Open Cup Digest #9
The US Open Cup is a strange competition to cover. In the next few weeks, the two Major League Soccer teams from the New York City metro area are competing in Round One of the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs at the same time that the qualifying tournament for the 2025 Lamar Hunt is underway. Right now, New York City FC and New York Red Bulls are casting a shadow over the amateur teams battling one another for the chance to play against professional sides in the US Open Cup next spring.
Enter Diego Hurtado, a 31-year-old former professional with a decade of playing experience under his belt. The defender finds himself on the roster of Zum Schneider FC 03, an amateur unit founded by a soon-to-reopen German restaurant that plays in the Eastern Premier Soccer League.
An aging player extending his career in a lower league: So far, this all sounds pretty standard. But what sets Hurtado apart is his day job. In 2019 Hurtado founded Diaza Football, a sports apparel company based in New York City that produces kits and other clothing — and that is fast becoming the supplier of choice for teams looking to get away from the corporate giants that dominate the industry.
Recently, the Diaza name might have crossed the paths of New Yorkers who follow Brooklyn Football Club, the new professional team currently competing in the USL Super League with a soon-to-debut second-division men’s team coming to the USL Championship. Diaza also supplies teams like Manhattan Celtic FC, a Cosmopolitan League side that call Randalls Island home, and Campobasso FC of Italy’s Serie C. According to Hurtado, they now outfit hundreds of clubs at the professional, amateur, and youth level, with more on the way.
But Hurtado is currently focused on more important things than expanding his clothing company, namely getting ready for the game coming up this Sunday, when Zum host multi-time national champion Lansdowne Yonkers FC on Roosevelt Island. Zum are just two wins away from a US Open Cup berth, and Hurtado is out to help the team qualify for the first time.
Andrew Leigh
Las Vegas to Roosevelt Island
Hurtado’s career has been anything but easy to follow, which is something plenty of non-professional players can find relatable. League to league, team to team, the defender has had sprints with the Las Vegas Lights in the USL Championship (working under former US Men’s National team player Eric Wynalda), to high-level amateur play in Milwaukee, to the sunny shores of Florida.
“Back in the day, the USL (and) NISA, it was very unstable. It's not like it is today,” Hurtado explained in an interview with Hudson River Blue. “I think USL League One wasn't even around and it was very unstable. So it was a league where they (would) sign you for three months, six months, 10 months, you know. It wasn't even a year.”
He isn’t new to New York soccer, having previously played with the New York Cosmos organization in 2017, enjoying a brief stint with New Amsterdam FC in the National Independent Soccer Association, and playing with New Jersey Teamsterz FC among others.
As recently as two years ago, Hurtado was still trying to balance his current career with Diaza and playing soccer. Time wore on, age caught up, and priorities changed. Hurtado hung up his boots, but he never lost the itch. While living in Queens, he’d started to hear about Zum Schneider more and more.
“I always hear about Zum, I always heard about them and how they were very competitive in the EPSL,” Hurtado said, further explaining his decision to attend a team practice without knowing a single person there but falling for the club’s ethos. “Some of these guys are very good! What I like most about it, they're very united, they stick to each other.”
Head coach Alexander Berscheid isn’t shy to say he works his players hard. Despite this being below the sanctioned professional divisions of US Soccer, his group takes training and playing just as seriously as a professional unit.
“The EPSL and these amateur teams getting into the US Open Cup are right on the cusp. If we had just a little bit more money for training facilities and for maintaining the players and making sure that they have time to come to training, the talent is there,” the coach said following his team’s win over Central Park Rangers earlier this month in qualifying. “It's a margin right there and I think we fill that void, that spot, the EPSL is that.”
As for the Open Cup, Hurtado is no stranger to that either. He previously played with Miami United FC in 2015, scoring in the first round and playing professional side Charleston Battery. Playing in the tournament again, trying to reach the competition proper for the first time in a decade, Hurtado had doubts about himself playing in such a highly competitive environment. But a talk with coach Berscheid helped him realize he could still be an asset, especially alongside a team that works with so many youth players.
“Kaiser (Coach Berscheid) is always trying to find these players that are very good at and they can compete, right?... I like to push people to the limits (on the field),” Hurtado said. “(The whole team) has so much potential.”
It's a point the coach reiterated earlier this month, explaining his team’s ethos in bringing in younger talent. Including former FC Lokomotyv Kyiv and New York City FC academy player Artur Shamrov, who scored earlier this month in qualifying.
“I love new young talent. That's part of what we do,” said Berscheid. “We develop players, we work with young players and they do bring a certain energy and that definitely showed.”
Dreams, designs, Diaza
Currently, Hurtado isn’t best known for his on-field career. Instead, it’s for the sports apparel company Diaza, whose name comes an indigenous Colombian word for "resilient" and "right mentality" according to company literature. Indeed, Diaza is steadily increasing its footprint from amateur leagues into the professional game. According to Hurtado, the growth has been, at times, overwhelming — but in the best way. Considering the company’s beginnings, that isn’t a surprise.
A simple order issue: That’s all it took to launch the company. Hurtado, playing in Florida for leagues that pay cash upfront per game, found out that his team’s kit order from Colombia wasn’t coming through. The team asked Diego if he had any connections in the country to help get it fulfilled. That was in December 2018.
“I don't know anybody but I know my family has been in the garment industry for decades,” Hurtado said with a laugh on the phone. “So let me see if they wanna do it. So we make the uniforms, we make everything and then it was a success.”
It all came together thanks to a self-education in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for the design, and a small family-run factory for the production. The team got their kits and Diego had the beginnings of a business.
It wasn’t until mid-2021 and a move to New York City that things really began to expand. After bouncing between a few teams, Hurtado began playing with New York Contour in the United Premier Soccer League. The club from Garden City dominated the national amateur league, went undefeated, and eventually won the 2021 Spring National Championship in Southern California.
While on that run, Hurtado worked with the team to change their kit production from the Italian company Macron to Diaza.
“I put the brand (on) New York Contour and when we won the national title, everybody started seeing Diaza, especially the New York teams.”
Today, when you go to Diaza’s website and explore the catalog, it features almost ten teams from the New York City area including Brooklyn FC of the USL Championship, and Manhattan Celtic FC and Manhattan Kickers FC of the Cosmopolitan League.
Andrew Leigh
Hurtado prefers that potential clients first see the uniforms in person. With more and more teams wearing their gear, it’s easier for prospective buyers to attend lower-division matches and find out why athletes like to play in Diaza. His website has catalogs and price estimates, just like any other major kit company. But despite the brand’s increasing name recognition, most clubs find Diaza by word of mouth.
“If (teams) go to the older brands, the bigger brands, they wouldn't care about them” he explained. “They just do the transaction and that's it. For us, it's more like that, it's more like the relationship. How can we build that online store for you guys? How can we do the designs for you?”
It should be pointed out that there isn’t any talk about Zum Schneider changing their traditional supplier, adidas. The Germanic bond to the company is thick, and even Hurtado would never try to force any changes just because he plays there.
Though, as Hurtado and others have noted, there is a chance he could play a match against his biggest client should Zum Schneider win enough games in the Open Cup.
“I had a conversation with one of my friends, one of my coworkers and we brought that up,” He joked. That's (would) be funny because other than the uniform and all that, I'm very close to the owners and everybody at Brooklyn. So that's gonna be very, very funny if we made that happen. But I would love it, man.”
The bierhaus that's a soccer team
For Zum Schneider, an appearance in the US Open Cup could be the biggest game in club history. The organization won the Cosmopolitan Soccer League league cup twice (2015-16, 2018-19), but were never able to win the Division 1 league championship. Since joining the EPSL a few years ago, Zum have been a top team, constantly making the playoffs in the Metropolitan Conference, but never winning the whole thing.
That’s what makes the Open Cup so appealing to a team like Zum.
“We're an amateur club. We're local. I founded the team back then in 2003, this is a big deal for these boys,” Berscheid said. “When you're asking, what do we want to get out of it? It's the fun, it's the experience, it's the history. We definitely have respect for the US Open Cup. It's sort of like our big leagues. If you want, we can measure ourselves against the best teams.”
Last year when they attempted to qualify for the tournament, Zum knocked off four-time Open Cup champions New York Greek Americans in its first game. Despite falling in the next round and failing to make it to the US Open Cup, a bar was set.
This year, the team once again knocked off a fellow EPSL side in its first game in Central Park Rangers. Now, they will host Lansdowne Yonkers FC on Sunday night in the incredibly small, yet inviting confines of Jack McManus Field on Roosevelt Island.
“They play every game as if it is the final. They don't believe that they're the best, they always show it,” Hurtado said. “It's not that they talk, they actually show it in the field and I love it, man. That's one of the things that I always love to play against because it makes me better. I would love to play against these guys because they're tough. They don't care about nothing and they're ruthless and they come to play.”
Sun, October 27 at 7 pm ET, Jack McManus Field on Roosevelt Island
Match Stream available on YouTube
