Longtime Millennium Soccer Club leader Haley Brisky is a finalist for a USL Hometown Heroes Award, and needs your vote by midday tomorrow to bring home the $10,000 prize, which she said will be invested into soccer for kids.
Voting is open now at this link, and will close Wednesday at 11 am.
Brisky is currently treasurer of the club, and served the last three years as president. She’s been involved in one way or another for more than 12 years, she said.
Millennium Soccer Club hosts Saturday clinics and games in the spring and fall for kids in first through fifth grades. Games take place in five locations around Madison, so travel isn’t an issue for families, and no player pays more than $15 for the whole year.
That’s a far cry from the typical hundreds or thousands of dollars it costs to join some other clubs, on top of other costs like uniforms and travel.
“Our goal is to make soccer as accessible as possible, so we are removing all of the barriers that exist in traditional clubs to try and make sure everybody gets a chance to play,” she said. “We take out cost, transportation, language barriers, access to technology, registration deadlines. Those are all the things that we do differently or remove entirely.”
In recent years the club has also fielded a team in the Madison Area Youth Soccer Association (MAYSA), competing against other clubs at a higher level.
Every professional team in the United Soccer League nominated someone for the Hometown Heroes award, and the league chose five finalists who are up for a fan vote. Forward Madison FC has been a partner and supporter of Millennium for several years.
Brisky was nominated by Forward Madison FC Retail Director Alyssa Bruce, who also serves on the Millennium Soccer Club board of directors.
“Millennium Soccer Club is a vital resource for school age children in our community to access soccer from any economic background,” Bruce said in a message to Madison365. “Haley has been a pivotal force in continuing and expanding the impact the club has on our community.”
Brisky said she didn’t realize the national scope of the nomination at first.
“I thought it was a nomination just to sit in some special seats for (Forward Madison) a game. So I didn’t actually know it was going to be all of this,” she said. “It’s pretty wild, and it’s nice to be recognized for sure. But I think it’s just the exposure for the club and just to show kind of a different way of doing soccer, and to be recognized for our efforts in that feels pretty great.”
If she wins the fan vote, Brisky said the $10,000 will go “directly into soccer operations, making us last another year. Our budget is extremely tight, so we can make a dollar go very, very far.”
Other finalists include:
- Rachel Jolley, the Program and Marketing Director of the Tampa Bay Sun Foundation.
- Sandra Navarro Davalos, the Community Relations Manager for the New York Cosmos, who’s inspiring the next generation by celebrating culture through dance and tradition.
- Spokane Velocity FC midfielder Nil Vinyals, who co-founded the Inspire Soccer League, creating more opportunities in the game for athletes with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
- Matt Briseno, the team captain of Sacramento Republic FC’s Unified Team.
Voting is open now at this link, and will close Wednesday at 11 am.
