The professional soccer club being built for Long Island has hired the person who will decide what it looks like on the field, and he turns out to be a local. The Island FC announced on October 5 that Larry Sunderland is its first sporting director, effective immediately, with the club's debut season set to kick off in July 2027 at a new stadium in Uniondale. Sunderland grew up playing for Massapequa Soccer Club, and after three decades building teams in Chicago, Portland and Cincinnati, his next project sits about twenty minutes from the fields where he started.

The job: build a team from nothing

A sporting director runs everything a fan actually watches. The club says Sunderland will shape its playing identity, construct the first-team roster from scratch, hire the head coach and technical staff, and run scouting, recruitment and player development. There is no inherited roster and no previous season to build on. Every player who wears the shirt in July 2027 will be someone his operation found, signed or developed.

He joins a front office that has been filling in all year. Principal owner and chairman Mitchell Rechler brought on Travis Lamprecht as president of business operations, and in June the club named Gary Book, who coached the men's program at Adelphi University, as managing director, with part of his brief being to help find and onboard this exact hire. The search ran through the summer. It ended with a Long Islander.

A career that started at the Coliseum

Sunderland's playing days began in Massapequa and ran through the New York Express, the indoor club that spent its single season at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale before folding in early 1987. That detail has a nice echo now: the Island FC's stadium is planned for the Mitchel Athletic Complex on Charles Lindbergh Boulevard, on the same stretch of old Mitchel Field where the Coliseum stands. His professional career as a player started in Uniondale, and the team he now builds will play there too. In between, he spent time on a Long Island sideline as an assistant coach at LIU Post in Brookville.

The coaching and development resume since then is the reason this hire matters beyond the hometown story. Sunderland spent eight years directing player development and the academy at the Chicago Fire, then became youth technical director of the Portland Timbers. From there he moved to FC Cincinnati as the club's first director of player development, spending seven years standing up an academy as that club made its jump into Major League Soccer. He has also worked with U.S. Soccer, including the under-16 and under-17 men's national teams, and teams under his direction have won national championships at the under-14, under-16, under-18 and under-20 levels.

Why a development specialist, and why that matters here

Read that resume again and a pattern shows: nearly all of it is player development. The Island FC will play in MLS Next Pro, the professional league tied to Major League Soccer's development pipeline, as an independent club, and its stated plan is a pathway that runs from Long Island youth soccer to a Long Island professional team. Sunderland's role includes working with the club's youth leadership to strengthen exactly that pathway.

That is the part a Long Island soccer parent should notice. The Island has produced professional players for decades, and almost every one of them had to leave to become one, joining academies in New Jersey, Connecticut or the city. A professional club with its own academy ambitions, run by someone who built the academies in Portland and Cincinnati, is a bet that the next one will not have to.

The stadium and the timeline

The club's home is planned for the Mitchel Athletic Complex at 1 Charles Lindbergh Boulevard in Uniondale, designed to seat 2,500 with room to grow to 5,000 as the club does. It is privately funded, and the club intends it to double as a year-round academy and training facility that can host other sports and community events. The first season is set to begin in July 2027, which gives Sunderland roughly nine months of runway before a roster has to start taking real shape.

It has been a sudden boom for a region that has spent years watching its best players leave to turn professional somewhere else. The Island FC is one of two professional projects announced for Long Island this year, alongside a separate club aiming to begin USL play at Hofstra in 2028. For now, the one with a stadium site, a league and a sporting director is the one in Uniondale.

What comes next is the visible part: a head coach, a badge and colors on real jerseys, and the first signings, some of whom may be names from Long Island club soccer. When the whistle blows at Mitchel Field in July 2027, the team on the grass will be the work of someone who learned the game in Massapequa and came home to finish the job.