Miguel Ibarra had to leave home to start his professional soccer career. On Monday, he’ll announce that he’s coming home to end it, joining AV Alta FC, the USL League One team that will begin play in the Antelope Valley in March.
“I’m definitely happy to be back home,” he said. “I never thought that I would end up here and play my last years for AV, coming back home and being next to my family and dad and mom.”
Not next to them, but under the same roof. As part of the homecoming, Ibarra has moved back into his parents’ house for the first time since leaving the Antelope Valley to join Minnesota United in the NASL in 2012, the first stop in a 12-year career that saw him play for six teams in five leagues in two countries.
No player from the Antelope Valley has played more games for the U.S. national or scored more goals in MLS than Ibarra. But that’s largely because few players from the Antelope Valley have played professional soccer at all. And that’s something John Smelzer wants to change with AV Alta which, when it launches, will be the only professional team in any sport in the rapidly growing Antelope Valley, a community of 538,000 about an hour north of Los Angeles.
“As a community-based club, we plan to create a pathway to professional soccer for AV’s youth,” said Smelzer, a longtime sports and media executive who began his career on the 1994 World Cup organizing committee. “Identifying and developing young players is not just the business model, it’s the right thing to do.”
Ibarra’s presence is vital to creating that connection. He’s living proof you can go from the Antelope Valley to the national team and it’s why AV Alta set its sights on him two years ago, when the team was little more than a dream.
“When we’re preaching local, we’re appreciating the whole full circle with Miguel,” said Nehemias “Nini” Blanco, the team’s general manager. “That’s probably the best story to tell to the community. One of their own is coming back home.
“Miguel is a perfect signing, a perfect story.”
Read more: How a pro soccer team hopes to create a new identity in the Antelope Valley
Ibarra, 34, said he was thinking about retiring two years ago, after his first season in the USL League One with Charlotte. Two years earlier he had suited up for the Seattle Sounders in the MLS Cup; his career was going backward. But then he got a call from Panchito Ramírez, who had played for the same Antelope Valley youth soccer club as Ibarra and was assisting Smelzer in putting a professional team together.
“I had made up my mind already,” Ibarra, who led Charlotte with seven assists last season, helping the Independence to the USL League One title game, said of retirement. “He told me the whole thing, that it might happen. And that his idea was didn’t I think it would be kind of cool if I would come back and retire here at home, in front of my family and where it all started.”
Of course he thought it was cool. So Ibarra signed a two-year contract to play at Lancaster Municipal Stadium, the former minor league baseball stadium about 10 miles from where he grew up. The City of Lancaster is spending more than $17 million to update the 28-year ballpark, transforming it into a 5,300-seat soccer-specific stadium with a safe-standing supporters’ section behind the north goal.
Ibarra said he knows part of his job will be to mentor young players, something he’d like to continue, perhaps as an AV Alta coach when he finally does retire. By then, the club hopes he won’t be the only Antelope Valley native with the team.
“The talent that is obviously there in the AV, and the soccer-first demographic that is there in the AV, I have no doubt that we’re going to find some hidden gems that, for one reason or another, would not have had the opportunity in the past,” said Brian Kleiban, AV Alta’s first coach.
Who says you can’t come home again?
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
