VANCOUVER, B.C. - After months of wrangling and uncertainty, the Vancouver Whitecaps were finally able to confirm the formation of their new USL PRO team on Friday morning.
Branded Whitecaps FC 2 (WFC2), the new team will be based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and will play games at the existing 3,500-seat Thunderbird Stadium starting in spring 2015.
Announcing the partnership, Whitecaps club president Bob Lenarduzzi hailed the importance of the new team to Vancouver's development pathway, providing the vital missing link the 'Caps have sought for several years now from their strong academy program to the MLS team.
"This club is a bridge between what we do at the bottom end of our pyramid and what happens at the top end," Lenarduzzi told reporters at a press conference to announce the plans.
"We've never had a second-tier team that will serve the purposes of young players coming up and evolving through to our first team. It's a momentous occasion. It's been a long time coming. I'm excited by the fact that it's going to provide a lot of young players with a great opportunity to further develop their skills."
The Whitecaps were left scrambling in September after the New Westminster City Council unanimously rejected their proposal to base the new team in that city.
That decision allowed Vancouver to re-evaluate their plans and with the Whitecaps current training facility currently housed at UBC set for expansion, moving the new USL PRO team to the same complex was seen as a natural progression and crucial to building on the work already undertaken by the club in terms of their youth development program.
"We've spent a lot of money on player development," Lenarduzzi added. "There's an acknowledged gap between players graduating out of Residency at 18 and being ready for our MLS team. So what we do with those players?
"There's been Reserve team-type of opportunities but the idea of our young players coming out and playing against our counterparts from Seattle, from Portland, from LA, it will be something that we'll be able to assess their abilities at that level and determine which ones are good enough to actually graduate through to our senior team."
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Vancouver will become the seventh MLS side to form their own USL PRO team, and after two seasons affiliating with the Charleston Battery, Lenarduzzi is excited at the options available to the Whitecaps with their developmental team much closer to home.
No decision has yet been made over who will be the head coach of the new side but the Whitecaps are keeping their options open.
"We're in the process of determining our coaching staff," Lenarduzzi said. "We're just keeping our options wide open at this stage. There's a lot of interest in the job as you can imagine but we haven't really dug down too deep in terms of who that might be at this stage. It's not as if we have a lot of time, so that will be one of our priorities to establish who the head coach will be for the WFC2 team."
