It’s not quite a homecoming, but this weekend’s road trip to face Brooklyn FC offers Tampa Bay Rowdies Head Coach Dominic Casciato a chance to return to the place that helped forge him into the coach he is today.
When Casciato arrived in New York in his early 20s, he wasn’t even sure that coaching was something he truly wanted to pursue. By the time he left the city, he knew it’s all he wanted to do.
A broken ankle finally put things in perspective for Casciato. After dreaming of being a professional player his whole life, he faced the real prospect of a life outside of soccer.
“I had so many people tell me over the years that I should be a coach,” says Casciato. “I always disregarded them because I was so focused on being the best player I could be. When I broke my ankle at 23 years old, it really made me start to think about things. I started to realize I couldn’t really live without the game. It’s such a big part of my life, so I decided that coaching was something I wanted to try and explore.”
To take his first dive into coaching, Casciato applied online for an open graduate assistant role with St. John’s University. Fortunately, he got the job. Coming from London, the idea of living in New York City was exciting for Casciato. The pace of the Big Apple was a bit more of what he was accustomed to compared to his college experience at Limestone University in South Carolina.
“Being an inner-city kid, I was used to the hustle and bustle,” he says. “To me, no place was better than London. The only place that could be better than London at the time was New York. You’d see it in movies all the time with all the skyscrapers, and it felt a lot like where I lived near Canary Wharf in London. I just had a feeling that I wanted t be part of all that.”
Once Casciato arrived in New York, it didn’t take long for legendary St. John’s Head Coach David Masur to make an impression.
“On the very first day, when I met the coaching staff and Coach Masur, I had a really good feeling about him and his personal values,” he says. “His knowledge of the game and just the way he would prepare a team blew me away. It was a level of detail I hadn’t really been exposed to before. I think through the process of watching Coach Masur and being around him, I started to understand what coaching really was. When you’re a player you don’t understand unless you really make an effort to.”
By the end of his first year with St. John’s, Casciato was hooked on coaching. With future Majore League Soccer players like Connor Lade, Tim Parker, and Rafael Diaz and other top players on the squad, St. John’s was crowned 2011 Big East Tournament champions and qualified for the NCAA Tournament.
After finding his calling as a coach, Casciato looked to gain more hands-on experience in different areas of the profession. He took on a coaching role at Dix Hills Soccer Club, one of the top youth academies on Long Island. Casciato’s Dix Hills squad rose to number one in the national rankings. He’s hopeful that some of his former Dix Hills players will be in attendance for Saturday’s match in Brooklyn.
“We went to a national final and we lost in extra time. Still haunts me a little bit,” Casciato jokes.
In addition to coaching for Dix Hills, Casciato was also working as a performance coach at Parisi Speed School, and as an assistant for Jersey Express SC in the USL PDL. His time at Jersey Express overlapped with current Brooklyn FC Midfielder Tommy McNamara and U.S. Men’s National Team Goalkeeper Matt Turner.
“We had a really good team at Jersey Express,” recalls Casciato. “I think through that experience, and all these experiences I gained in those years, I realized I just had to focus on the football side. I wasn’t as passionate about the fitness and performance coaching side of it. I’d also been to the 2014 World Cup as a fan. That summer just reaffirmed it all for me. I saw the passion of the Brazilian people for their team, I saw the passion of the fans that had traveled from all over the world to follow their countries. I thought this is the pinnacle, this is what I want to be involved as a coach.”
In 2014, the Brooklyn Italians came to Casciato with an intriguing offer to take over as technical director for the storied club. He suddenly found himself overseeing every team under the club’s umbrella and supervising coaches with more experience than him, including for former New York Cosmos Assistant Coach and current San Antonio FC Head Coach Carlos Llamosa.
“Brooklyn was amazing,” he says. “I coached everybody. Working with the coaches every day really helped me to understand and see the game differently. Working with every single youth program, from the rec program to U-17s, I think that made me a lot more well-rounded because my experience up to that point had just been U-14 and up. I’d never really coached the youngers kids. There are things I learned from coaching those little kids that I still use today with our big kids. That was a really formative experience for me.”
Eventually, Brooklyn appointed Casciato as head coach of the club’s NPSL team. With a focus on highlighting local college age players, Casciato helped Brooklyn qualify for the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup in 2018 after a four-year stretch without an appearance by taking down the New York Cosmos B in the play-in round.
“At the end of the first season, my first as a coach with a senior team, I had a similar feeling to what I had before when I first started with St. John’s. I knew that this is what I’m supposed to do. I knew then that I wanted to be the head coach of a professional team. That first year in Brooklyn really helped me understand that and made be believe it was something I could be good at.”
Even after Casciato moved overseas to coach in RCD Espanyol de Barcelona’s academy, he still made his way back to New York in the summers to lead Brooklyn during the club’s NPSL season. In 2020, the Cosmos brought him back fulltime to serve as assistant under Head Coach Carlos Mendes when the club joined NISA.
This Saturday, Casciato is back in New York, leading the Rowdies onto the pitch at the same stadium where he used to bring players from the Italians out to watch the Cosmos play in the NASL. The night before match, he’ll have the opportunity to share a little bit of his love for the city by taking Rowdies players and staff out to a local Italian restaurant owned by a close friend.
“I loved living in New York,” he says. “I think it really helped shape me as a person. I think all of the amazing experiences and relationships I had there certainly shaped me as a coach as well. All these experiences from my time coaching and living there helped prepare me for my career and what I’m doing today.”
