Meet Brendan Campagna | Soccer Coach & Entrepreneur

After graduating from business school with high marks, I applied for all my dream jobs in the sports and media worlds expecting to quickly come upon this bright future everyone was telling me I had. Application after application yielded the same results: no interview, no progress, and lots of disappointment. I moved back home and continued looking for opportunities. My first job would be as a freelancer on some television shoots. I would travel, typically for just a week at a time, to be a part of some shoot on location. I enjoyed these gigs, but they were too few and far between for me to truly rely on them for a career.

I also began coaching soccer at a high school and instantly fell in love with coaching. Having two part-time jobs, one that required me to be at the field from 3:30 to 5pm every weekday and the other that had me traveling inconsistently for a week at a time, began hampering my search for full-time work. On the recommendation of a former teacher, I applied to be a substitute teacher, as it would give me the flexibility to continue coaching and working on television shoots. This role as a substitute teacher would quickly open the door to begin teaching full-time. I quit the freelance work, but continued coaching, and spent the next five years in the classroom. I also started my first business, a small consulting agency. For the next several years, I would teach high school and middle school, coach a number of different ages, and work with a handful of small businesses both locally and across state lines.

I found teaching to be deeply fulfilling during this time, but after the pandemic, like so many others, I began reevaluating where I was and where I was going. My dreams of working in sports began to resurface. In early 2021, I tossed around some different ideas of starting a private coaching business or a soccer academy. I also looked into opportunities to coach at a higher level and applied for a handful of college assistant coaching positions. Similar to when I was applying for jobs out of college, my applications seemed to get lost in the void of the internet. Without college playing experience, I was facing an uphill battle to land a college coaching position. But in the fall of 2021, my friend Jason approached me with an opportunity to acquire a youth soccer club. The founder of this small, local club was retiring and was contemplating folding the club altogether. Instead, Jason and I acquired the LLC from him and quickly reincorporated as a nonprofit, applying for tax-exempt status.

We rebranded the club as Anglers FC, a nod to the original team formed by the club eleven years earlier, The Anglers. In the year since our acquisition, the club has grown not only in the number of teams, but also in the programs offered. We have launched various offseason programs and even a Christian mission trip to Quito, Ecuador. We hope to continue to grow our service offerings to church soccer camps, additional mission trips and cultural experiences centered around soccer, and an elite women’s team competing in the summer months.