![]() ![]() It’s OK if your goalkeeper wants to come out to midfield,” Lashbrook laughs. “It’s OK to play offensive soccer and push, push, push. ![]() The father-son team of technical director José Luis Sánchez Solá (better known as Chelís) and head coach Isidro Sánchez were brought on board to deliver on the latter's credo that “when people come to watch the Lights, I want them to forget their problems for two hours”. The Lights offices are in the same former City Hall building where kit sponsor and major downtown redevelopment driver Zappos is headquartered it’s the Zappos llamas that have made their way into the team photos.Ĭiting a Vegas ethos of “fast, glitzy, and in your face,” Lashbrook wanted a team that would play a more aggressive, goal-seeking style, and wanted to find a coach who would embrace what he calls “spectacular soccer”. It's also a sincere appreciation for both Burning Man culture and kitschy, classic Vegas. “But you also have to embrace where you’re from.”įor the Lights, that means embracing downtown Vegas – which, while still touched by the Strip economy, is a distinct and changing part of the metropolis influenced by their tech-minded millennials and tourism-reliant everyday workers who hang out there. “One thing I really learned in Orlando was keeping the soccer authentic: The fans, the tradition, the cheering, the marching, the smoke, all the olé, olé, olé,” Lashbrook says. In their debut season, the Lights are currently 13th in USL’s 17-team Western Conference, but they’re near the top of the attendance table at fifth out of 33 teams, drawing nearly 8,000 per match to Cashman. Funnily enough, the City Council went all in. Then he went to City Hall and declared: “I don’t need any public money, but I want to rent the empty stadium in the redevelopment zone and I’d like to bring a quarter-million locals down there every year are you OK with that?”Īdditionally, he offered to pay for all of the baseball-to-football transitions during the crossover year. In January 2017, he proposed a franchise in Las Vegas to USL president Jake Edwards and owner Alec Papadakis, funded entirely by the Lashbrook family. Its current tenants, the Las Vegas 51s AAA baseball team, are moving to a new $150 million stadium in nearby Summerlin in 2019, which Lashbrook took as serendipity. The stadium is shaped in a perfect square for accommodating a regulation-size football pitch along its first and third-base lines. Plus, Vegas already had a venue ready for football – Cashman Field, a 10,000-seat minor-league baseball stadium in a downtown district that's currently being revitalised. “I’d seen first-hand how to put a team together and how it could be successful, and realised I was living in the second-largest city in the world without a professional soccer team,” he tells FourFourTwo. He moved to Las Vegas in 2015, in part to help his mother recover from an illness, but was also struck by the potential for football in a place with practically everything to offer but that. Lashbrook then signed on to become COO for Orlando City in 2013, growing their fan base from 3,000-per-game to 20,000 season-ticket holders as they climbed toward an eventual 2015 elevation to MLS. He started as an intern during the debut season of the then-Kansas City Wiz, worked on two Women’s World Cups and with the WUSA, and spent seven formative years at MLS’s New York headquarters, where, he notes: “That’s where I began to see the growth of the game how you start a team, and build a soccer nation.” At 40 years old, Lashbrook has an extensive history in soccer spanning more than two decades. The chief architect of the team – unapologetically using “Get Lit” as a motto – is owner and CEO Brett Lashbrook. ![]()
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