Even the youngest clubs have a history.
Since El Paso Locomotive launched and joined the USL Championship in 2019, they’ve been a model of success, making the playoffs in all but one season. Several of those post-season runs went deep too, including back-to-back appearances in the Western Conference Finals. Yet for all the regular season success, the club’s struggled to make a mark in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup.
In 2019, they fell to USL League One darlings Forward Madison of Wisconsin. In 2022, when the Open Cup returned from a two-year Covid hiatus, another League One club, Central Valley Fuego, knocked Los Locos out of the competition. Last year, Union Omaha dispatched the El Paso-based Championship side 2-0 in the Second Round.
Regardless of impressive league form through the years, Locomotive has yet to win a single match in the Cup. And Lucas Stauffer, the defender signed earlier this year from Las Vegas Lights, is well aware of the expectations that come with that kind of record.
“The pressure is on us,” he said. “The dynamics shift when you’re playing a team in a lower division. You can debate the discrepancies between the levels up and down, but they [Union Omaha] are a very professional club and have had a ton of success in their short history.
Omaha’s Owls on the Hunt (Again)
“I lived in Omaha for four years so it has a special place in my heart,” said Stauffer, who played his college soccer at Omaha powers Creighton University, ahead of a second straight Cup opener for El Paso in Nebraska. “But for us going into the game, we have to approach it as normal as possible.
“I think if you talk to any player, it’s much more difficult than it sounds,” he said of facing off with a motivated team from a lower league. “I know it is for me.”
Stauffer spent several years in Germany, playing in the lower leagues with the likes of Wacker Nordhausen and Carl Zeiss Jena. While there, he participated in the DFB-Pokal. It’s the national cup in Germany and, just as the U.S. Open Cup does, it affords lower-league clubs the chance to play against the big names of the top flight (there, the Bundesliga). Even two years later back in the States, Stauffer still watches the Pokal closely for the excitement and surprises it breeds.
