El Paso, Texas — The USL Championship released the 2022 season schedules for all of its teams on Wednesday. This came approximately a week after releasing the home openers for each of its 27 teams.
At first glance, the 2022 schedule has a lot of elements that will stand out to El Paso Locomotive FC fans. It has a quick start to the season with important games against important rivals, away games that will give El Paso plenty of travel miles, and home games against teams that will be visiting the Borderland for the very first time.
Let’s break it down with a little bit more detail…
The Basics
The Locomotive's 34-match regular season schedule will consist of 17 home and 17 away matches over the course of eight months starting in March and wrapping up in October.
The Locomotive are in the Western Conference of the USL Championship, so they will play each team from that conference twice — one match at home and one on the road — with the exception of the Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC, who they'll play three times: twice in El Paso and once in the state of Colorado.
As for the remainder of matches, they will square off against eight opponents from the Eastern Conference. Five of those matches will be on the road (at Loudoun, at Pittsburgh, at Detroit City, at Atlanta, at Tampa) while the remaining three matches will be at home (hosting Hartford, Red Bulls II, and Louisville).
In May, Locomotive will play a total of six matches (three at home and three on road) with a couple of mid-week matches (on Wednesdays).
For seven out of the eight months of the regular season, the Locos will play either two or three matches at home with the exception of September, where they will only play one match in downtown El Paso. Offsetting this, they will finish the regular season in October with a pair of home games and none on the road.
You can’t forget about those important Copa Tejas matchups. The first one for El Paso will be on the road in San Antonio in mid-April, while the first home match will also be against San Antonio FC but not until late July.
What stands out
The home opener for the Locos immediately stands out. El Paso will face its biggest rival, New Mexico United, in its first home game of the season. This will be after the Locomotive kick off their season on the west coast with a road match at Sacramento.
A must-win match, due to the nature of the rivalry between these two clubs, in only the second game of the season will provide an electric atmosphere at Southwest University Park for the Locos home opener.
All of the inter-conference matches will be interesting as the Locos have never faced any of these teams. Yet the ones that stand out the most will take place in the second half of the season when they face the two of the most successful teams in the history of the USL-Championship. El Paso will face Louisville City in El Paso and the Tampa Bay Rowdies on the road.
The 2022 season will allow for the Locos to once again go against important teams in their own conference. At the top of this list has to be the Phoenix Rising.
The team from the Valley of the Sun has been a powerhouse in the Western Conference for the three years that the Locos have been in existence. These two clubs having a home and home regular season series only adds to the quality of the league’s regular season. In addition, the geographical proximity between both clubs allows for fans to travel.
Other conference games that will be good include the away match in the Land of Enchantment against New Mexico United on Labor Day Weekend to begin the final stretch run of the regular season. This will undoubtedly be one of the most important matches of the season.
Finally, the three-game series against the Switchbacks is guaranteed to be entertaining and hard-fought. The matches between these two teams are always memorable.
What Locomotive GM Andrew Forrest has to say
Locomotive general manager of business operations Andrew Forrest called this “the best schedule we’ve ever had."
He said the club is looking forward to a playing a more diverse group of teams this season.
"Coming off last year, where we played the same teams a lot, over and over, much more regionalized." he said. "(This year), we’re playing a bunch of teams we’ve never seen and teams like Phoenix that we haven’t seen in a long time.”
Forrest made reference to the fact that the Locomotive will have 12 home matches on a Saturday, a definite positive for Locomotive fans.
“For a shared facility [Locomotive shares Southwest University Park with Triple A baseball team El Paso Chihuahuas], I don’t think we could have asked for much more," he said. "I think we got a really good schedule. It may not be perfect and it never will be, but we’re quite excited about it. One thing to keep in mind is that we have a lot less compression, two more games were added this season but more weeks to play them in.”
Final thoughts on the schedule
It’s good to be back to the traditional regular season schedule, where a majority of the teams play each other in a home and home series after this kind of format was suspended the last two seasons due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This allows for the most fair type of competition and is a true barometer as to how to judge the teams that make the playoffs.
I feel the 2022 schedule is balanced and fair for El Paso. It gets off to a fast start and doesn’t slow down. It will be interesting to see how the season develops and how the Locos will deal with a couple of back-to-back road game stretches, especially in September when they will travel literally from coast to coast to face LA Galaxy II and then Tampa Bay. In the middle of the summer, the Locomotive will also travel to Phoenix and then Detroit in back-to-back weeks.
With all that being said, March simply can’t get here soon enough.
