Knoxville loves winners, and we might just be getting swept off our feet again. (Or perhaps it’s just a hard, clean slide-tackle.) We’ve been flirting with soccer for years, and have even been fortunate to enjoy some pretty memorable nights on the town, so to speak, in the last decade.
In 2017, Knoxville Force, an amateur team playing at the still-new Sansom Sports Complex, finished their regular season on top of the National Premier Soccer League’s Southeast Conference. (They went on to get knocked out of the playoffs by a team from, gulp, Nashville, but still…)
Earlier this year, the University of Tennessee Women’s soccer team scaled unprecedented heights, even for a team that’s enjoyed a fair amount of success in recent years, reaching #1 in the United Soccer Coaches Poll, after upending a pair of top-10 teams in their current season’s early stages. (SEC tourney kicks off Tuesday. Go Vols!)
But now, especially this week, professional soccer appears to have found a foothold in this “football” town, and things could be getting serious. Like, it’s-time-to-meet-the-family serious. With the holidays just around the corner, the continental, cosmopolitan “beautiful game” and scruffy little Knoxville feel ready to take the next step.
This Sunday at 4 p.m., your USL League One Player’s Shield (that’s the trophy for the regular season title) winners, One Knoxville Sporting Club, take the field in the Old City as the top seed in an eight-team playoff.
USL League One is a USSF Division 3 professional league (think AA baseball, like their Covenant Health Park roomies, the Knoxville Smokies). As such, it features an exciting, athletic, and talented blend of aspirational international players, former NCAA stars, and even high-level players that have been, or in some cases are still getting, called up to represent their countries at the national team level.
I’ve seen a former USMNT national team goalkeeper line up against One Knoxville in a Lamar Hunt US Open Cup match and both a former US Captain and a World Cup goal scorer prowl the sidelines as opposing head coaches. If we’re not quite in the big leagues, we’re not far off.
OKSC has been a respectable, even formidable, side ever since its inception. In 2022, their inaugural season, they won their division, but faltered on the doorstep of the national semifinals in the semi-pro USL League Two. It was a steamy, rainy late-summer evening at a packed Austin East High School stadium, some may recall, and it felt like something lasting was drifting within reach. (But, ah! Oh, those summer nights. Well-uh, well-uh, well-uh…)
Turns out, that feeling was no mirage – we weren’t getting ghosted. The team moved up to their current tier and full-pro status the next season, and leveled up in a new home at UT’s Regal Stadium. The pace of play sped up, the tackles crunched harder, the crowd continued to swell. At Regal, we were a big enough fan section to roar when needed, but I still expected to end up sitting next to someone from Knoxville’s ardent soccer community that I recognized.
The team responded, establishing a tangible on-the-pitch identity as a defensive force that could control possession, which meant it felt OKSC was nearly always in a nail-biter as the clock wound down. Last year, they finished the regular season in fifth place, above the cut line for their impressively soon (if heartbreakingly short-lived) first pro playoff appearance.
Then 2025 arrived, and with it, the sparkling new digs that most of the center city had been watching materialize between E. Jackson Ave and Summit Hill since the summer of 2023, Covenant Health Park. “It feels professional,” team captain Jordan Skelton remarks of the stadium, “like a real stage.” Skelton, a towering UK-born center back, is in his third season in Knoxville and is approaching his 50th match appearance for the club. He was quick to admit that the new park has had an impact. “Yes and yes. That’s one (question) I can have an instant answer to.”
In his further musings on that point, he does something that by itself should endear him to folks that proudly call Knoxville home, which he also unreservedly did when we spoke by phone on Thursday. “It’s a place my wife and I both love. We both feel we could settle down here.”
Tactfully alluding to one of the stadium’s very few perceived imperfections, he finds a way to see it as a functional advantage for the team – part of our identity if not a point of pride. (Kinda like when a big-city journalist called our little town “scruffy” way back when.) There have been moments in the park’s first season when some of the challenges, from a turf maintenance perspective, inherent in managing a multi-use field have been noticeable to players and fans alike. But Skelton recalls conversations with supporters in which he’s implored us all to embrace that. “It’s not perfect, and is that ideal? No, but you know what? It makes other teams that have to come in here say ‘I don’t want to play on this. I don’t want to be here,’ which deep down, I think is brilliant for us.” That’s a very “Knoxville” mindset from our leader on the field.
In addition, and for the first time in club history, OKSC had a new head coach, Ian Fuller, who played college soccer at Clemson before being drafted by the New England Revolution in MLS. He transitioned from player to coach, eventually settling at Minnesota United FC as an assistant, where he made the step up with the team from the USL Championship to MLS in 2017.
Under Fuller this season, OKSC has become a more aggressive attacking team, accompanied by a marked uptick in offensive productivity, with 43 goals scored in the regular season compared to 23 in 2024. That spark of creativity and urgency in attack has led to some thrilling moments for the fans, along with the sense that the team is never out of a match when goals can come at any time, from nearly anyone on the pitch. Fourteen different players have scored this season, and most of them more than once.
Speaking of goals, we’d be remiss not to highlight the surprising dynamic duo carrying the heft of our goal tally this year, Babacar Diene, a Senegalese newcomer, and German attacker Kempes Tekiela, who led the team in scoring last season. They could have easily generated unwelcome locker room drama or become contentious rivals for playing time when Diene joined the team in the off-season. Two strikers, both with impactful skill and instincts for goal, rarely share the field in the modern game, let alone joyously so.
“Hey, this is enjoyable,” says midfielder Angelo Kelly-Rosales of their blossoming offensive chemistry. “Babacar scores one goal, how can we keep giving him the ball? How can Kempes get the ball?” It’s been an obvious group effort, not only putting the ball in the net, but how consistently the entire attacking half seems to be creating quality scoring chances at a high volume. “All those attacking players, you feel good. How can we keep making you feel good?”
“In the mornings, they ride in with me,” recalls Skelton of Diene and Tekiela earlier this season, “and they started to build a big relationship off the field and a bond off the field. Look, why can’t we maybe play them both? It seemed to work and then, it has seemed to get better. It’s flowing.”
Unlikely allies, earned chemistry, and a unique setting have all contributed to a historic regular season for this soccer team in a sports-mad town. OKSC have not lost a league match at Covenant Health Park this season. It’s a record they are duly proud of, and a streak they are counting on Knoxville’s soccer fans, new and otherwise, to help them extend.
The team’s connection to the fans has evolved and grown alongside their success. That aspect of representing and engaging with the community resonates with the players, and not only during a match. Kelly-Rosales: “Kids always say ‘Hi! How’re you doing?’ and I take that to heart, and I turn around and acknowledge you.” As an increasingly in-demand youth instructor, as well as a father, he understands the positive impact that taking a moment, especially for a young fan, can have. “I hope someday somebody will do the exact same thing for my son.”
These types of moments can be fleeting, but Knoxville knows how to embrace them. As we’ve been fortunate enough to witness here repeatedly, the high points of success for a team in a town like ours can impact the community for years if not generations. On Sunday, at Covenant Health Park, One Knoxville Sporting Club has a 90-minute long opportunity to continue a storybook season. Ticket sales for the match are on pace to sell out (get yours here).
Who wouldn’t want to be a part of a love story like that?