The choice in front of Ryan Hollingshead wasn’t much of a choice at all.
Everyone—family, friends, random people on the Internet—knew there was only one thing to do. For better or worse, the focus for nearly any young athlete in this country is the dream of one day getting a shot at the pros.
So, after being named the 2012 Pac-12 Player of the Year and Second Team All-American in his senior season, it was only logical that the versatile attacker would try his luck in Major League Soccer.
Going pro actually wasn’t on Hollingshead’s mind, though. He felt a calling more important than any team or sport. For him, it was settled. He was going to help his brother build a church.
“Every single person I talked to was like, ‘Man, you're an idiot,’” Hollingshead told The Striker Texas in January. “I can't tell you how many people told me that I was going to regret my decision. And some people more forcefully than others.
“And I do not regret it at all.”
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Ryan Hollingshead didn’t grow up a Christian. He joined the faith just before heading to UCLA from his hometown of Granite Bay, California, just northeast of Sacramento. One of his older brothers, Scott, also played soccer at UCLA and was steadfast on his next steps after school and sport. He was going to start a church, a process referred to as "planting" within the Protestant faith.
“We would just be talking regularly, kind of dreaming up this idea of starting this church, planting this church and what it would look like,” Ryan said. “[We] didn't know where it would be, didn’t know what time, didn't know what God was doing with it, but just trusted that he was leading, and we're gonna follow it.”
While Ryan continued to excel on the soccer field, he also grew more and more certain that the time was right to lean into his faith. After his standout senior season, Ryan told coaches and MLS front office personnel that they shouldn’t draft him.
The only reason he stayed in the draft at all, he said, was because of a request from legendary MLS coach Sigi Schmid. The former UCLA coach was then working with the Seattle Sounders and while he understood Hollingshead’s choice not to go pro, he said picking up Hollingshead in the supplemental rounds of the draft would give him an option in the future.
Hollingshead skipped the combine, traveling to Haiti to visit an orphanage where his wife had volunteered and staying with her friends there. (Hollingshead says while he would teach kids soccer drills or help out around the facility, he didn’t actually do any mission work during that time, one of two oft-repeated misconceptions about this time in his life; the other is a misunderstanding of the term ‘building a church.’ While Hollingshead does enjoy carpentry, the church met in the back of a grocery store that let it use the space for free before renting its own location.)
The draft began and, sure enough, teams passed on Hollingshead. Then the second round started. Hollingshead’s name went up as the first pick.
FC Dallas didn’t get the message. At least, not totally.
Marco Ferruzzi, now FCD’s Director of Soccer Operations but then an assistant coach who was intimately involved in draft preparation, remembers scouting Hollingshead on West Coast trips. FCD gave Hollingshead high marks, putting him in their top ten picks but wondering why he was skipping the combine. Unlike now with social media, scouting and getting in touch directly with players was much more difficult.
“We had a really good familiarity with Ryan being a top-level player,” Ferruzzi said. “What we didn’t have was the story of, ‘what’s going on? What’s Ryan doing?’”
As Hollingshead continued to slip in the draft, Ferruzzi, head coach Schellas Hyndman and members of the front office decided he was a risk worth taking.
“We were at a pick where we felt like, well, if we can take a gamble and he wants to come back to playing, let’s have that conversation,” Ferruzzi said. “We essentially drafted for the opportunity to speak with Ryan and convince Ryan if this was something we wanted to do. We didn’t feel like in any way it was going to be a wasted pick. We felt like in some ways we were going to steal a player we’d always liked.”
It took a while to have those conversations.
Hollingshead was well off the grid in Haiti until two weeks after the draft. When he finally returned to the U.S. and landed in Florida on a layover, his phone was flooded with “hundreds of missed calls and voicemails.”
“Dallas obviously had called me many times and was like, ‘Hey, give us a call back, we drafted you and can't get ahold of you,’” Hollingshead said. “So, I called them back and I was like, ‘What did you guys do? Like, that was such a bad decision. Did you not know?’”
Despite FCD’s confidence he would be a success in MLS, the midfielder was undeterred. He and his wife felt like the right thing to do was start the church, while everyone else in his inner circle—even his brother leading the church project—had their doubts.
“Ryan and I are just talking,” Scott said. “I'm, in fact, trying to stay away from it and let Ryan really make those decisions so as not to persuade him, but at the end of the day, he was just so convinced this is what (he felt) like he needed to do: Help my brother get this vision established.”
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The two brothers and their wives went to work, drawing out a vision for what they wanted their church to look like and getting the word out to attract potential members for their new congregation in the Sacramento area.
Things were going well, with new recruits ranging from old friends to strangers encountered at the grocery store.
“Ryan was the kind of guy that would serve in any way,” Scott said. “So if there was ministry to be done in the community, outreach to his neighbors, [he would do it].”
When there was no one to lead worship, Ryan put himself in charge of plugging an iPod into the speakers and selecting the right songs.
That leadership “mirrored his soccer career in a sense,” Scott said. “When you see where he's played on the field—what position hasn't Ryan played?
“It speaks to this willingness. Ryan's flexible, he can move and adjust. He's such a team-oriented guy.”
As Hollingshead continued to work on the church plant, then-FC Dallas sporting director Fernando Clavijo kept checking in. As the one-year mark approached, Clavijo gave Hollingshead a polite but firm deadline.
“We really want you here,” Hollingshead remembers Clavijo saying. “We've been trying to follow up with you for this entire year, trying to make it happen, but this is probably the last call. We cannot keep waiting on this. We’re going to start moving forward with other things.”
Ryan persisted in declining the invitation until Scott eventually pulled him aside and let him know he felt he should take the offer.
“I think we were both surprised at how well the church had gotten off the ground, and I think that cushion, or that sense of, ‘Wow, thank you, God for what you're doing,’ opened up the idea of saying, from Ryan's perspective, ‘What was my goal in coming? Was it to be here indefinitely? Or was the sense of burden on my heart really to help get this established?”
Ryan eventually decided it was the latter. In 2014, a year after declining to join FCD through the draft, he moved to North Texas with his wife and worked to get back in shape after a year away from any elite competition. The only soccer he had played was in Sunday men’s leagues after church services. Ryan estimates it took him more than six months of first-team training to really feel like he was back at match fitness. His debut season was the only one in his seven-year career in which he played fewer than 750 minutes.
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FC Dallas fans know the rest of the story. The player who turned down FCD is now the second longest-serving player on the roster.
He has played on the wing, as a fullback and even had a memorable cameo as a goalkeeper in 2016, making a save on Sebastian Giovinco after putting on the gloves in a match when FCD had used its subs and the goalkeeper was injured.
Now 29, Hollingshead looks to be an example for his teammates on and off the field, but he’s hardly winding down. He even wonders if the gap year may have inadvertently extended his prime. While playing mostly at left back last season, Hollingshead continued to earn respect from the fans, with the Dallas Beer Guardians naming him their Player of the Year.
He says he feels better than ever and is putting up his top running splits and weight room numbers, despite his upcoming 30th birthday in April.
“It’s weird because I do feel kind of that pressure of, well, you're supposed to stop getting better and stop getting faster. And I'm like, dude, I'm just getting started!” he said. “I think I've got so much left in the tank. I think I'm hitting a stride right now that I can really cause some damage in this league.”
FC Dallas fans also know Hollingshead as a good guy off the field. He cemented that reputation in the 2017 offseason when he stopped to help a car stuck in a freak ice storm and was involved in an accident that left him with three fractured vertebrae.
But the defender looks to live his life in a way that helps others, not just help out now and then. To that end, he and his wife, Taylor, became certified as parents in the foster care system around a year and a half ago.
“Since my time in Haiti working at the orphanage with my wife and going to visit there, I always had a heart for adoption,” he said. “Adoption is just a sweet picture of what it means to be a Christian — being brought into a family that's not your own and having it be your own.”
In addition to a four-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter, the Hollingsheads are fostering a nearly two-year-old boy, who has lived with them for nearly a year. The couple see a path to him potentially becoming a full-time member of the family through adoption.
When Hollingshead first arrived in Frisco, he said he felt he was still “in church-plant mode” and sometimes made a hard sell for teammates to accept the gospel. While he’s still happy to have those conversations, he said he’s now more conscious about making sure his faith goes beyond words and extends into actions.
“There's days I think I emulate Jesus really well, and then there are days when I'm terrible. There's days that I'm pissed and screaming and yelling, and, you know, cussing at teammates and cussing at myself or whatever,” he said. “In those days, what it looks like to be a Christian is to get the team together after practice and be like, ‘Hey, guys, I'm just so sorry. I repent from that. I apologize for those actions. That's just not OK.’”
Considering his unusual journey to MLS, Hollingshead knows better than to say he knows what the future holds for him. But at the moment, he and his expanding family are in the right place.
“I couldn't have asked for a better place to come play,” he said. “I have enjoyed Dallas so much and have enjoyed just what this town has to offer and the people that it has … This is a really, really special place. And absolutely for us, it's home.”