Dayton Dutch Lions have big goals as new season approaches

“The club that you remember, almost everything about it is different in some way, other than the colors and the logo,” Ash said.

General Manager Ryan Gallagher joined the club in February 2024. Ash came aboard this year.

“We’re kind of putting our best foot forward this year to have a media presence, a community presence, a social media presence, all that good stuff that we just haven’t had the last two or three seasons,” Ash said.

The Dutch Lions men’s and women’s teams start a new season this month. Rosters are composed of college soccer players.

Ash likened USL League Two, the men’s team’s league, to summer baseball leagues like the Prospect League, home to Springfield’s Champion City Kings. USL League Two is the highest amateur division in American soccer and the fourth division overall.

The Dutch Lions men’s team competed in the United Soccer League‘s Premier Development League when it was formed. It was one of the few teams in the league at that time with a professional status. In its second year, it moved up a division to USL PRO, which is now called the USL Championship. They played there four years before returning to USL PDL in 2015.

USL League Two includes 144 clubs in 19 divisions. The Dutch Lions would like to climb to the higher division — USL League One — in the next couple years.

“We have a lot of big-picture changes down the road,” Ash said.

That includes a new stadium in Dayton. Ash said Dutch Lions officials will take site visits later this month.

“Right now, we’re still at West Carrollton, where we’ve been for a bit,” Ash said. “But we kind of want to get out of that and have our own stadium where we can control things.”

The men’s team opens the season against Fort Wayne at 7 p.m. Saturday at West Carrollton High School’s Dayton Outpatient Center Stadium. The women’s team, which competes in the USL W League, opens the season at Louisville FC at 6 p.m. Wednesday and plays its first home game at 7 p.m. May 21 against Indy Eleven at West Carrollton.

Dan Griest, a longtime area coach who played at Northwestern High School and at Wright State, will manage the men’s team. His roster includes players from many area colleges, including Dayton, Wright State and Northern Kentucky.

The women’s team is coached by Hatem Gabr, of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

With the popularity of FC Cincinnati and the Crew and with the FIFA World Cup coming to the United States in 2026, the Dutch Lions hope to take advantage of the moment.

“We’ve talked with the league,” Ash said, “and they love Dayton as an expansion market. They see Cincinnati as kind of the poster child for success stories, and we’re in a similar area, obviously. They basically told us that in the next two to three years, when they turn to promotion and relegation within the USL, that they want Dayton to be in that system. We have a lot of checkpoints we have to hit before we can get there. But the league is telling us that they want us there, and they’ve offered to help us to make sure that that happens. Having the league on our side is huge there.”

The USL announced a promotion and relegation system in March.

A press release explained the move: “The USL becomes the first professional sports league in the U.S. to adopt this global model, creating an interconnected three-tiered men’s professional soccer system, where teams earn promotion to a higher division or face relegation to a lower division based on their performance during the season. With this historic step, the USL aligns with the world’s top leagues—including the Premier League, La Liga and Bundesliga—where promotion and relegation raises the stakes of every match, drives fan engagement, and elevates the overall competition of the game."