SEATTLE — If not for being a dutiful junior associate at a big law firm who said yes to working on Christmas nine years ago, Garth Lagerwey probably wouldn’t be the new general manager of the Seattle Sounders.
But we’ll get back to that in a second.
First, why, after six wildly successful seasons in Major League Soccer, were the Sounders even in the market for a new GM? After all, generally when a professional sports franchise is making a significant front office change, it is either because that team is losing, or because somebody is retiring or moving on to another job.
The Sounders, who have been to the postseason every year since joining MLS, and who are coming off their best season yet, having won the Supporters’ Shield and a fourth U.S. Open Cup, certainly haven’t been struggling on the field, and the team’s long-time GM Adrian Hanauer also owns a pretty significant stake of the team, so he isn’t going anywhere.
So why bring in Lagerwey, who since 2007 had been the general manager of Real Salt Lake?
Well for starters, Hanauer, who was a successful business man long before he got into soccer ownership and management with the USL Sounders, never envisioned being the GM for this long. He didn’t mind doing the job, but in the long run Hanauer wanted to focus on the business side of the franchise while leaving the soccer operations to someone else. And up until now, the time wasn’t right for Hanauer to shuffle things within the organization, “because Garth wasn’t available earlier.”
If Hanauer was looking for someone who could live up to the Sounders’ incredibly high standards, Lagerwey is the perfect fit. The former professional player turned lawyer turned soccer executive helped turn Real Salt Lake into one of the league’s model franchises, and he did that with far fewer resources than he’ll have at his disposal in Seattle. So when Lagerwey’s contract ran out in Salt Lake, the Sounders decided now was as good of a time to make a transition as any.
“We had a bunch of success, and there was no urgency,” Hanauer said. “I had fun doing it — fun may be the wrong word — I enjoyed it, but I also wanted a bit of my life back, and I was looking for the right guy who could take what we had built and some of the value that I brought to the initial phase of the club, and sort of take that and run with it.
“I know myself well enough to know my strength is not long-term operating, managing from a plan, discipline of day-to-day management, some of those things — I’m good at creating. And Garth was the perfect guy to take that on.”
But if you think the decision to shuffle things up when so much has gone right for the Sounders is odd, just wait until you hear how Lagerwey even became a soccer executive in the first place.
Which brings us back to a young lawyer working over the holidays.
After a five-year playing career, mostly as a backup goalkeeper in MLS and other leagues, Lagerwey retired just in time to enroll at Georgetown Law School before his LSAT scores expired. That led to the job at a big firm, Latham &Watkins, which led to a question that, while he couldn’t have known it at the time, would change Lagerwey’s career path in a big way.
“In 2006, a partner came to me and said, ‘hey do you want to work over Christmas?’” Lagerwey said. “And as any good junior associate at a corporate law firm would, I said, ‘Of course sir, why would I want to see my family over such a minor holiday.’ He wouldn’t tell me what I’d be working on until I said yes.”
The deal, it turned out, was helping a client buy a piece of ownership in the St. Louis Blues. And the owner of the Blues at the time, Dave Checketts, happened to also own Real Salt Lake. The deal took six months to close, which meant in that time Lagerwey got to know Checketts pretty well. Also in that time, RSL fired its general manager, and hired a young head coach named Jason Kreis, who just happened to be a close friend of Lagerwey’s having played with him at Duke and on two different teams professionally.
“Dave had positive interaction with me and had a need, so he said, ‘hey, do you want to interview for the RSL job?’” Lagerwey said. “Of course he had hired Jason Kreis as his coach, and Jason and I had played together in college and played in the pros and knew each other since we were 16, so I’m sure he put in a good word that didn’t hurt either, so that’s how I got back into sports.
“Life’s about luck and timing, and I certainly had to get lucky to get asked to work on the project over Christmas, although I didn’t feel that way at the time. And it’s about timing, because one of my best friends in the world gets hired as head coach while I’m working on the deal, and they fire their general manager. So all that stuff was lucky and the timing was right.”
And now that luck and timing have taken Lagerwey from player to lawyer to general manager in Salt Lake to Seattle, he sees his latest job, while similar in title, as being very different from the one he took in 2007 when he and Kreis helped build RSL into a winning franchise. The Sounders have barely touched their roster since Lagerwey got here, which makes sense considering Seattle had the best record in the league last season.
Instead, Lagerwey is focused on the team’s long-term success. As he put it, Hanauer and company ran one hell of a sprint to build the Sounders to this point, but in doing so they missed some pieces of the foundation along the way. Now it’s Lagerwey’s job to work on the franchise, from the youth academy to the new S2 minor-league team to the main club to build a organization that can win and grow for years to come.
“The first time I talked to the guys here, I said, ‘the one thing I’m not going to try to do is make this my team,’” Lagerwey said. “That may sound counterintuitive, but the whole point was, if I’m taking on a management challenge, how do I get the best out of the people who are here, and how do I learn from what they’re already doing well and hopefully layer on top of that the stuff that I do pretty well, and then wind up with a bigger whole? So we’re going to be conservative with how we changed things or how we tweak things, because this is a really good team that is coming off a really good season.
“A lot of what I’m doing is long-term. It’s reorienting the youth academy, vertically integrating the youth academy and S2 and the first team, then creating consistency across the organization and unity in terms of style of play and philosophy of play and those kinds of things. The idea is basically to strengthen the foundations, even if the stuff visible at the tip of the iceberg isn’t that much different.”
Hanauer, the rest of Seattle’s ownership, coach Sigi Schmid, sporting director Chris Henderson and a lot of other people deserve a ton of credit for building the Sounders into what they have become. Lagerwey now hopes to help one of the league’s best franchises to even greater heights.
“I’ve got big shoes to fill in terms of the job that Adrian did and how good a GM he was and how creatively he thought, and how influential he is,” Lagerwey said. “People say, ‘are you threatened by that?’ No, those are resources for me now, we’re on the same team. But the standard is really, really high.
“People thought I was nuts to join a team that won two trophies the year before, and there’s probably some truth to that, but most people thought I was nuts for leaving the cushy law firm track to join the worst team in the league in a league that, at the time, people thought was potentially failing. I guess I took one stupid risk that worked out, why not try another one?”
Nuts or not, it beats working on Christmas.
Herald Columnist John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com
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