Soccer

NWSL Week 17 preview and fixtures: Will a coaching change put Sky Blue back in the win column?

Sky Blue FC head coach Christy Holly shocked everyone by unexpectedly stepping down on Wednesday. But Sky Blue is no stranger to coaching drama and Holly’s certainly not the first person to make a surprising late-season departure from the club.

by Lauren Barker

Aug 19, 2017, 5:42 PM UTC

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Photo by Nils Petter Nilsson/Ombrello/Getty Images

On Saturday night, swaths of small and presumably sticky children clad in the too-big t-shirts and jerseys of their various club soccer teams will, along with an array of adults there both of their own volition and as chaperones for said sticky screeching small people, clamber up the metal bleachers on Yurcak Field’s south side. Mostly, they won’t notice that anything is different. This, a late-summer Saturday night, things gearing down before they hit the Staples for three-ring binders and scientific calculators, will mostly be one last thing to do before school and work and that old routine kicks back in in a few weeks.

Longtime and more astute fans, all those that fill the far corner of the bleachers with both bodies and sound, and the others scattered throughout the sea — or probably, more accurately, large pond — of color coordinated kids, may be more likely to notice the change.

Saturday’s game, a crucial one against Seattle that could have some serious playoff implications for both teams, will be missing one meticulously chosen sweater, and the man who has, since 2016, donned said sweater as he paced the sidelines.

That man, of course, is Christy Holly, Sky Blue’s now-former head coach. Holly stepped down on Wednesday, four days after Sky Blue was blown out by Orlando, and four days before the team is set to take on the Reign in said crucial game.

Holly’s departure from the club came as something of a surprise — though Sky Blue’s been struggling lately, the team is still having one of its best seasons ever. Even with a recent dip in form — Sky Blue is winless in its last four, including three straight losses — it hardly seemed like things had reached the same critical mass that sent Randy Waldrum packing in Houston earlier this season. Mostly, what Sky Blue’s done in the past four games has felt more like a throwback to the team we’ve come to know and … something that’s kinda like love, I guess, over the past four years than anything that would warrant a change. And to be clear, nowhere in either the statement the team released, or in the one Holly tweeted, is there any outright indication that he was fired. There are the words that are familiar in these situations, the “stepping downs” and “mutually agreeds,” but mostly the talk surrounding Holly’s departure from the club seems to frame it more as his decision than one where he was forced out.

Still, whether it was his own decision or that of someone higher up at Sky Blue, the timing is curious. There is, immediately, the game on Saturday. Seattle is currently occupying the fourth spot on the table, but the Reign’s lead over Sky Blue is also only four points, a gap that Sky Blue could do some solid work in closing with a win. Beyond this weekend, everyone except North Carolina and Washington will have just five games remaining, and though Sky Blue’s schedule is about as favorable as you could ask for, with four of those games against either Boston, Washington or Kansas City, there’s also one against the Courage, and then, of course, the possibility of a postseason run. That’s some odd timing for a coach to leave, on his own or not.

Of course, oddly timed and sometimes overly dramatic coaching departures are nothing new for Sky Blue, and there is some historical precedent, however strange, here. Most famously, and apologies to the old people who’ve been around a while and no doubt heard this story 100 times, Sky Blue went through some Days of Our Lives-level coaching drama once upon a time, and at the end, they won the WPS championship. That was in 2009, Women’s Professional Soccer’s inaugural year. Sky Blue (yes, somehow they have existed for that long) started that season with Ian Sawyers at the helm. He lasted all of seven games, guiding Sky Blue into last place, before being suspended and then fired by the club. No one in New Jersey would ever talk about what, exactly, happened that led to Sawyers’ departure, with then-President and CEO Thomas Hofstetter (who’s still listed as one of the team’s owners on Sky Blue’s website), telling NJ.com at the time, “the standings are evident for what was going on behind the scenes, the problems. It might be a symptom, but not the trigger for us to go different ways.” What that “trigger” was specifically is still, apparently, some closely-guarded secret, though the word “inappropriate” gets thrown around a bunch in that NJ.com article.

After Sawyers was gone from New Jersey, Kelly Lindsey, who’d been Sawyers’ assistant, took over and the team climbed the table, with the playoffs a real possibility by the time the season was winding down in August. And then, and again with all the wrong kinds of dramatic flair and just two games remaining, Lindsey suddenly resigned. Again, the club offered little explanation for what may have happened, beyond some complicated story about the suspension of an assistant coach that also happened around the same time. This, of course, is when Christie Pearce, secretly pregnant with her second child, took over as player/coach, Sky Blue ended up as the fourth place team, and then, after navigating WPS’s bizarre playoff format and winning three road games in little more than a week, the last one against the LA Sol, captured the first-ever WPS title.

And if only the coaching drama had stopped there, dayenu. Instead, Sky Blue hired Finnish coach Pauliina Miettinen for the 2010 season, touting her arrival in New Jersey as something that would finally bring stability to the team. Miettinen was fired after 14 games.

After Miettinen, it was Rick Stainton, who’d been an assistant to Miettinen. He made it to the end of the 2010 season, at least, before the team hired Jim Gabarra and Stainton landed back in his original assistant coach position. Gabarra, who managed to make it through not only the entire 2011 season, but also the first two NWSL seasons with Sky Blue, would earn the not particularly difficult to obtain distinction of being the team’s longest tenured coach, before returning to Washington in 2016.

Gabarra’s departure opened the door for Holly, who’d been — take a breath — an assistant to Gabarra — and maybe you can see where this is going now — to take over as head coach prior to the start of the 2016 season. That’s, I don’t know, like, like 75 coaches in eight seasons. My freshman soccer team in high school had seven coaches in the span of three months, but we also tipped over a Porta Potty, smoked cigarettes in the back of a school bus and got in at least one postgame fight where rolls of medical tape were turned into projectiles.

Unlike Gabarra, who’s been coaching professional women’s teams since Fred and Wilma Flintstone were packing Dino and Pebbles into the car, stopping to grab Bamm-Bamm next door and then heading out to WUSA games, Holly taking over the head coaching position at Sky Blue really did signify a change. He was young, and didn’t have much experience in a high-level position. Gone were Gabarra’s more serious and stern ways, and the strange kind of “these are the players we have so” shoulder shrugs that came after disappointing games. Holly, instead, brought a certain lightness in the way he conducted himself and coached the team, seemingly more ready to let his players just play.

Holly’s first season with Sky Blue didn’t go particularly well. The team finished in seventh, a string of late-season losses and one of the league’s worst goals-against numbers sending them tumbling down the table. But there were also signs that Holly was, however slowly, building something. Maya Hayes’ increasing role with the team, the handful of rookies like Raquel Rodriguez, Erika Skroski and Erin Simon that Holly shepherded through both his and their first pro seasons, the faith he put into both a young defense and that Pearce was there in the center of it.

This year, with a full season under his belt, Holly continued to, mostly, just let his team play. And it’s been under him that Sam Kerr has flourished, Hayes has become a more consistent starter and essential piece of the team, goalkeeper Kailen Sheridan has put herself in the Rookie of the Year conversation, and his team has played some of the wackiest, most drama-filled, straight up fun games we’ve seen from any Sky Blue team, maybe ever. He also brought the team, for the first time in a long time, into the postseason conversation.

For all that, there were of course problems. So much of that wacky, drama-filled fun came because Sky Blue spent large portions of games doing what I can only assume were very elaborate and well-choreographed sleepwalking demonstrations. Sky Blue’s minus-eight goal differential is tied with Boston for the worst in the league. They’ve allowed more goals, by a pretty significant margin, than any other team. And the drama’s become more of a requirement than the once-in-a-while moment of amazingness it’s supposed to be, with Sky Blue way too frequently having to crawl out of a two- or three-goal holes with some epic late-game stuff.

Two weeks ago, Sky Blue slipped out of the top four for the first time in more than a month. And then came last weekend and a new low point for the team, a 5-0 loss to Orlando dropping Sky Blue even further down the table -- they go into this Saturday’s game in sixth. And yeah, there is maybe something to not putting too much into losing to an Orlando team that’s suddenly very, very good, but allowing five goals is still approaching WNY Flash-Boston levels of terrible.

The game against the Pride was Sky Blue’s third-straight loss and fourth consecutive game without a win. Individually, players like Kerr, Kelley O’Hara and Leah Galton are still doing well, but overall the team’s been pretty dismal, especially defensively, for a while. The late-game comebacks and solid second halves served as both a bandaid for and distraction from it, but now that Sky Blue’s ability to do even that has evaporated, it’s become much more glaring.

For right now, the team says they’ll go ahead with the coaching staff they’ve already got, including Paul Greig and former Sky Blue goalkeeper Jill Loyden, both of whom were -- you guessed it -- Holly’s assistants. Immediately, they’ll be tasked with facing a Seattle team that’s also fighting for its playoff life and that beat Sky Blue 5-4 four weeks ago. Seattle did play on Wednesday, but that’s probably little consolation -- last week, all four of the teams that played midweek earned at least a point on the weekend (Washington, Kansas City and North Carolina all won, while Boston Breakers’d the thing up best they could and earned only a draw).

Whatever happens over the next six games, and whether Sky Blue ends up making the playoffs or not, Holly’s tenure with the club is something that can, overall, be looked at positively. In his 38 total games as head coach, Holly compiled a 14-17-7 record. And if they do make the playoffs, something that hasn’t happened since 2013, that will be largely a credit to Holly, too, even if he’s not actually there to see it happen.

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the team’s used some coaching drama to ignite a postseason run, and though perhaps a strange and not particularly sound strategy for the long-term, it did work out pretty well last time.

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