs or finally, this year, US Open Cup, because the first two years we played, Open Cup got cancelled. So, we recognize that its going to be difficult to win every competition every year, but the goal is to compete and to have opportunities to win. I was not with the club for that 2020 season, I came on a few months before last season began, but the foundation that the ownership group, Martie Cordaro our Club President, and that probably most importantly, our Head Coach and Technical Director, Jay Mims, laid in 2020 – that covid impacted season – has carried over and is a great starting point to compete. We were able to build on that foundation, in season two, last year and obviously, take it one step further – win that regular season and win that final.

Speaking of Jay Mims, this is a guy who went to school in St. Louis, only played 10 matches for a club around this level in Cincinnati, and he seems to have made his home in Omaha; what does he provide to the club and how much of what’s going on at the club, stems from him?
You know, he was the first hire of the club! He was around before the team ever set foot on the field in 2020. So, he laid that foundation of what we were going to look like on the field; what the club identity was going to be; how we were going to play; the types of players that we were going to bring in to fill those roles – that could play that way. He really set that tone and set that identity. If it were a different Technical Director, a different Head Coach, we may play a completely different style. He set the tone; he set Union Omaha’s playing style and identity – I think we’re going to carry that on, no matter what. I think that’s pretty set, our fans love it, and it represents the area pretty well. It’s a hard-working group, a dedicated group, guys who are willing to put in the hard work, who don’t necessarily need to have the ball all game. But will represent this metro with a ton of pride and an exciting style. He set that from day one.

He is not from Omaha, but his history here is enormous; an assistant coach at Creighton under Bob Warming, who’s another Nebraska soccer legend, and he [Jay] started the program at University of Nebraska Omaha. He started that Division 1 program and was their head coach for years, before his one stop at RSL, then coming back to Union Omaha. He’s a stalwart, he’s a fixture in this community and has been for years now. Without Jay, we would obviously play a different style, but I don’t think we would represent this community as well because he’s somebody who knows exactly what this community is and what this Soccer Metro wants from its players and from its team.

I think the people that follow League One have tracked Jay’s success; are aware of him, but I think the cat’s out of the proverbial bag, now that he’s had a good run in the Open Cup. How long is it before a USL Championship Team, or even a MLS franchise, comes knocking?
You know (chuckling) I think they’re probably already sniffing around – I won’t make any comments about… knocking, but how could you not? The guy has done nothing but win in his professional coaching career so far, but I will also say, Jay is very dedicated to this city. I’m not saying he’s here forever, that’ll be up to him to decide, but his success on the field has got to be hard to ignore for anybody looking to put a winning product together for their club.

You’re only two or three years into the program, what has been the prevailing recruitment policy? How big is the roster and where does he draw his players from?
We draw our players from all over, quite frankly, we have two players this year who have played for the Jamaican National Team – Bobby Murphy went down to Jamaica, watched some games, and made those contacts. I think what’s been important to our year-after-year success, and I know its only our third season, I’m not going to act like it’s a historic success, but we know what player profile we are looking for at each position. We know what traits we need out of a player at every position. We know what personality are going to be required to play under Jay and play the way that we want to play. As well as those physical attributes which are going to be necessary – it’s a team project from there to go find those players who we think will fit that mold and take a close look at them.

So, the staff is not big, but we know exactly what we’re looking for, and that narrows down the field. If we hyper-specific attributes that we’re looking for, both playing style and personality style, it shrinks the amount of players that we’re looking through. Allowing us to go find guys to plug-and-play into our style.

Is there a long-term goal of Union Omaha to move up to USL Championship at some point? It seems like a high-level, intellectual club, with really smart and dedicated staff members, is transitioning up to an even more challenging level, in the vision of the organization?
It is. I can’t speak to specifics about this, but this market is a Championship market. I think the foundation laid for this club can build into a Championship one if we’re not already there. It’s absolutely an ambition of this ownership group and everyone in this front office to play at the highest level available to us, when the opportunity is right.

A fun and healthy locker room is a winning locker room

Tell us about your supporters; was there already an amateur soccer scene and they transitioned over from something else? Are they organic? And how important have they been to your success?
I think there is a good soccer supporter foundation, here in the Omaha Metro area; the Nebraska High School State Soccer Championships, which are played at Creighton for the past number of years, they get four to seven thousand people in that stadium to watch a High School Championship. So, there’s clearly an appetite for the game in the Metro, but there was never a professional club to really satisfy that at the highest level. I think the formation of Union Omaha allowed for that to happen and we’ve now got several big supporters groups – let’s say a group of supporters, that is incredibly enthusiastic, incredibly involved, and knowledgeable about what we’re doing as a club and what’s happening in the USL – they’re so passionate.

We play at Warner Park, which is a baseball stadium; we have great sight lines and I think it sets up pretty well for soccer, but obviously, its never going to be ideal. There’s a ton of room here, a much bigger stadium than any in League One. Our supporters’ groups come out, they are loud and they are excited – they create an atmosphere here at Warner Park that I think is hard for away teams to come play in and it gets our guys up another level, just due to their passion. Their support and the investment that our supporters have in the team is tremendously important to everything we do.

How has all of these elements we’ve spoken about translated to your success this year in the US Open Cup? Is it lightening in a bottle, or does it make sense that all of these things would add up to this?
I don’t want to speak too soon – I don’t want to assume this will happen every year. But, like I said, our goal is to compete to win every competition that we’re in, year over year. I did a podcast a few months ago and a similar question was asked, “how do you think you’ll do in Open Cup?” and my answer was this, “I think we’ve put a team together, that, in one game can beat any team in this country, no matter what the level is.” And I do still believe that and we started to prove that in the Open Cup. I’m not saying we can take this roster and go play in MLS, and compete week-in week-out at that level, but in a knock-out competition, I think we can win any game we play in. We’ve proved that so far, and hopefully it can continue, but even if it doesn't, I think we proved that no matter what YOU are, you need to respect Union Omaha in a knock-out game.

You have Greenville at home on June 18th, away to South Georgia Tormenta on the 25th, both really good teams, bookending your June 22nd USOC away match to Sporting Kansas City; does the club rest players ahead of the Cup match or is every match equally important?
Yeah, you know, it’s going to be brutal – there’s no other way to put it. We have good League One opponents bookending what I might argue is the biggest game in the young history of this club coming up, in Sporting KC. “Resting Players?” If I’m being perfectly honest, we don’t have all that many on the roster to rest all that much – not like an MLS roster which goes 30+ deep. It’s easy to get up for an Open Cup Knockout game against an MLS club when you’re a League One club, you don’t need any extra motivation to go out there, run through a wall, and play your best game there. I think there can be a natural league game in, what 9 of 30, whatever it may be, but its up to the coaching staff and senior members of the playing squad to make sure the guys are up for every game.

Knock-out competition or not, we want to compete to win the league again this year. The only way to do that is to get as many points as we can, early on. We have a brutal League One schedule for the first 1/3 of this season and that’s due to a lot of things. One of them being that we do play in a minor league baseball park that hosts a ton of minor league baseball games in the early part of the season. So, we know that the first 1/3 is ten to twelve games of our season every year is going to be a grind. Its going to be an exercise in accumulating as many points as we can possibly get out of that, knowing that things lighten up as the season goes on. We’ll get more home games and we can try to stockpile those points. So, throw Open Cup into this and it makes it all that much harder, but obviously, we’re thrilled to have that difficulty – thrilled to have that opportunity to keep this run going.

by Joshua Duder