In Montréal, Kei Kamara greeted Owen Wolff with a pre-match hug. Life comes at you fast.
Wolff, now 17 years old and playing for Austin FC, had a front-row seat for the best season of Kamara’s career. Tyler Wolff, the 19-year-old Atlanta United winger, remembers it fondly too.
Tyler, only 12 years old at the time, and Owen, 10, had full access to Major League Soccer’s top attacking duo in 2015. Kamara scored 22 goals, Ethan Finlay had 12 goals and 13 assists, and the Columbus Crew reached the MLS Cup.
Seven years later, the Wolff brothers are living their dreams. And those dreams include many of the same players who were their heroes back then.
A bear hug from Kamara, competing for playing time with Finlay, and going to work with 2015 Crew teammates Héctor Jiménez and Brad Stuver are just a few of the comforts that have made Owen Wolff feel at home during his breakthrough season in Austin.
“They were always good guys, good family friends,” Tyler Wolff said on Thursday from Atlanta, where Verde will play for the first time on Saturday. “Seeing familiar faces around the league, I think it’s cool for them to see how young we were then and now Owen is playing against them. It’s cool how everything comes back in a circle.”
At the center of that circle is the Wolff brothers’ father, Josh Wolff, who’s now the Austin FC head coach following a 14-year playing career and five seasons as the Crew’s top assistant coach during his oldest boys’ formative years.
On Saturday, Josh Wolff will lead his new club, and his second son, into the region that raised him. The Austin FC coach was born and raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, about 20 miles east of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Tyler and Owen were born a little bit farther out in Snellville, and both played in the Atlanta United Academy while their father was an assistant with the U.S. men’s national team, getting ready for the launch of Austin FC. Their grandparents still live in the area, making this weekend’s match a reunion of sorts.
The weekend will also serve as a send-off for Tyler, who won’t play for Atlanta on Saturday as he prepares to join Belgian second division club SK Beveren for the 2022-23 European club season, on loan from Atlanta. He recently helped the United States qualify for the Olympics for the first time since 2008, and could follow his father's footsteps if he's able to make the team that heads to Paris 2024. Josh Wolff was an Olympian at 2000 Sydney, where the U.S. took fourth place.
“I'm extremely proud of him, I'm proud of all of them,” Josh Wolff said on Thursday. “I’ve got two other kids that I’m equally proud of, these just happen to be the oldest and the first to come through.
“Tyler's earned the right to sign a contract with Atlanta. He got good minutes this year and performed pretty well early on. They're a very offensive team with with high-end quality at the front, so it was always going to be difficult for him to break in consistently.”
Tyler Wolff broke into the Atlanta first team during preseason prior to the 2020 campaign. He went with the team to the MLS Is Back Tournament bubble that summer in Orlando, then made his debut in an empty Mercedes-Benz Stadium in September, toward the end of the COVID-shortened season. He was 17 at the time.
“It was a little different, so I guess it was maybe easier for me to ease into things not having to deal with the crowd,” he said. “Obviously when the fans got back it was a very cool experience to have them back.”
Living on his own since his parents moved to Austin, Tyler has racked up a total of 597 MLS minutes, with seven starts. He recorded his first assist in February against Sporting Kansas City. With his oldest, Josh Wolff has been mostly hands-off, putting the role of “Dad” ahead of “Coach.”
“Everything's pretty smooth,” Tyler said. “There's no trouble about the game. I mean, we'll have moments where we're talking about the game and then there's moments where he can be a dad and talk about life. Being a soccer family definitely helps with the relationship between that me and my dad.”
He added, “(Josh) just gave me tips here and there about what to say, what to do, how to act, but for the most part he kind of let me figure things out on my own. Because I think that's part of being on your own. You’ve got to learn to deal with these things and to grow on your own.”
If things had gone differently, Owen Wolff might have followed his big brother to the Five Stripes. He was in the academy until late 2020, but a stress fracture in his back took him out of training and put him back at home with his parents.
“We came here to get him treated, and then I brought him into preseason to just kind of get him back on the field,” Josh Wolff said in September. “We made the decision to keep him in Texas, and there wasn't an academy team (for Owen’s age group) here so it was going to be difficult. But it was difficult being in Atlanta as a 15-year-old without your family. Obviously Tyler was there and they were living with some of our family.”
Tyler could see that his younger brother was having a tougher time living away from home, and wasn’t surprised that Owen began to flourish as soon as he regained his health and confidence in Texas.
“It shows you he has a tough mentality and that he can grind through those tough moments and know that there's going to be success on the other side once you get through it,” Tyler said.
It didn’t take long for Austin players, coaches and sporting director Claudio Reyna to take notice. Owen’s time with Verde may have began as a rehab stint, but Austin quickly consulted the MLS rulebook on converting him to homegrown status. He signed in September, after completing the requirement of spending at least 150 attendance days within the club’s Player Development Program. Attendance days are defined as 90 minutes (or more) of soccer-related activities.
Initially, and predictably, signing the head coach’s son as the club’s first-ever homegrown player raised eyebrows. Owen Wolff let his physical play, and his teammates, do the talking.
“He's also good at giving knocks to other people in training,” Verde captain Alex Ring said in May, after Wolff impressed during an away loss to Real Salt Lake. “I'm not worried about him in that sense, physically. He’s earned everyone's respect, by the way he's played, by the way he's trained and how humble and hardworking he is. So all kudos to him.”
And once he broke into the starting lineup, Owen Wolff erased all doubt. He started six-straight matches, beginning with a 2-1 victory over league-leading Los Angeles FC on May 18. He had an assist on a Diego Fagúndez goal the following week against LA Galaxy, and if he starts Saturday in Atlanta he could surpass his older brother’s MLS minutes total.
“Within the household there's a lot of competition and competitiveness that we have with anything we do, whether it's soccer or anything else,” Owen Wolff said. “And I feel like that really does come into the way that we train and how we work.”
Carlos Barron
One of the main ways that the Wolff men — Josh, Tyler and Owen all included — compete is on the golf course. Josh has talked about being golf buddies with former Mexico national team goalkeeper Jorge Campos during his Chicago Fire days, and has passed the bug on to his sons.
All three agree on who is the worst currently (that’s Josh), but there’s still some dispute over which of the boys is the superior golfer. And they’re good, too. Austin FC players have crowned Owen as by far the best golfer on the team, but Tyler says he’s still keeping his younger brother at arm’s length.
“I’d say I am,” Tyler said, without hesitation, when asked who is the best. “I’ve pretty much taken the upper hand in the family. I’m around a five (handicap).”
Whether it’s on the soccer pitch or the golf course, the players who have watched the Wolff boys grow up aren’t surprised at what they’re capable of. And while dad should get a lot of the credit, those close to the Wolff family know that there’s another parent who’s been steering the ship behind the scenes, out of the limelight.
“First and foremost, he's Dad,” Ethan Finlay said. “He'll do anything for his children. He did that when he was in Columbus. He continues to do that here. He's heavily involved in his in his kids’ lives; they just happen to play professional soccer and he happens to be coaching a professional soccer team.
“He has great kids. And behind every great man, there's a great woman. Angela (Wolff), she’s amazing. I’m not surprised whatsoever (that Owen is playing well) but it’s just the beginning.”