EMPIRE'S MILLION DOLLAR MAN

Turning points in our lives can come at the most unsuspecting times.

For Empire Strykers new head coach Onua Obasi it happened off the pitch.

Not once, but twice.

"I was a football fan, a big, big fan," he said in a recent interview. "I loved playing the game. I really loved watching it. I just wanted to keep playing soccer. I didn't want to stop. I obviously dreamt of being a professional. I wanted to keep playing until I literally I can't afford to play anymore. I was just very lucky."

The first time happened when he was playing for an amateur side in North Wales. A friend got Central Connecticut State University assistant coach to watch Obasi play in a game and Obasi was offered a scholarship to play for the school.

"It was a good time," he said. “I was playing football in America, in a new country, and meeting different people from different cultures. It was really cool."

It got even cooler in 2014, when he first joined the Rochester Rhinos in the USL.

In the second week of preseason, Rhinos head coach Bob Lilley asked his players to write down what they had learned the first three weeks. That was right up Obasi's alley because he had been writing down his thoughts already.

"I thought, 'Oh, great. I've already got pages of this stuff," Obasi said. "I remember my decision making was not good. When I first turned professional, I would dribble a lot. I didn't see passes. I was very limited. I was very physical, and a good 1 v 1 dribbler.

"I remember thinking, I'm probably not going to play that much this season. I might be more physical and faster than a lot of guys and technical, but just my decisions are just way lower. When he read what I wrote, he expressed to me he was very impressed. I think that stood me in a much better stead for getting minutes, because he was like, 'This player actually gives a crap. And this player has actually listened to everything I've said.'

"Now, as a coach coming full circle, I had two players after practice come up and ask me, 'Oh, coach, I just want your opinion on this and that.' Already it creates an affinity with the player where I'm, 'Oh, this guy wants to learn, and he's willing to kind of put himself out there and come and speak to me about it. I'm going to help him more. I'm going to put him in more spots to make him better, because he cares.' That probably served me well."

And, oh yes, it was the start of Obasi’s professional career.

"My first game was actually terrible," he said. "Then I got a stroke of luck. A player got injured, and I got to start the next game when I would have been dropped 10 times out of 10, basically, from my performance. I played well, got my role in the team, and never really looked back since. I can't overstate how lucky I was to be in that environment at that time."

Not only did that scenario help Obasi become a better player, but it laid the groundwork for him to become a coach.

Writing things down wasn't anything new for Obasi. Both his parents were teachers.

"Academics were something that they forced more than football," he said. "They did not enjoy me playing soccer. They were always saying, 'When are you going to quit? Stop chasing the ball around, your knees are going to hurt.' My brothers played for too long and their knees, they can't walk up the stairs. My parents were not enthusiastic, but it served me well. They weren't discouraging to the point of stopping me. Their advice was not to play. That might have fueled a bit more hunger for it maybe because I had to go and search for it myself. I always had that academic approach to what I was doing. I would take a lot of notes."

If the name Onua Obasi sounds familiar to you, it should. He directed Newtown Pride to the first TST - The Soccer Tournament - the winner-take-all $1 million competition, in 2023.

We'll get to that in a few minutes. First, let's talk about Obasi's career and what challenges lie ahead with the Strykers in the 2024-25 Major Arena Soccer League season.

Learning from the best

Born in Birmingham, England on Sept. 24, 1988, Obasi has been a football/soccer fan as long as he could remember.

The 6-foot-4, 215-lb Obasi completed college in England before learning he could earn that scholarship in the states. He pursued his master's degree at CCSU from 2014-15, before turning pro with the Rhinos (2015 USL champions). Obasi also played outdoors with the Ottawa Fury for four seasons (North American Soccer League). In 2014, he discovered indoor soccer and signed with the Baltimore Blast (two MASL championships), being named to the All-Rookie team. He also performed for Utica City and Ontario Fury (now the Strykers).

Obasi, who played left back, center back and defensive midfielder during his career, learned to learn from his coaches. He singled out the Blast's Danny Kelly and David Bascome and Lilley on what to do and what not to do.

"They are some of the best coaches," Obasi said. "I learned a lot. That was the grounding. That allowed me to see there's more to the game than just dribbling, being skillful. There's a lot more to be effective as a team. How do you make the style of play predictable but also tactically flexible without making players robots? I learned those things from two slightly different angles, but very similar in attention to detail. That was a really, really exciting time. I was in my prime physically. I was in a position where I could help the team, but also, I was learning a lot. That was really cool.

"I went to other clubs and didn't get the level of coaching, but because I'd had such a good base, I was able to look at it through the lens of what I already knew and see, 'Okay, I've seen what the best, looks like. Now I'm seeing what not to do and still pick up things here and there. This is how you don't treat a player. This is how you don't talk to the squad after a loss. This is how you don't do video. There's a ton of lessons that I learned from bad coaches, too, or not-so-good coaches, that also helped me. I had one coach later on in my career who we didn't exactly see eye-to-eye, but he was very structured with his video. That is the basis of how I do my video. It was cool."

Prior to the Strykers, Obasi might not have any coaching experience in the MASL, but he coached at a youth academy in Connecticut, getting background on organizing teams, and then the Newtown Pride, which captured the first TST championship in 2023.

"I was working with grown men, grown professionals with the personalities and the characters and that kind of put those two things together," Obasi said. "It left me in a good position where I didn't feel daunted by taking like a head coaching job. If I hadn't had either one of those experiences, I would have been like: how do we even play? I would have had to address a group of 30 guys. They're all looking at you. You've got to talk to them about how you want them to play. I had enough experience where I was like, I call I can do that."

A dream opportunity

Obasi, 36, had planned to coach Spice City FC (Connecticut) in MASL 2, until he received a call from Empire executive Jimmy Nordberg, who asked him if he was interested in coaching the team after Paul Wright departed the club.

"Obviously, I’m thankful for Jimmy and Jeff [Burum, Strykers managing partner] for thinking of me. It's a dream,” he said. “It's the job I wanted. I had a taste of organizing high level players before. To do it a day-to-day basis for an extended period of time is, is exactly the opportunity I was hoping for. Out of the blue, Jimmy called me and told me about the opportunity. I had a few other commitments. I was to coach an M2 team, which I'm still going to help out from a distance. But I couldn't pass up this opportunity."

Obasi hasn't had many days to prepare for the season, as he was named head coach on Nov. 8. Training started on Monday, Nov. 18. The Strykers will kick off their season at the defending champion Chihuahua Savage on Friday, Dec. 6 before hosting Utica City FC in their home opener on Friday, Dec. 13.

Immediately, Obasi started watching videos to get a sense of how the team played last year.

On the coast-to-coast flight last week, he worked out his game plan for the preseason.

"I spent time thinking, what's that first session going to look like? What's the second session going to look like? What's the third session going to look like?" he said. "I know what my first 20 sessions were going to look like. It was a good lesson for me to think very quickly on what I'm going to prioritize. I want us to by game one, to know what we want to do in all the different phases.”

Goals for the season

Last season the Strykers (12-9-3) finished out of the playoffs in sixth place out of seven teams in the Western Division.

"I think playoffs are a minimum," Obasi said, adding, “obviously, best case scenario is we win a championship.

"I don't want to get ahead of myself, but we have a team to do it. There's a lot of structure and things that need to be put in place. Luck plays a role. It's not an aim where it's unachievable. I've been on teams where it's unachievable, but this is not one of those teams. I haven't said, 'Hey, I'm here to win a championship, and we're going to win a championship.' But when the time comes, I'm going to make the same argument to them that I was just saying to you. 'Listen, we have the tools to win a championship. That should be our goal.' Then we work backwards from that is, you know, we need to win games against the best teams."

Those teams include the San Diego Sockers and Tacoma Stars because the Strykers play each of their Western foes five times. That's 10 out of 24 regular season games.

"We need to be very competitive and win a number of those games," Obasi said. "It's half our season. We do well there, we're good. Playoffs will take care of themselves if we achieve that goal. Winning a championship, that comes down to, are you able to be in the business end of the season in good form and with luck with injuries. All those other factors are one element of the equation, and to a degree out of our control."

That championship summer

Regardless of how the Strykers fare, Obasi already has etched his name into soccer history by coaching the Newtown Pride to the first TST championship in 2023. He put together a team that included several MASL stars.

"It was great. It was great," said Obasi, added that a close friend of his, Matthew Svanda, and his wife Adriana, put up the money to fund the 2023 squad.

"They put a lot of stuff to make it happen in a way that we could be proud of," he added. "We didn't just turn up and play. We turned up early. We trained. Some structure wasn't perfect, definitely part of the learning curve. We recruited good players. He [Svanda] supported me a lot to get a lot of the best players together in one location. That was a big challenge. Then we went to the tournament, and we won.

"We lost the first game against the run of play, but we won all the other games, and we won them convincingly. So that was a really nice moment. It was really nice to say I could pay back the faith that my friend showed in me and his investment. It meant a lot to me. I got a nice [nice] car out of it. So that was cool. I really feel fortunate. There were a lot of lessons learned, coaching wise, which was cool as well."

This past summer, Obasi returned to coach Newtown in the TST, but the team fell short, reaching the semifinals.

After the 2024-25 MASL season, Obasi will concentrate on coaching Newtown to TST glory one more time.

"There'll be one last roll of the dice," he said. "You can count on me. I want him [Svanda] to be a bit more frugal with his money. He paid guys well. He's a very generous guy. He basically gave the guys double what they got in the first year.

"We can still be successful and not maybe spend as much as he spent because I feel a bit bad about that, because we could lose it again. As a friend, I urge a little bit of caution, but as a coach, I can work with the best players again. We're going to give it a good go. I already have some ideas of how we want to play differently. It's quite an involved process, recruiting 20 guys and getting the right balance and the right training in a very intense two-, three-week period."

But first things first, Onua Obasi will focus on improving the Strykers and striving for some MASL glory in what could be an intense five-month period.

Michael Lewis, who has covered indoor soccer since 1975, can be found and followed on BlueSky at @Soccerwriter.