Birmingham was suburbanized in the 1960s + American soccer is usually confined to the suburbs = the city of Birmingham did not have soccer clubs or public soccer spaces.

Before our park renovation, if you wanted to play soccer in Birmingham, you had to drive to the suburbs and trespass on a soccer club’s field. Grass fields are expensive to maintain and clubs need to protect their investments.

If you’re not a member of the club, you can’t play on the field.

If you didn’t live in the suburbs, and you didn’t belong to a soccer club, you were out of luck if you wanted to play soccer.

Two friends and I formed the Steel City Soccer Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization, in 2015.

We were eager to make a change.

Our first goal: create a new, public soccer space.

It’s important to acknowledge our mistakes. Our foundation made plenty of them our first year.

We only wanted to work on big ideas. Small ideas didn’t seem fun or meaningful.

At the time of our foundation’s formation, Birmingham was experiencing a downtown resurgence.

• Customer-facing businesses were opening in converted warehouse spaces left and right.

• The Birmingham Barons, the city’s beloved minor league baseball team, had moved from the suburbs to a new baseball field downtown. They played to packed houses almost every game.

• There was an influx of investment capital for downtown entertainment.

Our thought process:

• A converted warehouse space would be a slick space for an indoor soccer facility.

• We could attract residents from downtown Birmingham AND the suburbs, now that suburban residents were consistently coming to downtown.

I verified that there was strong interest in playing soccer downtown by taking polls online and at local pickup games. The support was overwhelmingly positive:

Soccer players wanted to play soccer downtown.

We met with city officials, investors, and property developers to make the warehouse renovation happen. I thought we were heading in the right direction, but progress was slow.

Nick, Lake, and I had 9-5 jobs. We worked on this project after work. It’s safe to say that we were too tired to sync up properly.

Our whiteboarding sessions were circular - we would talk for hours but couldn’t agree on big picture items.

We were in quicksand, the harder we worked, the further we got from our product: a public soccer space.

It’s hard working on a project with friends. You don’t want to let work get in the way of friendship and that was starting to happen.

****To make matters worse, the more we talked to indoor soccer facility owners, the more we were turned off on the business model. Specialized indoor recreational areas are difficult to operate year-round.

We were in over our heads. We had to make a change - and fast.

Sometimes you become an A-player by having your back against the wall. The world forces you to adapt to survive.

Nick had recently bootstrapped an insurance agency with his mother. They started from zero.

While we were all disaffected by the indoor facility, Nick was able to put his finger on what we needed to do:

• Cut the fat immediately and start thinking lean

• Remember the mission: create a public soccer space

Many people feel comfortable saying this privately, but don’t want to attach themselves to the notion in public: many non-profits are bloated.

We were following that path. Our project was bigger than our capacity. It