By Sam Prickett
For two weekends this month, teams from around the Southeast will head to the Birmingham-metro area to participate in the Red Diamond Classic.
That soccer tournament, which is expected to have a $6.2 million impact on the Birmingham-metro economy, is one of the largest single events organized by the Birmingham United Soccer Association, but organizers say their efforts can be seen throughout the year.
BUSA, the largest soccer club in the state, was formed in 2006 after the merger of the Mountain Brook Soccer Club and American Jets Soccer Club. Roughly 8,000 school-aged children enroll in the program annually, split evenly between the spring and fall seasons.
That consistent success, said BUSA Executive Director Andrew Brower, is because the club is easy to find.
“One of the things that makes us unique is that we are situated in multiple strategic areas, including Mountain Brook, Inverness, Chelsea and Alabaster, and then we have a lot of other pockets in and around Vestavia, Homewood, Crestwood and different areas of north Shelby County that allow us to have a big sphere of influence in the soccer community,” he said.
BUSA offers recreational programs for children from 3 years old to 19. Starting at age 9, kids have the option to enter into BUSA’s academy program, which prepares them to begin playing competitively at age 12.
“We have multiple layers of competitive offerings, including playing in the Alabama Soccer Association’s state league,” Brower said. “We offer everything. You can be a senior in high school and still be playing rec soccer, lower-, mid- or high-level competitive soccer. We’ve got an offering for every education level and age group.” BUSA also offers soccer camps throughout the year.
Some students even receive BUSA’s help after they age out of the program, thanks to the club’s scholarship program. Since 2006, Brower said, BUSA has sent 500 players to college on soccer scholarships. “Right now in our 2020 class, we have almost 50 kids that are going on to play college soccer at the next level,” he said. “Last year, we had close to 60, so we’ve had two really good years in a row.’
The club regularly organizes college identification clinics, which allow players to interact with a slew of soccer programs from schools around the Southeast. These clinics typically feature about 25 soccer programs as opposed to 50 or 60 programs for girls.
Because of Title IX, Brower said, “There are far more programs, funding and scholarship availability on the female side than the men’s side.”
On the girls side, the clinics generate an attendance of about 220 players, compared to 100 to 150 attendees on the boys side.
“It’s a hard sellout, usually, with 40 to 50 people on the waiting list,” he said.
Service Projects
BUSA also works to give back to the community, most notably through its “BUSA Serves” day every July. Each year features a different philanthropic approach. In 2019, each of BUSA’s competitive teams organized and executed their own service project.
“We wanted them to take ownership, to leave their own mark, so we let them design their own projects” Brower said. “Some of those included cleaning up elderly people’s houses, placing flags at a veteran’s cemetery in Montevallo and cleaning up schools.”
The year before that, the club all worked together on a single project: a gift drive “for the entire patient load of Children’s Hospital,” Brower said. “That year, there were 237 patients in Children’s Hospital. We made 275 gift bags, each worth about $250. It included age-appropriate activities for the kids that were in the hospitals, as well as gas and food gift cards for the parents … . That was a pretty cool investment that our families and membership made.”
That’s been BUSA’s larger goal overall: to show people the ways in which soccer can give back to the community. For Brower, that includes the Red Diamond Classic and its $6.2 million economic impact, which is part of BUSA’s estimated annual impact of roughly $42 million, according to a 2018 study BUSA chartered from the University of Alabama.
The two tournaments – the boys teams on March 6-8 and the girls March 13-15 – will take place at Mountain Brook’s Rathmell Sports Park, the Hoover Met, Shelby County’s Sports Blast Soccer Complex and Heardmont Park, also in Shelby County. The economic impact will come from visitors visiting the Birmingham metro area for the tournament and spending money on hotel rooms, food and shopping, Brower said.
“Typically, we bring in teams from all over the Southeast and beyond,” he said. “We usually hit about 10 or 11 states that participate in the event … . We fill up hotels everywhere (in Birmingham). Just for this event, I think we use about 35 different hotels, which is pretty crazy to think about.”
It’s something Brower hopes will make people take notice of BUSA and its overall role in the Birmingham metro area.
“Sometimes people don’t really understand the sphere of what we are and what we do,” he said. “It’s important for us to show how sports can affect the economy in a positive way, and I think that’s something we’ve been pretty excited about for years.”
For more information about the Birmingham United Soccer Association, visit birminghamunited. com.
