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PROVO — For 15 years, the BYU men’s soccer team has roamed across the landscape of the Premier Development League, a semi-pro league that operates in the summer under a direct affiliation from the U.S. Soccer Federation.
The Cougars were the only university team in the PDL, a unique position for a university that prides itself on unique factors (Stone-cold sober, anyone?). Since 1987, the program has had to make a place for itself without NCAA sanctioning and the scholarships and benefits of such a designation.
And now the Cougars will have to deal with another change.
Less than two months after wrapping up the PDL season, BYU announced it will return to the national collegiate club scene in the National Intramural Recreation Sports Association.
The Cougars will play nine regular-season games in the West Coast division, competing against local rival schools such as Utah, Utah State, Utah Valley, BYU-Idaho, Boise State, Weber State and Southern Utah.
“We’ve always said in the PDL it’s hard to talk about playing FC Tucson or Fresno Fuego. They are fantastic teams, and anyone who knows the PDL knows how good those teams are," BYU head coach Brandon Gilliam said. “But anyone who doesn’t know the PDL? They just shake their heads.
"If you say we play Utah State, or the U., then they will know more about the game because of the schools we are playing. It’s a nice plus for us.”
BYU opens the season at 5 p.m. Friday at Utah State. The club's home opener is at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27, against the Utes.
But this is a different BYU club team. The Cougars lost significant portions of their defense to graduation in the summer, and starting goalkeeper Brenden Ottman did not return to compete in the fall because of conflicts with school. Tryouts wrapped up Sept. 15, which included the return of returned missionaries like veteran Jacob Ence and former Alta High star Christian Bain.
Bain, who recently returned from a two-year mission for the LDS Church in Brazil, was a PARADE All-American in high school and the Deseret News Mr. Soccer honoree. Gilliam is confident the move back to collegiate club status won't dramatically impact recruiting.
“Most of our recruits want to be at BYU," Gilliam said. “The sale has always been the same: you come to this program because of the environment you will be in, you still get to play soccer, and you get a great education. That is never going to change.”
Both Ence and Bain played briefly in the PDL before serving missions, and returned to a complete new setup with less than two months to regain form for the NIRSA season. Ence returned from a two-year mission for the LDS Church in Japan just days before beginning the fall semester at BYU, making his acclimation to college soccer a fast-paced process.
“That’s how soccer is,” Ence said Thursday after training. “Sometimes you don’t have offseason — you always want to play. There isn’t a long offseason, but it’s worth it.”
Officials with the Premier Development League declined to comment on BYU's status with the league, but Gilliam said the program still holds a franchise with the league.
The Cougars could explore using it on a local team not affiliated with BYU that could benefit all players, including NCAA scholarship players at Utah Valley (Division I), Westminster (Division II) and Dixie State (Division II) because the league does not impede a player’s amateur status. BYU will consider multiple possibilities for the franchise until next spring, when the PDL season begins.
“Technically, we still have the franchise. We’re seeing if there are some things we can do to it,” said Gilliam, a former BYU goalkeeper who took over for former coach Chris Watkins in 2015. “It wouldn’t be under BYU’s name, but to keep a franchise in Utah has a lot of benefits for college kids, including our own players.”
Under the new franchise model, BYU men’s soccer continues to operate under the extramural sports office and not the athletic department. Utah Valley boasts the only NCAA Division I team in the state (the Wolverines also field a club team that competes in the NIRSA), and the Cougars will continue without an NCAA-sanctioned program as they’ve done since competing in the Western Athletic Conference from 1978-89.
“The soccer players were always on half-rations; we treated them like step-kids,” former BYU athletic director Glen Tuckett told the Deseret News in 1989. “If we could get to the point where we could fund it properly, then OK. But if we’re going to do something, we’d like to do it right.”
Part of doing it right, Gilliam believes, is bringing the Cougars back to a fall season that correlates with a time when the majority of the school’s 33,000 students are in Provo. Campus population drops by as much as two-thirds in June and July, and BYU fielded an average attendance of just 788 fans over 11 seasons in the PDL, according to records kept by the United Soccer League.
Prior to joining the PDL, Watkins led the Cougars to seven club national championships in nine years, including four-straight titles from 1995-98. The move to the PDL in 2003 was about finding better competition, and the Cougars made three trips to the league’s postseason — including a Northwest Division title in 2007.
But consistent success was rare, and the Cougars were shuffled across divisions from Southern California to northern California to the Pacific Northwest and a recently created Mountain Division that included standout FC Tucson but few other consistent franchises year-to-year.
“We were the only school in the nation in the PDL and it was a little hard to take,” said Gilliam, who was a sophomore in 2003. “But there are positives and negatives; a lot of players wanted to be able to do internships in the summer, and now we get an opportunity to play in the fall in front of our students.
“If you focus only on the negatives, you are going to be upset. There are some positives, too.”
For now, the Cougars will look to immediately compete for a club national championship — and rekindle the local rivalries many of them have known since high school.
“We grow up playing some of these kids at Utah or Utah State,” said Ence, a native of Salem. “It’s exciting to get back and play against them.”
