When J.D. Ulanowski was working his way through the Sports Management program at Brock University, the path to a job in Canadian professional soccer wasn’t especially clear.

At the time, it felt like there were only really three options: Canada’s Major League Soccer clubs.

“So it’s like, Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver, and how many job openings are there really?” Ulanowski told CanPL.ca. “Maybe there’s an internship, but then after that where do you go? ‘Well, sorry, we don’t have a job for you here, we have our full-time people,’ that’s it.”

That all changed in 2019 with the launch of the Canadian Premier League and the introduction of seven new professional soccer teams into the Canadian market. That number became eight a year later when Atlético Ottawa joined the fold.

The league’s inception created a whole new world of opportunity within the sport in this country. It is safe to say that Ulanowski has made the most of this development. On Feb. 10, just over five years after he graduated and at just 28 years of age, Ulanowski was named Atlético Ottawa’s youngest-ever general manager.

“It’s hard to put into words, but it’s pretty incredible,” said Ulanowski. “For me, I always say it’s a little bit of luck and good timing, but I couldn’t imagine being in another job, in another position.”

Ulanowski was three years into a Bachelor’s degree in Economics at Queen’s University when he began to think about where he saw himself after school. The easy answer was that he wanted to work in sports. So he made the decision to transfer to Brock University’s Sports Management program in 2017.

The program has a solid list of alumni, including CF Montréal Director of Soccer Corey Wray, Pittsburgh Penguins GM Kyle Dubas, and Toronto Blue Jays VP of Baseball Operations Andrew Tinnish. Still, in a competitive industry, getting to follow in their path isn’t especially common. But for Ulanowski, who grew up playing soccer in his native Oakville, the program offered a critical foot in the industry door through an internship in Team Operations with Toronto FC II.

After graduating in 2019, he saw a job opening with the Canadian Premier League as a Compliance and Player Recruitment Officer and jumped on the opportunity. It was a very administrative role at the start, mostly focused on cleaning up documentation and working on creating processes.

But through the position he got to experience things like the league’s Covid bubble in Winnipeg, and got a good understanding of how different clubs operate, what he liked, and what he would maybe do differently if given the chance.

“To be fair, when I came to Ottawa, I had all these ideas, of ‘This is how this should go’,” said Ulanowski. “But this is the tough part, right? You don’t really know until you’re actually doing the negotiations, until you have your guy on the other end. So you can make all the comments you want, ‘I would have done this, I would have done that’. But once you’re actually doing it you’re like ‘Okay, now it makes a little bit more sense’ of why [clubs] went this way, or went that way on certain things.”

He says working in the league office was the perfect starting job for anyone who would want to work in a team’s front office some day. The lessons he learned in everything from the importance of attention to detail and what to look for in contracts to the relationships he built around the league have proven invaluable to this day.

As his third season with the Canadian Premier League was winding down, Ulanowski received a call from then-Atlético Ottawa CEO Fernando López. The club was looking to expand its front office team, and, having seen Ulanowski’s work with the league first-hand, he thought he would be a perfect fit. In January 2022, he left the league office to join what at the time was the league’s newest club.

In that first season, he worked largely in a team manager type role, helping with day-to-day logistics for the Atlético Ottawa first team.

“I mean, my first month I spent in Madrid, so can’t really complain,” he says with a grin. “Just learning the ins and outs of how the team operates. Year one was very much like team manager.”

Following that season, when Atlético Ottawa captain Drew Beckie retired and became the team manager, it opened the door for Ulanowski to take on a more of a role supporting López and then-head coach Carlos González in the building of Atlético Ottawa’s roster.

Things changed again in a big way this past summer, when López announced he was leaving the club to join Real Zaragoza in Spain. By that point, Ulanowski had been promoted to assistant GM, and suddenly inherited a lot of responsibility in what he called a ‘bit of a whirlwind’ — effectively becoming the team’s GM.

Now, under new CEO Manuel Vega, he was officially promoted to that role. He says that all of that previous experience, especially this past season, has set him up for success now that he is in this newest opportunity.

Becoming a general manager has in some ways been a little bit different from what Ulanowski would have imagined — especially with a club as new as Atlético Ottawa. The day-to-day is less of a Moneyball-esque trade deadline scene where he is working the phones with agents and negotiating contracts, with plenty of what he calls the “nitty-gritty stuff.”

As he looks across the Canadian Premier League at other front offices, Ulanowski sees a lot of others in his age bracket also thriving. Cavalry FC assistant GM Tofa Fakunle, who played for the Calgary club in their inaugural season, is 29; Forge FC’s Director of Soccer Operations Jelani Smith is 34; and Pacific FC Manager of Football Jamar Dixon is 35. On the coaching side, York United recently promoted 32-year-old Mauro Eustáquio to head coach. For all of the talk of the platform provided by the league for young players like Shola Jimoh and Grady McDonnell, it is giving Canadians critical professional opportunities off the pitch as well.

“All these guys are in these front office executive roles and they’re crushing it, right?” said Ulanowski. “It’s incredible, because I’ve been here from the beginning and I have a lot of love for the league and what it’s given me and what it’s allowed me to experience.

“Being able to work with different coaches and different players that all share that passion, and are all here because of their love of football in Canada, that makes it even more special.”

Ulanowski’s promotion is far from the only change in Atlético Ottawa’s front office this off-season. In late November, the club hired Manuel Vega as their new CEO, who Ulanowski says has instantly shown a clear understanding of the Canadian market.

Together, the pair worked on the hiring of the club’s new head coach. It was an informative process for Ulanowski, one that left him impressed and encouraged by the number of solid candidates who interviewed, particularly the Canadian coaches. In the end, however, former Liga MX coach Diego Mejía emerged as the right choice.

“There was no point in having a coach that wanted to play a certain way, and we had these players locked into certain contracts that it wouldn’t work,” said Ulanowski. “Overall [Mejía] has been excellent so far. I think he hasn’t taken too much time to adapt.”

Following a somewhat disappointing 2024 campaign, Ulanowski and the front office have been hard at work recruiting a solid mix of experienced players and young talent to round out the roster. Most importantly, he believes the club has added a key ingredient that they perhaps were missing last year — depth.

“In this league, if you don’t have depth, which I think we saw a little bit of last year, you might get found out, right?,” said Ulanowski. “It might work out for a little bit, but like we dipped at the end there. Having Ollie [Bassett] play out wide and these certain things that maybe we didn’t have depth for, I think the Kevin Dos Santos injury really kind of knocked us back. We’ve made sure to address that.”

Ulanowski acknowledges that it is easy to hype his team up in pre-season before there is any pressure or proof of concept — and jokes to follow up with him in a few months about how he really feels about the team.

“I think there’s a little bit more reinvigoration in the group and a little bit of excitement, you know, and then understanding that last year some of the performances weren’t good enough,” said Ulanowski. “Everyone’s aware of that now, and it’s just overall very, very good.”

He won’t have to wait long now to get a first glimpse of how what he has helped build on paper translates to the pitch. The 2025 CPL season kicks off in the nation’s capital on Saturday, April 5 when Atlético Ottawa host Halifax Wanderers at TD Place. For Ulanowski, it will begin another chapter in his already incredible story.