It was a simple question from Hartford Athletic owner Bruce Mandell, but it was music to the ears of his soon-to-be Chief Executive Officer Nick Sakiewicz.

“It was our first lunch before I came up here to look for places to live in August, maybe,” said Sakiewicz this week. “Bruce just happened to say, ‘Hey, do you happen to know Brendan Burke?’”

Did he ever.

On Tuesday lunchtime, Burke was introduced as Hartford’s new Head Coach and General Manager, bringing the Massachusetts native back to the northeast to work alongside one of his longtime allies and supporters at the executive level.

It’s been more than a decade since the paths of Burke and Sakiewicz first crossed. In 2007, Sakiewicz became a co-founder and CEO at the nascent Philadelphia Union. A year later, Burke took his first head coaching position with Reading United AC in USL League Two, bringing him into Sakiewicz’s orbit.

Since then, the two have remained close, so much so that when his lunch with Mandell ended, the first thing Sakiewicz did was give Burke a call.

Burke was immediately receptive.

“I had no idea that he wanted to get back home,” said Sakiewicz. “It all worked really well. We worked together very closely in Philadelphia. Brendan was feeding us a lot of young players from [Reading United], and then when I bought Bethlehem Steel, and we set that team up, I appointed Brendan as the Head Coach. The rest is history.”

This year, Burke was part of another major turnaround after being recruited as Houston Dynamo FC Head Coach Ben Olsen’s first assistant. With a new-look lineup and dynamic style of play that was reminiscent of Burke’s squads in Colorado Springs, the Dynamo won the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup for the first time since 2018, and not only reached the MLS Cup Playoffs for the first time since 2017 but advanced to the Western Conference Final against Los Angeles FC.

But the appeal of the chance to return home with an ambitious – but so-far underachieving – club proved enough to peel Burke away from a job he was enjoying greatly.

“I was enjoying the hell out of life, training the [Dynamo] First Team every day and going into big environments with those guys every weekend. But this is everything for me,” said Burke. “My family and my wife’s family – aunts, uncles, cousins, you name it – everyone’s in this region. So, this is a place I’ve always wanted to work. With Nick here, I knew that things were going to turn, and turn quickly, and that he would work with some urgency that this club, quite frankly, needed for a long time.”

Hartford Athletic has never been shy when it comes to making big swings. After hiring former Dynamo and United States U-20s Head Coach – and U.S. Soccer legend – Tab Ramos late in the 2022 season, the team went out and added notable on-field pieces in the offseason. Two of the new arrivals were winger Antoine Hoppenot, who was coming off winning the USL Championship’s Golden Playmaker award after leading the league in assists with Detroit City FC, while forward Elvis Amoh had put together consecutive seasons with double-digit goals and seemed primed for more.

Neither made a major dent for the Athletic, however, as the side was plagued by defensive challenges and couldn’t find its range in attack consistently. Amoh’s minutes/goal rate sagged to a goal every 381 minutes – easily the lowest single-season mark of his career – while Hoppenot had only six goal contributions, one-third of his 2022 total, as both Ramos and Omid Namazi – who stepped into the Head Coach role after Ramos’ departure in June – were unable to find a clear identity for the side.

From Sakiewicz’s perspective, the challenge for Hartford has been an inconsistency in the on-field vision. With six Head Coaches in the club’s first five years – including Ray Reid’s stint as interim in 2022 before Ramos’ appointment – a long-term vision for the club’s culture and on-field style has failed to materialize.

Both also have the support of Mandell and Hartford’s ownership group, with between 16 to 20 new players set to arrive at Trinity Health Stadium this offseason. Burke gives major credit the Dynamo’s turnaround to owner Ted Segal’s investment not only on the field in acquisitions like Mexican star Hector Herrera and Panamanian international Coco Carrasquilla, but also into the staff that allowed the coaches to dig into granular details from games and training sessions and provide the players what they needed to succeed on the field.

Now, as he did in Colorado Springs, Burke’s aim is to establish the Athletic as a club that achieves both on-field success and provides opportunity to push players to higher levels in their careers.

“We want to be an athletic group,” said Burke. “We want to be an aesthetically pleasing group. We’re trying to accomplish many things all at once because we don’t just intend to win here. We intend to be a place that other clubs – both in MLS, but also globally – look to when they want to find the next best player. … We’ve already signed a few under-20 players and international players that I think are going to be big hits.”

Of course, there’s a lot of work ahead to get where Hartford wants to be. For inspiration, the Athletic might look at the Charleston Battery’s 2023 campaign. Just over a year ago, the Charleston Battery appointed Ben Pirmann as their new Head Coach, joining club President Lee Cohen, who had joined the club earlier in the year. The Battery’s turnaround from the worst season in the club’s lengthy history in 2022 to winning the Championship’s Eastern Conference this year before narrowly falling in a penalty shootout in the USL Championship Final showed how quickly things can change.

“I’ve known Lee for many years, because I’m a part of the Tampa Bay Rowdies alumni group,” said Sakiewicz, who was a goalkeeper for the Rowdies in 1990 before beginning his executive pathway.

“I saw him at the Board of Governors meeting on Friday, and we were talking exactly about this subject, about the relationship between CEO and Head Coach being important and then the importance of bringing people in. It’s not a secret why they did so well, and in a league like this … you’re able to shift the roster. We’ve signed 15 players in the last 30 days, so you can really transform a roster pretty quickly if you get the right players and have the right people managing them.”

One consistent bright spot the Athletic over the club’s first five years? Its fanbase. Despite many more downs than ups, the support at Trinity Health Stadium has barely wavered. The club’s final game of the 2023 campaign against FC Tulsa – with the playoffs an afterthought –was sold out long before the gates opened.

Sakiewicz’s aim is to eventually expand capacity at the venue from its current 5,500 capacity, allowing that atmosphere to grow. This year, though, Burke wants to give the fans that have stuck beside the club the on-field product they have been clamoring for.

“At a bare minimum [the goal is to be] in the playoffs,” said Burke. “[The fans] deserve a team that has hope in November. I said to someone a few weeks ago, if you’re playing soccer in late November and December, you’re doing your job right. And if you’re not, then you need to reevaluate your process and how you’re doing things.

“I know it doesn't happen for everyone every year – there can be injuries, we don't want to overpromise. But what I can promise is that anyone I bring through this door is going to work their socks off and do their best to deliver to a fan base – like Nick said – that’s just quite frankly incredible. We want to give them exactly what they’ve paid for, what they’ve showed up for, what they’ve supported over the last couple of years.

“It’s long overdue.”