Fort Wayne Football Club is hard at work preparing for the move to USL League One, a Division III professional league that will have 21 clubs across the nation next year.
We sat down with our new Sporting Director, Oliver Gage, to discuss how the club is beginning its roster construction. Gage is no stranger to the process of building a squad – see this profile on his accomplishments – and is pleased to have joined the ranks of Fort Wayne FC after it had immense success at the pre-professional level with three straight division championships and back-to-back trips to the conference semifinals in USL League Two.
Gage stressed the importance of getting the roster build right for 2026, when the regular season will run from March to October and Fort Wayne FC will begin play in its new state-of-the-art stadium, Fort Wayne FC Park, at Bass Road and I-69. (Fans are encouraged to place their 2026 season ticket deposits and reserve their spot in line for when tickets go on sale in September.)
“Even though the club has existed for a number of years now, in the pro ranks this is going to be the first go-round,” Gage said. “You only get one chance to make a first impression. I think the tone of what we’re trying to do here in terms of making a statement and what Fort Wayne is going to be will be set from Day 1. I don’t see us doing something and then blowing it up after a year and changing strategies. We know what we want to do and we’re going to set about from Day 1 in trying to do it.”
Gage has spent a considerable amount of time evaluating the players who were with the club in 2025 and determining if they could be good fits for the team as it moves to the pros.
“I’ve watched every single game from this season and from a couple seasons beforehand,” Gage said. “There’s a responsibility in this position to understand the history here, not just from the club – how it was formed and the people involved – but the history of how the team has evolved and how the coaching staff likes to do things. It gives me a better understanding of what they may or may not like from certain players. I’ve watched an awful lot of film and I’ve learned a lot.”
Having been the Director of Soccer for Loudon United, a Division II USL Championship team, Gage is familiar with several players at the USL League One level because he’d scouted them previously.
Still, he and the Fort Wayne FC staff must pour through data on roughly 150,000 potential players to determine who might be good fits for the club next year.
“We have some qualifiers and some filters that can narrow down that pool,” Gage said. “My background and one of the my strengths is the use of data and the good thing about data is you can use it to filter down a huge list of players quite quickly. … (We’ll) fill out the long list of 20 or so players at each position and then get that down to a short list of a more appropriate size of three, four or five and then go from there.”
Gage said it’s important that Fort Wayne FC identifies the players who best fit the club’s tactics, culture and long-term goals, not just the players who have racked up the best statistics.
“The roster will not dictate the way we play,” he said. “The other way around. We have a pretty well defined playing style already under the coaching staff – it’s been established over a number of years – and when I was discussing with (Director of Football Operations DaMarcus Beasley) and (Majority Owner Mark Music) about what Fort Wayne was going to be in the long term, we had a vision of what it was going to look like not just in how it feels to be in Fort Wayne, and how we operate as a club, but also what it looks like on the pitch. That’s a non-negotiable for me. We will have a defined playing style and we will recruit players according to that.”
Gage also believes it’s crucial to study other USL League One teams to see what they’ve done well and what they’ve done poorly, as that information can help direct Fort Wayne FC toward success in the future.
“You have to see what your competitors are doing, how they’re building the rosters, what’s worked and what hasn’t,” Gage said. “You learn from people who have been there before and why make their mistakes and go through the pain they had to go through, when you can just see what they did and avoid that?”
About Fort Wayne Football Club
Fort Wayne Football Club, founded in 2019, is moving to the professional ranks of USL League One in 2026. The club is building a new state-of-the-art, soccer-specific stadium, Fort Wayne FC Park, that will open at Bass Road and I-69 in 2026. In pre-professional USL League Two, Fort Wayne Football Club won Valley Division championships in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
About United Soccer League
Founded in 1986, the United Soccer League (USL) is the largest and fastest-growing soccer organization in the United States, impacting more than 200 communities nationwide. The USL is the first and only organization to offer a comprehensive youth-to-professional pathway for both men and women under one ecosystem. This structure includes four men’s leagues: the newly announced, top-tier professional Division I league, the USL Championship (Division II), USL League One (Division III), and USL League Two (pre-professional). The women’s pathway includes the top-tier USL Super League (Division I), which debuted in 2024, and USL W League, the country’s leading pre-professional women’s league. The USL also oversees USL Academy, a progressive talent development platform, and USL Youth, a premier national youth platform.