How about those kids up in Burlington?
Put the question to anyone with even a passing interest in soccer in the Northeast and they’ll know exactly what you mean. Vermont Green FC, the amateurs causing a sensation in this year’s Open Cup are those kids and what they’re doing up in Burlington is conjuring the rarest and most precious kind of Cup Magic.
Zach Barrett, 22, scored five minutes into the Open Cup First Round game at home against pro side Lexington SC. Five minutes after that, Nick Lockerman doubled the lead. "Sh*t, what do we do now?" Barrett asked himself at the time. "Up by two. Your heart is pumping so fast. You’re beating this pro team. The crowd is going insane.”
What he, and the rest of his team did, was calm down. Breathe. They trusted their training. And they trusted each other’s abilities. They may be unpaid amateurs, patched-worked together from their own colleges in the space of a few days in their off-season, but they know the game. “The chemistry was there," said Barrett. "You could tell.”
In the 48 hours they had to train together before kick-off, set pieces were the key. “It’s what you control when you come in on a Saturday and play on a Tuesday,” said Jacob Labovitz, who scored a crucial third before the half. Three of Vermont Green’s goals in the 4-3 win came from corner-kicks.
“It may have been 3,000 [fans], but it felt like 30,000,” remembered Barrett a few days after scoring the header at the back post that will stand as the first goal scored on Vermont soil in the 109-year-history of the U.S. Open Cup. “It’s a huge boost for us and it really raises the pressure on visiting teams.”
Scenes at Virtue Field
Though Barrett is unlikely to know it, busy as he was, there was a young boy behind the goal where he scored that historic first. He was watching the action while sliding on his butt down a huge mound of freshly plowed snow. It’s Vermont after all and several inches fell the night before the game.
Youth is the fuel that animates this Green Movement. The club’s regular season is the summer, when the scholastic calendar breaks (it’s why these early rounds of the Open Cup pose such a challenge). And the club is intimately connected to the recent emergence of the University of Vermont – on whose campus Virtue Field is located – becoming an NCAA soccer powerhouse.
“Vermont is traditionally big on hockey,” said Barrett, a Pennsylvania native who’s come to think of Vermont as home during his four years at UVM. “But you’re really seeing a soccer buzz here now.”
“People were screaming and crying and jumping up and down – kids were staying up past their bedtimes,” said Tyler Littwin, member of the Green Mountain Bhoys supporters group, about the sustained energy of the game. “People, not huge fans and not overly effusive by nature, were saying that this was the best game they’d ever been to.”
A graphic designer with a past as an indie rocker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Littwin sees connections between this young soccer club, founded in 2021, and the local music scenes born of passion and DIY urges. “It feels like being at the best all-ages shows back in the day,” he said of Vermont Green games. “There’s no separation between the bands and the room and the crowd and the people putting on the show. The players are just as excited as the fans.
“There’s a communal feel,” he added. “As you move up the levels, you kind of lose that. Players in MLS can’t sign everyone’s shirt after the game, but these guys can.”
It’s a valid point. At least one kid went home with an autograph on his forehead in what looked like permanent marker. “My kids wanted to wear their Vermont Green shirts to school the next day – the whole thing is beyond words,” Littwin said.
