In a competition that has produced some incredible David versus Goliath battles over the years — including Cavalry FC and Pacific FC both beating the Vancouver Whitecaps, and Forge FC taking both Toronto FC and CF Montreal to penalties — League1 BC champions TSS Rovers beating CPL side Valour FC in the Canadian Championship preliminary round on April 19 was a unique piece of history.

It saw amateur players, many of whom are university students or players looking for an opportunity to move up to a level in which they get paid to play the sport they love, beating a professional club that at the time was top of the table in the country’s top league. It’s the kind of result that becomes an instant classic, and a ‘where were you when’ moment for the club’s supporters.

TSS Rovers as a club isn’t very old, either. While the club has existed in some form since 1997 as an academy, the semi-pro team was founded ahead of the 2017 PDL (now USL League Two) season. Last year, they became a founding member of League1 BC, and the provincial league’s inaugural champions which qualified them for the 2023 Canadian Championship.

“I’d say they’re insane,” head coach Will Cromack said to CanPL.ca with a smile when asked what he’d say if someone told him a few years ago that the team he helped build up from the start would one day be in the position that they are. “We literally went to the pub, we went to a Tragically Hip concert as a bunch of old guys, and decided that we were going to build a soccer club and hoped one day we’d be able to compete in the Voyageurs Cup, and we did it.

“I don’t know how, and I don’t know why it all came through, but I’m really thankful it did. I’m particularly proud of the guys that were sitting having that beer and stuck with it, because it takes a long time to build something and you take a lot of hits emotionally, physically, financially… and we did it.”

Cromack, who was the head coach last season as TSS won the men’s L1BC title, moved to Ontario in the offseason. He told CanPL.ca that he didn’t know that they would be invited to play in the Canadian Championship, and moved east after what he described as “the end of the cycle” at the club. When it was announced that they’d be playing in the Canadian Championship, he resumed head coaching duties for the cup games, while Darren Russcher is the new head coach for the League1 games.

He has flown in from Ontario for both matches, showing his commitment and passion for a club that means so much to him. Anyone who speaks about Cromack only has positive things to say about the charismatic head coach.

“I have a very nice wife who said ‘You’ve got to finish the job you started’, and here we are back in BC… I feel like I haven’t left yet,” he joked.

The match against Valour ended 3-1, after Matteo Polisi and Ivan Mejia scored in the first half to give the home side a 2-0 advantage heading into the break at the historic Swangard Stadium. Polisi added a second after the break, and Anthony Novak’s penalty was too little, too late for Valour in the final stages of the match.

“I smile every time I think about that game or someone sends me a photo or anything,” Polisi said to CanPL.ca. “I played with TSS for years, and to come back and have my first game in the Canadian Championship was special obviously, and then to get the win was incredible.”

The TSS skipper produced a moment that will forever be remembered in Canadian soccer circles in the second half of that match. After smashing home a shot to make it 3-0 for the Rovers, Polisi jumped over a fence behind the net and into the crowd to celebrate with their supporters’ group — known as The Swanguardians.

It was a special sequence that again highlighted just how much this competition means to players and fans alike — and especially at TSS Rovers, where many of their fans make up part of their ownership group, owning 49 per cent of the club.

“As soon as it went in, I knew he was headed that way again,” sporting director Colin Elmes said with a smile. “There’s been multiple iconic pictures of that from different angles, different photographers that were there. The two fellows that he jumped into, that were the closest people to him, were two of our Swanguardians and two fellows who have been integral in building the Supporters Trust, so it was very appropriate that those two guys were the ones literally holding him up as he was celebrating.

“Not in any moment as big as this one, but Matteo has been in that crowd I’m gonna say over the years, probably three or four times previously.”

Polisi beamed from ear to ear when asked about his jump into the crowd, as the memory came back into his head.

“Just emotion honestly, and adrenaline,” he said. “I scored that goal and the Swanguardians were right behind the net. I have done it before, and I just went over there and just jumped in there, and the whole group came in there too. It was special.”

Polisi, who spent two seasons in the Canadian Premier League with Pacific FC, winning the North Star Shield with the Tridents in 2021, decided to rejoin his old club after being unable to secure another contract in the CPL this season. He played in a preseason game for Valour, alongside his brother Marcello who signed for the Winnipeg club this offseason, and has been keen to use this Canadian Championship platform to elevate himself — and potentially some of his teammates — up to the professional ranks.

“I’ve played in the CPL, and so I just try to bring my knowledge and my experience and share it with the team, and just try to help the guys on the team to get together and really work together and get the most out of the group,” Polisi said. “It’s not an individual sport, there’s 11 players in the field, the whole squad of 26 guys. Everyone did their role incredibly well, and that’s what got us the win.”

“Our motto here is, and has always been, ‘We never want to see you again’,” Elmes added about the opportunity that games and competitions like this present to players. “Will said in his press conferences that trophies are nice and winning is great, but the reality is our victories are moving players on.

“These players have recognized that they’ve now become a part of history with what’s happened and what happens next, nobody can ever take that away from them now.”

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES, BURNABY? ✨

TSS Rovers go up 3-0 over Valour FC in this MIRACLE #CanChamp match 🤯

Matteo Polisi, take a bow 👏

🔴 https://t.co/7JFAUhgjL6 pic.twitter.com/VBXW4UemFS

— OneSoccer (@onesoccer) April 20, 2023

In order to beat a professional club, TSS knew that they had to act like one. What they lack in resources, they make up for in passion and commitment to their cause. Analysts Ryan Lindsay and Stephen Mosher worked tirelessly to scout every single player in the Valour squad, using data and whatever footage they could find online to build scouting reports on each player.

Valour surely had an equally-difficult task to get information on the TSS Rovers squad, which hadn’t played a competitive game since the previous summer when the L1BC season wrapped up — but as the heavy favourites, a lot of the talk out of their camp was focusing more on themselves.

“We found ways to get footage on all of these new guys, and we watched multiple matches for each player to create profiles of each one,” Lindsay, who is actually from Winnipeg, told CanPL.ca. “Going into the match we had a pretty good idea of the profile of each player and how they may fit into Dos Santos’s system, and so we felt that we could prepare well for that.

“It was a lot of fun too, to try and problem solve that and find clips of guys coming over from Peru or Ireland. They pulled from Iceland, they pulled from everywhere, so it was definitely challenging trying to track footage down, but I think we pulled it off pretty well.”

Lindsay says that while he was focused more on player tendencies and profiles, Mosher was scraping the internet for any data he could find. Together, they helped the coaches create a game plan that he thinks was executed to near perfection.

“Stephen is an ace, he’s more of the data side of things, he’s got a master’s degree in analytics… somehow he’s able to find data on all of these players and put together heat maps or passing maps or average player positions and stuff from this data he’s able to mine,” Lindsay added. “I’ve worked with a lot of coaches and teams that use that kind of stuff, and the things he put together and continues to put together is above professional level, it is incredible. I’d back that guy to the hilt, he’s going places for sure.”

Up next, TSS Rovers play the Tridents in the quarterfinals, an all-BC clash that many are billing a “Celebration of BC Soccer”. Pacific offered to give some of the proceeds from ticket sales back to the Rovers in an effort to help out the club financially and will make Wednesday night’s match an occasion to remember for both sides, regardless of who comes out on top.

“The party is still going, we’re still celebrating BC soccer,” Cromack added. “That’s what we started with, and we’re still not done yet so let’s carry this on and do everything we can to make people aware of how much fun this is.”

The match also has some added importance for Polisi, as he returns to Starlight Stadium for the first time since departing the club in the offseason.

“I used to have those fans cheer for me, but now I’m going to be the opposition,” he smiled. “Obviously, things didn’t work out the way I wanted to, but I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity I had with Pacific for two years, and I think I have something to prove over there. We have belief we can win.

“We know we’re the underdogs, obviously, and we’re not favourites, but I mean we’ve done it once, why can’t we keep doing it?”

Without getting too far ahead of themselves, both teams know what waits in the shadows if they are to win — a potential battle, at home, with local Major League Soccer side Vancouver Whitecaps FC — who will first have to get through York United earlier on Wednesday.

The thought of another all-BC clash is mouthwatering — but a York vs. TSS Rovers game or York vs. the team (Pacific) that they knocked out of last year’s competition would be equally entertaining as well.

“Pacific has grasped this, clearly they want to beat us, but they’ve grasped it and turned it into something more than just a game on the 10th of May,” Elmes said. “We love the fact that we’re on the road, but our supporters can come over – I know that the ticket numbers have been climbing daily there, we’re hoping to get somewhere between 100-200 people there.”

“There are going to be some very difficult moments for us, we’re going to have to suffer much more probably than we did on April 19, and we’re going to have to be patient and pick our moments and limit mistakes quickly in our own half of the field down to nothing in order to survive this. This is going to be really really hard.”