I think the last time I was this surprised about a front office move was the off-season before the aforementioned Martin Rennie joined the club. That off-season was full of surprises as the 2017 team led by Tim Hankinson transitioned to the 2018 team led by Martin Rennie, in a new league (NASL to USL), and in a new stadium (Carroll to Lucas Oil), much of that announced extremely last minute as the club tried to extract itself from the dying NASL. The 2018 team had no resemblance to the 2017 team, returning just Ring, Braun, & Speas, after Rennie decided that he couldn't see any place on his team or in the club for any of the 2017 players who had just a season before made it to the NASL's Soccer Bowl before being beaten by the Cosmos in penalty kicks. Rennie couldn't see a place for a ball-hawking forward like Eamon Zayed or a goalkeeping legend like Jon Busch. Hell, it was seemingly only because of a near fan-uprising that he kept club legend Ring around. That off-season was weird as hell.
Today's surprise departure of Lowry takes a close second in my opinion.
There was absolutely nothing from my perspective that would have made me guess this was going to happen. Lowry seemed to genuinely convey to me during conversations that Indy was the place he wanted to be to keep moving Indy forward, and to be a part of the first games at Eleven Park. It seemed like such a given to me, after getting the team back to the playoffs this year, that I barely wrote anything about the coaching situation in my end-of-year off-season article.
Could I have misread the situation? Definitely.
Do I think there is something else going on? Definitely.
The following is a scenario that I can envision happening to lead us to watching yet another coach, this one highly successful in this league, walk away from the club after signing nine core pieces of the 2023 roster.
Ways parted.Martin Rennie "mutually parted" Indy, in part, because of the poor turf at Carroll stadium. Despite a new turf being installed in 2020, the team that Mark Lowry put together still found that field to be less than ideal in the way that it played. Lowry found late in the season that with some pregame effort, this new version of the turf could be massaged enough to play in a more predictable way, thereby allowing the team's preferred style of play to shine. That level of field maintenance takes time, and time is money. Part of the theory behind artificial turf fields is that they are supposed to be low maintenance. I'm guessing, and I stress guessing, that Lowry requested more budget next year for the field maintenance.
That, by itself, wouldn't have been enough to "part ways," mutually or otherwise.
However, and I don't remember if this was said to me on- or off-record, so I could get in trouble here for saying something that I shouldn't, but many of the clubs' groups had their budgets frozen for at least the last month of the season. Lowry likely had one of the highest paid rosters in the USL Championship this past year, but that money was focused on the core group of players. As the team found out, that created a depth of skill problem when suspensions or injuries sidelined some of those core players. I'm guessing, and I stress guessing, that Lowry requested more budget next year to bring in some other players to have a higher level of depth than what the team had this year. That additional depth was going to come with a cost.
Ersal and/or Stremlaw said no. Lowry said that he didn't think he can get the team any higher without that money for stadium and player help. "Then we have reached an impasse."
I honestly think that Mark Lowry was the right man for the job to get Indy to higher level. The club and even fans think that Indy need to get back to the successes the team used to have. That is not this club. Actually, I should be more specific and say that is not the men's first team. The Academy and the women's side have been successful. The men's first team is, and has been, an average to below average performing team for nearly the entirely of its history.
- The team has now had 4 permanent coaches and 2 interim coaches in 10 seasons of action.
- The team has made the playoffs just 4 times in those 10 seasons.
- The team has just 4 seasons with a positive goal differential and two of those have just barely made it to that threshold (2016 - +21; 2019 - +20; 2020 - +2; 2023 - +3).
- In the team's time in the USL-C, they have finished 7th (2018), 3rd (2019), 3rd (out of 4 teams in their group due to the 2020 pandemic arrangement), 12th (2021), 9th (2022), and 6th (2023) in their conference.
- The team has made it to one league final (2016 NASL season, which had just 11 teams in the league and 4 of them made the playoffs).
- The team has made it to one conference final (2019 USL season, which imploded in the final minutes to Louisville).
- The team has 1 piece of hardware; a "spring season" championship because the NASL was kooky-dooks and split the season into two parts, that Indy won on the third tiebreaker.
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