This is the third of a three-part series on Phoenix Rising coach Rick Schantz. You can read the first part, focused on Schantz’s youth and time at college, here and the second part, focused on Rick’s return to Tucson, here.

RICK SCHANTZ SAT ON THE BENCH, feeling alone. It was May 2017, and he was no longer in Tucson, but up the road in Scottsdale.

“I looked around and the fans were miserable,” he recalls. “Everyone was upset, and they were yelling, and I thought this is going to be the shortest head coaching gig ever.”

His stint in the professional game started the previous offseason. By that point, Frank Yallop wasn’t bringing MLS sides to Arizona, but instead coaching the state’s USL club.

After Marc Bircham, Yallop’s assistant, departed for Queens Park Rangers, Schantz picked up the phone to his old preseason friend.

“I said ‘hey, I just wanted to say congratulations, I also wanted to talk about Arizona United/Phoenix Rising coming down to Tucson for preseason,’” Schantz recalls. “I was trying to help him out a little bit, and like out of the blue he just said ‘hey, you want the job?’”

As spontaneous as it may seem, the appointment had actually been on Yallop’s mind.

“If it’s a coach or even a member of staff, I try to make sure that we are going to get on, not just on our philosophy on the game but socially and actively, because you’ve got to spend a lot of time with each other,” Yallop says. “Rick was one of those guys that I really enjoyed his company the whole time I was with him.”

Of course, ‘enjoyed his company’ is open to interpretation.

“Frank needed a drinking partner for the golf course, so you put those two together and you’ve got the perfect assistant in Rick,” Peter Ramage, who played under and later coached alongside Schantz in Phoenix, says jokingly.

Leaving everything behind in southern Arizona wasn’t easy for Schantz, and his wife proved hesitant at first.

“She was scared,” Schantz says. “She was teaching at the time. I was working at FC Tucson. Life was OK, but I remember my father-in-law saying ‘if you get it, you’ve got to go for it and don’t look back.’

“Frank called me and he talked to Bobby [Dulle, Rising’s general manager] and this was what they could offer for the job, and it was a little more than my expectation at the time, and I said ‘let’s go, let’s do this’; and I think it was a couple weeks later I was commuting from Tucson to Phoenix.”

That commute saw him have to sell off his “really cool” off-road jeep in exchange for a more economical Honda Civic, but it wasn’t the smoothest of transitions into the new job.

“He actually missed the first week of training, which we never let him live down because he had something to do with his back,” Ramage points out.

That story elicits a laugh from his former boss, too.

“I thought this is a good start,” Yallop chuckles. “You’re supposed to help me out and I’m doing everything around this place.”

Regardless of the early setback, Schantz soon settled into his new role of organizing training sessions throughout the week, despite some of the players being slightly more prestigious than he had been used to coaching in Tucson.

“With all due respect, we didn’t know who Rick was,” Ramage says. “We’ve got egos as all professional footballers do, especially ones that come from across the water, but I think he understood what we were looking for, how we trained, how we wanted to train, how we wanted to conduct ourselves on and off the field. He was really receptive to us, and as soon as we met him, we had this instant kind of rapport and relationship that’s still going to this day.”

Schantz could have settled into a rhythm as just a part of the coaching staff at Rising, but fate had other plans for him.

“I came in one morning, and Frank is sat down with Cory [Robertson], and he said ‘I’m sorry to do this’ and I completely understood.” Schantz says. “I was really happy that Frank was making that decision because he was making it for the right reasons, to go and be with family, but I thought I was going to have to go home and tell my wife that I just moved you up to Phoenix and now I don’t have a job.”

That wasn’t the case, though. The club’s ownership remained insistent that the staff would remain on the books, and the former Tucson boss was put in charge as the job search started.

Within just a few months, Schantz had gone from being in charge of college-age players to globally recognized names.

“Shaun Wright-Phillips, Jordan Stewart, Omar Bravo,” Schantz laughs. “I was coaching the Galacticos in my mind.”

That brought him to his first-ever professional game as a head coach. Facing Reno 1868, an expansion club that had yet to win a game at that stage, Schantz watched his team concede goal after goal on home soil. They ultimately fell to a 4-0 loss.

“As senior players, we didn’t do ourselves any justice that week either in terms of trying to get the guys around to play,” Ramage says. “We didn’t do our jobs. We let ourselves down. We let the team down. We let Rick down, more importantly. He needed us probably more than we needed him.”

Schantz was approached by Wright-Phillips after the match, who told him that he didn’t deserve that performance from the boys. In the next game, it was the winger who scored the winning goal, giving a nod to his interim boss in his celebration.

That marked the end of Schantz’s spell in charge as shortly after, Patrice Carteron arrived. The Frenchman had previously led Dijon to the French top tier and Mali to a bronze medal at the Africa Cup of Nations. He’d also coached future Rising winger and back-to-back MVP Solomon Asante while at TP Mazembe.

Carteron brought technical knowledge to the club, and one of his lasting impacts on Schantz was to show him the bigger picture of planning how to train a team through the season. That wasn’t all he taught him, though.

“I will never forget the one thing he said to me is ‘Rick, you have a lot of charisma. You have to use the charisma when you coach. You can’t be shy, you can’t be afraid,’” Schantz recalls. “I admit that it was sometimes intimidating when you’ve got Didier Drogba standing on the field and you’re saying ‘Didier, I need you to do this. I need you to do that.’ Who was I to tell Didier Drogba how to play soccer?”

Ultimately, Carteron would leave during the following season for pastures new, with Egyptian super club Al Ahly calling. Schantz was once again called by the club owners to serve as the interim boss, but this time was different. In 2017, Schantz had felt unprepared at the reins, even if Yallop had believed in his ability to do so. By 2018, he was ready to show what he could do.

“For me, I knew this was my opportunity,” Schantz says. “It was go-time. I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from getting this job.”

Schantz led a coaching staff featuring Blair Gavin, a former Rising midfielder with experience at MLS level, and Cory Robertson, the side’s longtime goalkeeping coach from way back in its days as Arizona United. A few months into the role, Schantz coaxed Ramage into returning to the desert after a spell at Newcastle United’s academy.

As a group, the coaching staff was tight-knit and has no shortage of stories about their exploits on away trips. Behind closed doors, though, their stubbornness could come out, particularly as Ramage was never one to bite his tongue.

“Oftentimes, he’d storm out of the office and slam his door and go into his room and sulk,” Ramage said. “There’d be times where I’d storm out of the office, go somewhere else and sulk, but when we both cooled down, we’d both sit down and be able to talk it out.”

Despite a hiccup away to Las Vegas in the run-up to the 2018 playoffs, Schantz’s second interim period was a success as he guided the team to its first Western Conference title and a shot at lifting the USL Cup against Louisville City.

It was to be Didier Drogba’s final game, with a storyline of one last triumph just begging to be played out. Sport has a funny habit of not turning out that way, though, and the Kentucky side took a 1-0 win.

“I haven’t watched the game again, I’ll be honest,” Schantz says. “I think we made all the right choices. We did enough to create goal scoring opportunities. Lady luck wasn’t on our side, and we played a very, very good team, and a very experienced team.”

The playoff run was enough to secure him the permanent job, and with it the chance to mold the team into his own. That proved a harder job than it looks, and with just two wins in the first nine games of the season, the previous years’ successes had been forgotten and the critics were loud with their opinions.

“It wasn’t as hard for me as it was for my wife and my daughter, because they were seeing some of the comments,” Schantz says. “But what I learned then, and what I told my family was ‘listen, if people weren’t doing that, I would be concerned for the club because that means the club doesn’t have fans or followers that care.’ They want to the club to be successful.”

The comments soon stopped when the team went on a record-breaking 20-game win streak shortly afterwards. Little did he know at the time what would come around the corner the following season.

***

“The players were disappointed because we weren’t playing well, so they were kind of going through that,” Schantz recalls. “Some of the players were trying to, I think, understand what happened. Did Junior [Flemmings] say anything? What did he say? Many of them didn’t know. For me it was, writing down as many facts as I possibly could.”

It was September 30, 2020, and Phoenix Rising’s match against San Diego Loyal had ended just after the half-time break. On the field, Flemmings had used a homophobic slur right next to openly gay Loyal player Collin Martin. After Martin was given his marching orders by the referee, tensions came to a boiling point, capped off by a dramatic video of a confrontation between Schantz and San Diego coach Landon Donavan where the former seemed more interested in why the latter hadn’t been sent off as well.

“On the bus, I don’t think it took long for the ESPN video to get sent to me and the reaction from the community at-large, and how they responded to the things that I said, and supporting that type of behavior,” Schantz says. “It was immediate.”

The video soon went viral, and the incident – which ultimately ended with the match being abandoned after Loyal players left the field at the start of the second half – made headlines across the world.

“We have Sky Sports in the office on the TVs, and it was all broadcasted,” Ramage, who had by then returned to Newcastle, explains. “The incident was broadcasted; it wasn’t just like a side note. It was big news over here.”

As Schantz scrambled to defend himself that evening and over the following days, the calls for his head had already begun online.

“I got a phone call, I want to say that Thursday night after we got back, and with all the owners on the phone, and that’s the first time it kind of hit me that there’s a chance that my coaching career could end,” Schantz says. “They started speaking and they talked about the idea of putting me on administrative leave, which immediately made me feel that these owners and this ownership group was different.

“Rather than take the easy way out and just fire me, because that’s what people wanted, they were going to take the hard way, and to educate, and to learn, and to give me time to reflect on what had happened and become a better person and help the club.”

Schantz was placed on administrative leave, with Gavin taking over head coaching duties. Instead of focusing on the field, he was left to focus on speaking to the community his words had dismissed. He spoke with fans who had been personally affected by the incident. He sat down with employees of sponsors who recounted their experiences of discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. He did his own research, and then as one of his final acts before reinstatement, took part in an interview with Outsports founder Cyd Ziegler.

“He faced the consequences of it, quite rightly so, but he’s grown from it. He’s learned from it,” Ramage says. “Hopefully it’ll make him not only a better manager but a better person in the long run.”

Ahead of the Western Conference final, Schantz was reinstated. Now, he’s putting that learning into practice, such as an emphasis on inclusion in his presentations to players.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Schantz says. “It’s not something I can say I’ve done in six weeks, eight weeks or three months. It’s something that doesn’t go away, and treating the LGBTQ community with acceptance and educating my environment to behave and act that way has, I think, been the most important part.”

***

Now Schantz is preparing to face the 2021 playoffs with a new coaching staff surrounding him. He’s looking to do something his side has never done before: finally capture a league championship.

Oh, and he’s doing it in a new stadium too.

“Rumor has it Rick can literally open his doors to his back garden and he can walk out and he’s on his training field,” Ramage says. “Him and Bobby have obviously had that in the plans somewhere down the line.”

The circumstances – with changes to the coaching staff, playing facilities and of course also to the playing staff – might have sounded a challenge at the start of the year, but Schantz’s path to where he is now has been one throughout.

“For guys like Rick and I, we never had that guy in MLS that was going to hold the door open for you and help you,” college teammate Darren Sawatzky says. “If something happened in one job, it was going to be harder to get another job. When it comes to Rick, he was grinding in youth soccer in Arizona, and he kind of had to create his own path.

“In a way, I’d say he’s a bit of a rebel. He did it in a different way. Nobody really opened that door for him in a way that Clive might have been able to because he wasn’t around. But I will say, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone that works harder.”

Schantz has spoken before about his desire to attain the highest accolades in the game, and those who have worked with him before think he has what it takes to move up the ranks.

“He can go all the way to the top,” Yallop says. “I don’t see why not. MLS, I would think, would be in Rick’s thoughts. He’s seen the guys that coach in MLS and they’re just normal, hard-working, strong character coaches, and he’s the same. We all have to have a little talent along the way to go along with those traits, but Rick has all the traits and all the attributes right now to be a very good head coach in MLS.”

For now, though, Schantz’s focus is on winning a league title for his club, and continuing Rising’s growth. His background in the youth game also keeps him close to one of the club’s newer ventures: the development of an academy.

“It’s annoying, to be honest, to listen to people talk about development and winning as separate things,” Sawatzky says. “I would argue that Rick is one of the coaches in this country that puts both of those at the forefront and puts them together.

“Not only has he developed players that have moved on to MLS and higher levels, he’s also won in the process because those things are not mutually exclusive. Winning and player development are not two different things. You need to learn and teach players that are going to be pro players how to win. It’s a huge piece and Rick’s been good at that.”

Development of the game itself in the desert is something that Schantz said he would ultimately like to be remembered for after his career comes to an end.

“I hope that maybe it might be that people say that I was one of the people on the forefront of bringing pro soccer to the state of Arizona,” Schantz says.

For some, of course, he’s already there.

“I think Rick has been a key actor in bringing the game in Arizona to where it is,” FC Tucson co-founder Greg Foster says. “I also think Rick would be the first to tell you that he was part of a community. That his youth coaches helped inspire him to do what he’s doing now, and almost certain that he would say to you that he hopes he’s inspiring the next generation of players to come and pick up that torch and continue to grow the game in Arizona.”

“It’s obvious he’s had a profound effect,” Sawatzky notes. “Frank Yallop has been a legend in MLS, and Patrice was there and Rick learned from him, but neither one of those guys won in Arizona the way Rick has.”

Perhaps it’s his former boss, who gave him his first chance at coaching at the professional level, who sums it up best.

“If you think of anyone other than Rick in the same sentence of putting Arizona pro soccer on the map… Rick’s your guy,” Yallop remarks.

In his fifth decade after leaving Roll and Tacna behind, Schantz continues to be surrounded with growth in the desert.

Only now, it isn’t crops. It’s a sport.

This is the third of a three-part series on Phoenix Rising coach Rick Schantz.

You can read Part I, focusing on Schantz’s youth and college years, here.

Part II, focusing on Schantz’s return to Tucson, can be read here.