Sam Zisette reflects on last season's success, looks forward to this year's goals at Ballard FC media day
By Charles Hamaker
Interbay, WA – Sam Zisette is one half of the ownership duo for Ballard FC, the USL League Two side that lit up expectations in their inaugural season. From amazing kits, on field success, and match day environment, Zisette and Ballard FC burst onto the scene in year one. With a retooled roster, a returning coaching staff, an expanded beer garden, and two new kits to add to their wonderful wardrobe, the club is ready to ensure that the sort of success on and off the pitch wasn’t just an inaugural season showing, but rather the start of a culture of a club that aims to treat everything as if they were a major league team. With the way operations are running and how the players are being treated, it already sounds like that culture is being built. You could already consider Ballard FC a success, but Zisette has plans to push this further and further to greater heights.
Ensuring that the buzz around Ballard remains
The inaugural season of a sports team across many different leagues and sports always tends to be a thrilling endeavor as the organization celebrates many firsts and the general atmosphere of getting things started. It could be seen with the many firsts of the Seattle Kraken during their 2021-22 season, and with this Ballard FC club through their inaugural 2022 season. The atmosphere at matches at Interbay was on display, and the club itself was winning on the pitch. Those two factors on their own would mean a successful campaign in any season, but there was some wonder if this sort of positive reaction could be recreated after the allure of the inaugural season. Zisette himself wondered that and made sure that his team at Ballard FC worked towards success and atmosphere becoming a regular, sustained thing.
“The inaugural season is kind of its own thing, a buzz to it. There’s an energy, there’s just like a trial-and-error process. Going into year two, for us, it’s really been about creating consistency, and creating something that is sustainable. Not just relying on that first-year buzz, and what we really wanted to avoid was this being a fad, something fun for a summer coming out of COVID, this is a one-off fun year. We want to create something that we can know that in 10,15,20 years is actually still growing, right? We’re not just going to have one big inaugural season and then watch it fade. We were like, how can we really take that energy and enthusiasm that we had for year one and build on it and actually grow it. The challenge with this level of soccer is that it’s a three-month season and a nine-month offseason. How do we keep people engaged for nine months? That’s the big challenge. We feel really good about what we did in the offseason of having events, engaging through social media. Trying different things with kit releases in December and keeping the content, the ideas, and buzz going through that entire offseason. We’re not just starting back up again in April and expecting everybody to like, still remember who we are and what we’re doing. I think what I’m really most excited about is that we have seen major growth from year one to year two, there’s more people who know about Ballard FC, more people who care about Ballard FC. We know that through how many tickets we’re selling, our digital and social following, just the general kind of buzz in the air about the next season, but seeing that tickets are up from last year, compared to this, you know, this time last year is awesome. We’re really excited to fill the stadium again and bring that buzz back to Interbay.”
Getting back into the swing of things
After a somewhat long offseason, given that the USL League Two season only lasts a few months during the summer, Zisette and Ballard FC are ready to get back to the action and passion that have made this club so popular in the city of Seattle. With a revamped roster that features a mixture of new and returning faces, Ballard FC is primed to go deeper into the USL League Two playoffs than they did back in year one and could arguably challenge for the title if things fall into place. But before we get to that point of the season and even think about the playoffs, Zisette and staff are working to ensure that the regular season starts off right and that the weeks afterwards work to plan with a new artist kit to reveal, new merchandise to unveil, and a club to run.
“Playing in front of a crowd against a very good team, it’s going to be awesome to see the players turn it up a notch for that game, and see what we get out of the team. And I’m really I’m gonna note, Jason probably already spoke about it. But I’m really excited about this year’s roster. Not only are we returning such a great core group, which is hard and rare to do at this level, the players we’ve brought in are just lifting us to a whole new level. Obviously, that has to happen on the field, the results will speak for themselves. But we feel really confident about the roster we’ve gotten together, the culture of the group that’s coming together. So being able to see that on Thursday, and a competitive game is going to be so exciting. Seeing these stands filled again, even for a friendly, is going to be amazing. The big change I’m excited about is this beer garden, you know, it’s not gonna be without its challenges. But, we felt like last year, there was a huge opportunity to bring more energy to the stadium, particularly in that behind the goal, there was so much energy coming out of the beer garden. We were like, there’s only way that we could spread that beer garden and energy out across more of the stadium. Hopefully what will happen is we’ll see this whole area behind these trees filled with people. We’re going to see four, five, six hundred people between the beer garden wrapped around this entire area. Can you just imagine when a goal for us is scored there? The celebration can wrap all the way around here along the side and that’s going to be something unique about Interbay and what we’re doing here, where the players are literally three feet away from the fans, it’s different than know major league soccer or even just other major sports where a celebration happens and there’s at least 30-40 feet between the closest fan to the celebration.”
Kit creativity
Creative and good-looking kits are something that fans of all kinds can appreciate, whether they’re an actual fan of that club or not. In their two shorts seasons in playing existence, Ballard FC has already produced quality kits to make their players look good while they’re playing good. Whether it be the team's inaugural home kit to open the season, the Brothers kit that shows a pair of prominent peaks in the Olympic Mountains here in the Pacific Northwest, or the now two kits designed by local artists. The designs of the uniforms that Ballard FC wear whenever they take the pitch, home or away, have certainly caught the attention of the soccer fan base around the city of Seattle and perhaps sooner the soccer world. Regardless, wearing a Ballard FC kit gives you not only a good fashion choice, but a winning club to support as well.
“Kits are a lot of fun. They’re one of the things that we look forward to the most, because there’s an opportunity to be creative, have a lot of fun, and we don’t really have any rules that we’re really bound by. We really get to express ourselves and have a lot of fun with the process. Luckily, we work with an awesome partner with Anaria, who specializes in custom and can really do almost anything. The process is so much fun. We take a lot of pride in quality and design. It starts kind of with the color scheme, right? The brand that we have, and really trying to just let the brand speak for itself and the colors.”
While the home kits in year one for the club were already a sort of classic look with the beige/sand color that they used, steering away from the traditional boring white that teams will often wear at home, Ballard upped their game this year with a bit of a touch up.
“With this home kit, we knew we wanted to do this color for the home kit because it is unique. It’s not like a flat white, like a lot of kits. It’s not yellow, it’s just kind of in between color that we haven’t really seen many teams do before. We thought it’d be a lot of fun to kind of lean in on this color with our home kits, which is this kind of beige, feels very summer because it’s that in between kind of white and yellow. It has kind of some good sunset/beach, like sandy beach kind of vibes that really like. This primary color is inspired by the beaches, Golden Gardens, which is obviously a big part of Ballard. That’s kind of the feeling we’re trying to evoke, that you’re hanging out in Golden gardens in the middle of June. And then with the rest of the design, you know, this home kit, we did this Ballard to Bergen theme. We put a map of Ballard on one sleeve and, and a map of Bergen on the other sleeve just as a nod to Ballard’s Nordic heritage. We like the idea of kits having some deeper meaning to them beyond just cool design, that there’s a story to tell. The Nordic heritage and history of Ballard is an important one for the community. This is kind of our way of being able to kind of express that and celebrate that.”
The brothers kit instantly became a favorite for many in the area before they may have even known that Ballard was a club. The design was one of four options in a fan voted contest (something that the club has tried to do to keep fan engagement high, being those merch votes that is), taking the results by storm and running away with things. While the home kit and Henry kit from year on are both class in their own right, the Brothers kit stood alone as the club's best option from the first year and has stuck around untouched for year two.
“Then with the away kits, we did those as a fan design contest last year, it was one of four options, and fans voted on it overwhelmingly. The response to it has been amazing. I’m actually wearing it right now, it’s my favorite kit of ours. The Olympic Mountains, the Brothers, behind the sunset backdrop with the stark black contrast, which I think is what makes it really special.”
The Dozfy kit from this year, a black background with dark-ish blue lightning and a dragon design, is this year's edition of the artist collaboration kits that Ballard FC has done for the first two years of its playing existence. Last year's edition was designed by local artist Henry, who you’ve no doubt seen some works of theirs around Ballard and the city of Seattle if you’re a native or have explored enough. That Henry kit was very much what you’d expect from the artist, with a bright mixture of colors on a largely light-blue background with designs of creatures you’d seen in the artist's work around the city. Like the Brothers kit only in the black background, the Dozfy kit has a few fun touches of its own. The reflective crest patch, the dragon design popping out of the water below the Ballard Bright to split it, all create another nice kit to look at in the club's artist collaboration series.
“Then our Dozfy kit, part of our artists collaboration kits that we will be doing every year now. It started with Henry, and now Dozfy, and we’re doing it again next year. That was a long-winded way of saying, we take a lot of pride in our kit, a lot of thought and effort into it.”