CLEVELAND, Ohio – Blake New remembers his soccer epiphany vividly.

“I grew up all around the south playing baseball, basketball, football,” he told cleveland.com. “I had no idea what soccer was until I moved to North Olmsted in the sixth grade.”

He had been wearing deck shoes and had played at school. He came home and said he needed a new pair of shoes.

“I played this new game,” he said, “and it’s awesome.”

That was the beginning of New’s soccer career.

Now 57, New has been named as the inaugural coach of Lorain County’s USL2 team, which is set to start play in May at ForeFront Field in Avon. Club Chairman Andrew McDonnell said New, the soccer coach at Oberlin College, was chosen among six candidates.

Related: NE Ohio lands soccer team to start play in 2026

It’s almost as if he were born for the sport. Within a month of that moment of discovering soccer, he was on a travel team. In the 1980s, he said, North Olmsted was a hotbed for soccer, with a melting pot of ethnic fathers serving as coaches who knew the game.

He earned a scholarship to Cleveland State and then shared goaltending duties with Otto Orf on the Cleveland Crunch in 1992. He stayed for a master’s degree at Cleveland State and then got the gig at Oberlin.

When McDonnell contacted him last year, the timing wasn’t right.

“I said, ‘Hey, I’m really flattered,’” he said. But he was involved in coaching club soccer for the Cleveland Force, which had a demanding schedule with three practices a day. The Force has its own club from U8 to U19, and they have a USL2 team on top of it, he said.

But after leaving that job, his schedule opened up, and he figured “this would be refreshing for me to have something to look forward to in the late spring-summer and keep my skills sharp.”

McDonnell said New checked off three boxes in requirements of what he was looking for.

“First and foremost, 25 years in the same organization speaks volumes,” McDonnell said. “You generally don’t see that loyalty anymore. Second is his ties to the community. We are a Lorain County community-based team, and he lives in Lorain County so that’s just a great fit. Most importantly, he’s coaching at the collegiate level right now and he’s also played at the pro level. As our players are transitioning from college to pro to get to that next level, he’s got a foot in his career in both of those sections.”

That skillset will allow him “to prepare the players accordingly,” said McDonnell, who added New will retain his Oberlin coaching job.

New, who was in Phoenix on a recruiting trip, said he was excited to take on the USL2 challenge. He has been coaching at Oberlin for 30 years. He guided the women for three years and the men for 27. He is the longest-tenured coach at Oberlin.

That experience, McDonnell said, makes him “the perfect fit for us.”

“When this team was just on paper I reached out to Blake and said, ‘Hey, would you ever consider this?’ It wasn’t the right time in his life. … Now the time is right. I couldn’t be more grateful the timing worked out. We’ve been circling each other for a year on this so there definitely was a lot of history getting him on board.”

Lorain County USL2 will play its first-ever match in May 2026, with the first home game tentatively scheduled for Memorial Day weekend.

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