The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
State natives Downs, Vazquez to suit up for Hartford
It would be easy to excuse Nicky Downs and his Hartford Athletic teammates for being overcome by a case of deja vu when they boarded the bus for the journey to New York for the 2020 season opener.
Just more than four months ago, fresh off a successful preseason, the bus was ready to take the squad to New York when COVID-19 brought the USL
Championship season to a halt the day before it was supposed to begin.
“We just completed a seven or eight week preseason and we are literally on our way,” said Downs, a midfielder from Lakeville and four-year starter at Yale. “We just finished training, we were going to hop on the bus down to New York to play the Red Bulls on March 13 and that day was the day that we got suspended. The local guys stuck around, some guys went home.”
When the team reconvened in May, all they could do was hope that there would be goals to be scored and games to be played. Those wishes will become a reality when Hartford’s second season gets underway with a game at the New York Red Bulls II Friday night. The home opener will be on Monday at 7 p.m. against Loudoun United FC with capacity at Dillon Stadium in Hartford being limited to 25 percent.
“Everyone is just super excited to get back to playing,” Downs said. “Obviously it has been such a long time away from competitive action and when we came back, it was a slow kind of transition back to doing full contact with the whole group so we were just itching to get going again. Our group this year is a little bit younger than it was last
year, so it is a group that really wants to prove itself, so we are just excited to get after it and start playing games.”
Downs carried the Connecticut banner a season ago when he played 23 games with 11 starts. He’ll have some company as recent high school graduate Alfonso Vazquez is ready for his professional debut after scoring a Connecticut high school record 149 goals at Windham.
“It’s going to be very special because that really was what my dream was, to become a professional soccer player and now that is happening and that happening in my hometown, my family being able to witness and see everything happening is just an amazing feeling,” Vazquez said.
“Friday, it will hit me deep down that it’s my first professional game, but I feel like Monday when it is a home game, I think that is when I am going to realize everything.”
If Downs and Vazquez each share strong family support. Vazquez began playing soccer at age 5 following in the footsteps of his older brother.
“My brother played, parents wanted to take me in and sign me up,” Vazquez said. “My dad would say that when I was younger I would just want to play, play and play.”
No member of the Hartford squad probably understands what Vazquez will be facing more than defender Matheus Silva, who was 19 when he made his first appearance with Major League Soccer’s San Jose Earthquakes in 2016.
“Alfonso is a really good player, has so much potential, works hard, listens and that is the most important thing. You have to be willing to make the mistake and listen, especially to Coach Rahdi,” Silva said.
Downs not only had the support of his father but he played for him for eight years including his first season at Hotchkiss.
“I was always surrounded by the game so I think I definitely grew to have a passion for playing, watching and just being involved in soccer,” said Downs, who started 56 games at Yale from 2016-19. “The best part, especially as a little kid, was I got to grow up around my dad’s Hotchkiss teams. As a little kid, I would always be around the practices after school and kind of hanging out with his players. My dad always had pretty international teams at Hotchkiss with guys coming from all over the world and he started getting a lot of the Right to Dream boys from Ghana so I kind of grew up with all of these positive role models in my life and guys that I looked up to, so that was a huge part of why I wanted to keep playing soccer. From a coaching perspective, he was always the harshest on me, pushed me to be the best that I could be. And to have another resource in the offseason to do individual training was obviously a huge benefit. I wouldn’t be where I am without him, that is for sure.”
Downs made annual visits to Ghana to visit the
Right to Dream academy. The experience was uplifting both on the field and off.
“Obviously expanding my horizons,” Downs said. “That is one thing that I feel super fortunate that we traveled a lot when I was a kid. We actually lived in France when I was 5 and 6. That was something my parents always did was to get my sister and I in different environments, kind of understand and appreciate different cultures so going to Ghana was eye-opening in a lot of different ways. I was lucky enough to go a few times and kind of interact with not just the boys at the academy, but a couple of summers I got to go meet with some of the families of the Right to Dream boys who were at Hotchkiss, see where they grew up and the field that they grew up playing on. It was just a new way to experience how somebody else was brought up and just appreciate a different culture and what they brought to us in the U.S. and how they enriched our lives.”
There’s a third member of the Hartford Athletic who was born in Connecticut. Defender Kevin Politz was born in New Haven and spent the first few years of his life in Cheshire before his family moved to New Jersey. Politz does have family friends in Connecticut and his brother lives in Middletown.