Long Island is getting a professional soccer team of its own. The United Soccer League announced Wednesday that it has awarded a franchise to a Long Island ownership group, and the club, playing for now under the name USL Long Island, plans to take the field in USL League One in 2028. Home will be James M. Shuart Stadium at Hofstra University in Hempstead, the same ground where the New York Cosmos once played.

The launch is subject to final league and federation sanctioning, which is standard for a new franchise announced two seasons out. What is not standard is who is building it, because the two names at the top of this club are both Long Island soccer stories themselves.

A World Cup champion from Greenlawn comes home

Sara Whalen Hess, the club's co-founder and president, grew up in Greenlawn and played her high school soccer at Harborfields. From there the résumé runs through just about every level the sport had to offer an American woman in her era: the U.S. Women's National Team, a world championship at the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup, an Olympic silver medal in 2000, and professional stints with the Long Island Lady Riders and the New York Power. The Suffolk Sports Hall of Fame inducted her in 2001. She went on to become a licensed clinical psychologist, and now she is running a professional club in the county next door to the one where she learned the game.

The 1999 World Cup team she played on is the one that filled the Rose Bowl and put women's soccer on American televisions for good. A generation of Long Island kids grew up with that team's poster on the wall. One of the players on it is now building them a team of their own.

The academy pipeline behind it

The principal owner is Glenn Schneider, a Dix Hills native who spent his corporate career at Nature's Bounty, where he was chief executive of US Nutrition, and who founded and runs SUSA FC, the largest private soccer academy on Long Island with more than 5,000 players in its programs. That number is the quiet logic of the whole project. Long Island produces soccer players at enormous volume, and until now the ones with professional ambitions have had to leave the Island to pursue them. A League One club with an academy of that size behind it is a pathway that ends at a stadium a local kid's family can drive to.

Shuart Stadium has seen this before

The venue is not a neutral choice. Shuart Stadium, the nearly 13,000 seat facility on Hofstra's campus, hosted the New York Cosmos in 1972 and 1973, and again from 2013 to 2015 during the club's revival. Older fans will remember what the Cosmos became in the years after they left Hempstead the first time. The stadium has spent recent decades hosting Hofstra athletics and championship events, and in 2028 it goes back to work as a professional soccer ground.

USL League One sits on the third tier of the American professional pyramid, currently at 17 clubs and still expanding, with more teams arriving in 2027. The regional map is already interesting: Westchester SC is in the league now, and the Cosmos themselves are part of the USL fold. A Long Island club walks into ready-made rivalries the day it kicks off.

The name is up to you

USL Long Island is a placeholder. The club says its real name, crest and colors will be unveiled in the coming months and shaped by fan input, through listening sessions, interviews and online polls at the club's website, USLLongIsland.com. That is an open invitation, and given how strongly Long Islanders feel about the difference between, say, a lighthouse and a wave, the submissions should be worth watching.

The club is also making the standard promises about community roots and youth development, but here they land differently than they usually do, because the ownership is not a private equity group testing a market. It is an academy operator with 5,000 local families already enrolled and a Harborfields alumna with a World Cup medal. The community they are promising to build in is the one they are from.

What it means for the Island

Professional soccer has passed through Long Island before, from the Lady Riders and the Rough Riders to the Cosmos years at Hofstra, but a men's professional club built around Long Island's own identity, with its name chosen by its own fans, is a different proposition. Between now and 2028 there will be a name, a crest, a coach, a roster, and, if the academy math holds, some local kids on it.

For a reader in Nassau or Suffolk, the practical version is this: in two seasons there will be a professional team on the Island itself, in a stadium your parents may have watched the Cosmos in. Season one of a new club is usually the best ticket in its history. You have advance notice.