Last November, the Portland Hearts of Pine, Maine’s first and only professional soccer team, hadn’t yet played their first game. They hadn’t even officially signed a single player.
But that didn’t stop more than a thousand fans—1,500, to be exact—from filling the State Theatre in Portland on Nov. 21, 2024, to witness the team’s inaugural jersey reveal.
For Kevin Schohl, president and chief business officer of Hearts of Pine and BC ’06, that kind of energy and passion is exactly what led him to leave a high-paying job at DraftKings to join the new soccer club in April 2024.
“Leading a small business, transforming a community, and bringing that excitement of a new soccer club to town was so much more interesting to me than moving up the corporate ladder somewhere,” Schohl said.
Portland Hearts of Pine are wrapping up their inaugural season as an expansion team in USL League One, a minor soccer league in the third tier of American soccer.
Their first season has proved a successful one. With a quarterfinal playoff win on Nov. 1, Portland became only the second USL League One expansion team to win its debut playoff match.
As president and chief business officer of the club, Schohl is responsible for the club’s short and long-term business operations—a wide-reaching role that covers marketing, branding, ticket sales, corporate partnerships, stadium and game-day operations, and merchandising.
“I wear a lot of hats, trying to make sure that we’re generating revenue and that we’re number one in every category on the revenue side in our league,” Schohl said. “I also need to make sure I’m paying attention to the operational side and keeping costs as low as we can, keeping the employees happy, and making sure that the financial and human resources pieces are taken care of too.”
Schohl, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, brings extensive business knowledge and experience to his new role.
After graduating from Boston College’s Carroll School of Management in 2006, Schohl spent three years in consulting at Bain & Company before working for two years in private equity.
While working in private equity, Schohl said he realized he wanted to pivot into sports business.
“I was able to realize that I want to apply my skills in sports business,” Schohl said. “And so from there on I was really very focused on, ‘Hey, I don’t want to just use this business degree generically. I want to be able to find a way to make an impact in sports, because that’s something I’m most excited about.’”
Schohl then spent two years at Harvard Business School. During this time, he also worked on a variety of sports-related projects and spent a summer working for Major League Baseball.
After graduating with his MBA in 2013, Schohl dove into sports business full time in 2014, moving to Atlanta to work as director of analytics and strategic initiatives for Arthur Blank Sports and Entertainment, a company best known as the owner of the Atlanta Falcons.
Schohl’s role at AMB Sports and Entertainment wasn’t limited to running the Falcons, nor the building of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium where they play—he also helped launch Atlanta United—Atlanta’s first Major League Soccer team.
“Atlanta had had two failed NHL teams, and there just was a lot of talk that it wasn’t going to be a good soccer market,” Schohl said.
But according to Schohl, by focusing on authenticity and building community, Atlanta United’s launch proved successful.
“The club won a championship in its second year,” Schohl said. “And, so, there was just this amazing experience where it sort of took over the excitement of the city. And 70,000 people [were] watching soccer in Mercedes-Benz stadium.”
After four years in Atlanta, Schohl returned to the Boston area in 2018 to join DraftKings, where he worked his way up to become a vice president.
After more than five years with the sports betting platform, Schohl decided to take a chance and move more than a hundred miles north to Portland, Maine.
“Even as exciting as other things as I’ve done have been, and I enjoy being in high-growth businesses like DraftKings has been to me, I love the passion that sports can bring to a community,” Schohl said.
Gabe Hoffman-Johnson, founder and chief community officer of Portland Hearts of Pine, and Jonathan Culley, founding partner and board member at Hearts of Pine, offered Schohl the chance to get back to what he loved.
“Being able to relive a little bit of the magic from Atlanta United, and to be a part of that in a new place—and to be able to put more of my stamp on it—was great,” Schohl said.
For Culley, Schohl was the right man for the job.
“We needed a really strong operating executive, and we found that in Kevin, and from the minute I met Kevin I was confident that he was the right choice,” Culley said.
Hoffman-Johnson echoed Culley’s sentiments.
“I’m a big believer in people, especially leadership and the right people with the right experience,” Hoffman-Johnson said. “I think you can look at his resume and some of the stuff that he’s done—whether at Bain or with Arthur Blank or at DraftKing— and he’s perhaps overqualified to be running your third division pro soccer club.”
According to Schohl, his experience in helping to launch Atlanta United translated especially well to his role in Portland.
“Even though the size of the city is so much smaller than Atlanta and the stadium only fits 6,000 people instead of 70,000 people, the excitement and the passion and the camaraderie, the community that’s built here is so similar,” Schohl said. “Both places have felt like a magical experience to be part of a launch where all of these factors combined together and it’s the hottest ticket in town.”
Yet, Schohl also acknowledges the differences that managing a smaller business in a smaller market entails.
“When you’re in a smaller market, and when you’re in a smaller league, you don’t have the benefit of all the big TV money that the major leagues have, and so you have to be scrappy,” Schohl said.
Schohl credits some of this scrappiness to one of his leadership positions at Boston College: general manager of The Heights.
“It was very entrepreneurial environment to be able to start a brand new [soccer] club, and the scrappiness, I think, was very similar to, you know, being at The Heights and having to knock on doors to find new advertising revenue, or all the other challenges that go with a small business,” Schohl said.
Schohl possesses a unique set of abilities that lend themselves to this kind of entrepreneurial environment, according to Hoffman-Johnson.
“He’s able to—at the same time—think macro and big picture, but also dive very, very deeply into nitty-gritty details, which is a super important piece of running a lower-division club,” Hoffman-Johnson said.
Culley noted that Schohl and Hoffman-Johnson have a rare partnership that helps to set the club up for success.
“He’s very different than Gabe, and they’ve got this really, really special partnership,” Culley said. “[Kevin] was the person who was going to make sure that everything happened the way it needed to happen.”
So far, the partnership—along with the hard work of Schohl, Hoffman-Johnson, and their colleagues—appears to have paid off.
According to Schohl, Portland has more season ticket holders than any other team in the league, the team’s inaugural season has been completely sold out, and there’s a 98 percent renewal rate of season ticket members into the club’s second year. Portland is also selling more merchandise than any team in USL League One history, Schohl added.
But beyond the numbers, Portland Hearts of Pine also aims to support the local Maine community through economic, cultural, and community development across the city and state, according to the club’s website.
“Aside from the economic advantage of selling out a stadium and and bringing extra people to town and giving people pride of being a Mainer, I think the community impact programming that we’re doing is giving people a new way to see soccer as a transformative way for people from different cultures to come together,” Schohl said.
The love of Hearts of Pine for the Maine community is reciprocated. Schohl said seeing thousands of fans show up for each game—even in the cold and rain—demonstrates the love and support they have for the team. This love and support also resulted in Portland breaking the USL League One attendance record with a crowd of 6,440 in October.
Maine Governor Janet Mills, U.S. Senator Angus King, and actor and Maine native Patrick Dempsey have all made appearances at games this season, Schohl added.
“It’s just a fun atmosphere where there’s a soccer game going on which people are excited about, but it’s also this festival and celebration of Maine and a pride of the whole state to give something for people to rally around that’s positive and exciting,” Schohl said.
Moving forward, the club has a variety of goals, according to Schohl—first and foremost to win a league championship, which is a goal very much in sight after the club’s recent quarterfinal playoff win.
For Schohl, dreaming big isn’t just for the success of the team—it’s also for the success of the community that has shown so much support for the Hearts of Pine.
“If we can be a cultural force for change here in Maine and be a brand that, you know, kind of punches above our weight class, so to speak, within soccer—all of those things can be beneficial to Portland and to Maine,” Schohl said.
