On Saturday, history will be made at Widner Field while Rhode Island FC travels to the Colorado Springs Switchbacks at noon CBS for the USL Championship. Both are among the hottest teams in the league and are looking for the first championship in club history with rookie head coaches, but the similarities are starting to distract. Colorado has been playing in the USL for a decade, but this isn’t just their first appearance in the finals. After qualifying for the playoffs in their first two seasons, the Switchbacks have been in and out of the postseason. After head coach Brenden Burke left for the Houston Dynamo, the Switchbacks turned to assistant James Chambers to lead the team, strengthening their connection to eastern Pennsylvania.
Chambers and team captain Matt Mahoney played together for Bethlehem Steel, where Chambers served as a veteran player and team captain taking talented players to the Philadelphia Union Academy.
“I think as you get older you get more experience, you’ve seen certain things, you’ve felt different things and I was able to do that in Bethlehem,” Chambers said. “In the end it was a little easier because I had younger players in a top academy who were around me and bought into what I was trying to do. Whether it was right or wrong, they still listened to me, which was impressive of me. saying it definitely helped, but I wouldn’t say it fully molded me into this culture now, but it did help on this journey.”
It’s a different world being alongside players like Brenden Aaronson and Mark McKenzie in Bethlehem, but being able to gain that experience and sometimes make mistakes is something that’s crucial to growth. Those Bethlehem sides were competitive and combined development with performance, which has carried over to Colorado Springs. Their mid-season improvement is down to the team being more aggressive and learning their role under Chambers to earn their place behind the strong home form and its players playing for each other.
“I was very lucky to have Chambo, who was playing professionally at the time and I think he was the same age as I am now,” said Switchbacks captain Matt Mahoney, 29. “When he was captain of that team my freshman year, it was incredible to learn from [him] and of course my relationship with [sporting director Stephen Hogan] and Brenden [Burke] I felt very comfortable then and it was all about hard work and mentality. We had a few other students in that group who made it easy to train and work hard within that organization so I could learn how to be a good pro and what it means to win at this level.”
The Bethlehem experience has gone a long way for Mahoney, who has never missed the USL playoffs during his career. The final will rely on the experience gained in Bethlehem, but that doesn’t mean an upstart team won’t try to steal the spotlight.
Khano Smith’s Rhode Island FC, which has already defeated Louisville City FC and the Charleston Battery, has quickly become a team no one wants to face. They never tied a game and set the record for most ties in a USL Championship season with 15, and only the league’s division in Louisville and Charleston had fewer losses than Rhode Island’s seven. They came out of the gate strong in their first season, becoming the first expansion team to even make the playoffs since Swope Park Rangers in 2016. Swope Park also advanced to the USL finals, becoming the second team in USL history that did this, but now Rhode Island is the third.
“The turning point in the year, I think, is when we started winning games. But again, if you look at the results and you look at games and if you actually look at the games we played in, the only game in which we played.” From a scoring perspective, the Tampa game wasn’t really competitive, and that was the Tampa game,” Smith said, looking back on the season. “It was the third game of the season. We actually went into the half, were 1-0 up and probably should have been up by two. I thought we were the better team in my opinion. In the second half they blew us like crazy with four goals and we never responded, we never changed.
“It was a learning moment for me and a learning moment for the players. But apart from that, every game was close, we were competitive, uh, maybe in all of them, and looking… [it] It just took us time to win games, but we didn’t lose games either and in the end people like to point out to me and us that we set the draw record of 15 draws. But for me that’s positive.”
That momentum led Rhode Island to buck the trend of expansion teams struggling in their first year, but there’s still a new challenge coming their way. However, no one has stopped them yet, so they will be well prepared to make it a thrilling final and make history in the process as two teams battle for their first crown.