So who are you and what's your background in soccer?

I’m Chris Petley. I have been a fan and played the sport my entire life. I played growing up and captained my high school team and played intramurals in college. I have blown out both knees so the competitive playing days went away. I am the fanatic fan that was awake at 3:00am to watch the National team play in Korea. I have chased the national team around the country catching games. I just flat out love the sport.

My day job is in communications and working in the superintendent’s office for the Leon County School District. I have a background in Florida and Tallahassee politics.

How did you get involved with Tallahassee SC?

A few years ago I read Dens manifesto and then texted a group of friends asking why not here in Tallahassee. A bunch of them sort of laughed it off—but I was dead ass serious. I spent a year meeting with anyone involved in soccer or business in our area. I told them the vision and the plan to start a community led soccer club that would highlight local players. I kind of set out waiting for someone to say no…but every step of the way people bought in and the momentum kept building.

I recruited some friends and business leaders and set up a board of directors for the non-profit. We announced to the public in front of 150 people on a 95 degree Wednesday in May 2018. I was convinced there would be 30 people there. This was a sign of what was to come. One year later almost to the day, we hosted the Savannah Clovers in front of 700 people. It has been an incredible journey.

The club is community owned, can you talk about what that means?

We set out to build a community club. Not one person involved is making any money. This is a passion project built on the love of where we live and the sport. The community is our driving force in everything we do. It means the world to see the relationships and friends that have been made in the past two years. That is what this is all about. We are not building a soccer team, we are developing an experience and relationships that add to why people choose to live in Tallahassee and the surrounding areas. We have college students, high school students, professionals, heck we even have a surgeon on our team. We are a reflection of who lives here. We wouldn’t have had a tenth of the early success if we were not community led.

Your team plays in the GCPL, we'd love to get your take on the league.

LOVE the league and the relationships we have created. Being in Tallahassee we are on a geographical island. This was probably the biggest barrier to any team from here. We are the only large population area in about a 3 hour radius. Finding teams to play was going to be a challenge. The GCPL solved that. While we still have to travel more than three hours every single away game, it is a local regional league with like-minded teams. It was important to us that there was a clear path to success. With 19 teams in 5 states it was clearly defined to see what winning would look like—not getting lost in a 100+ team league.

You won your division this season before losing in the playoffs, what lessons did your club take from 2019? How will you top it in 2020?

Last season was magical. The games. The fans. The players. Everything just sort of fell into place. It was a lot of work, but it was truly amazing. We have learned a lot of lessons from travel, to food, to practices and so much more. The learning is in the doing and we had to get that first year over so we could take the lessons and start to plan for 2020.

We are focused on keeping the momentum going. We understand there may be a natural drop off given that the “newness” factor will not be there this year. But we are planning to improve our game day experience and offer more value to our members and sponsors. We will be doing a much better job this year in outreaching to different parts of the community as well.

I also believe that our team is going to be even better this year. Players will have spent a year in Coach Bruno’s system. Our college guys, one more year in a college program. We have some exciting high school seniors in town as well. And those players that were hesitant to tryout or play with us last year, now know what we are about—taking care of our players, performing at a high level and showcasing their talent in front of our community.

Add it all together and we are confident that 2020 is going to be a great year!

What TSC player should we all know about?

Without question it is Hugo Peruzzi. He is an outstanding goal keeper, but an even better person. His personality, experience playing professionally in Portugal and leadership on our team were invaluable. He racked up the recognition in the GCPL being named to the best XI. He was our fan vote player of the year and our defensive player of the year. But I cannot stress enough that none of that would be possible if he wasn’t such a great person. He is a coach at the local academy and a father to a toddler. He gives his time and energy to his teammates and more. We are lucky to have him.

Additionally, we had some amazing individual performers such as Aron Wimberly who played every single minute for us at CDM, Team Captain Jacob Schmoker who lead our team emotionally and physically and others.

We also have the GCPL Coach of the Year in Josh Bruno.

Your logo and kit are pretty stellar, how did those come about?

When we started researching for the branding of the club we wanted to stay away from the easy things related to the capital and the local college motifs. We went deep into the history of Tallahassee and came across an old WWI air field by the name of Dale Mabry Air Field. Before this base Tallahassee was a sleepy southern town with a population of about 18,000. After this base was put into use, the entire city changed direction. FSU was a women’s college until the base and then opened to men. Over 173,000 visitors came to town and the city found its roots. We wanted to celebrate this history and turning point. We know that there were battalions that trained at this base. We took the word battalion and split it into our brand of the Battle Lion—thus our logo and beyond. Our supporters group is named the Olde Fields Battalion. Tallahassee is a Creek Indian word meaning Olde Fields. They combined the two and it works perfectly.

The day after we announced our team and presented the logo and brand, we were contacted by the local Dale Mabry Air Field Museum. They shared a story with us about the 338th Fighter Group that was based out of there. They told us that the 338th insignia was a winged flying lion. Then they really blew our minds by telling us there motto was Ad Metam which translated into To the Goal. It was all meant to be!

We adopted the To the Goal as our official hashtag and motto. And we are proud to be able to use our branding to tell stories of our city that might’ve been lost to history.

If someone wants to get involved with your club, what would they do?

Become a member, follow us on social media, send us an email. This is a volunteer run organization and there is room and jobs for everyone.