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“In my current role, as a professional soccer club, we are trying to create community at Lower.com Field and with the global game of soccer, which unites people,” Bezbatchenko says. “We’ve come together with a shared passion for soccer. And I think providing a resource for the community to come together is something that is a thread that goes back to my time in Westerville.”

Bezbatchenko returned to Columbus in 2019 to lead the Columbus Crew as president and general manager, on the heels of a few tumultuous years. The team had been rescued from what seemed like a sure relocation, and Bezbatchenko became part of an entirely new leadership team for the club.

And though the Crew’s leadership was new, the territory was familiar for Bazbatchenko, who first played soccer at age 4 at NCAA Fields, now known as Columbus Recreation and Parks Fields, on Westerville Road.

His leadership with the Crew has led to several productive years for the team, starting with the 2020 MLS Cup title, the construction of Lower.com Field and the addition of its new training facility, the OhioHealth Performance Center.

Before joining the Crew, Bezbatchenko was senior vice president of soccer opera- tions and general manager for Toronto FC for five years and led the team to a championship. He joined the Crew under the new ownership of Dee Haslam, Jimmy Haslam and Pete Edwards, who took possession to ensure the team would remain in Columbus after an extended process and largely fan-led campaign that saw the club in limbo.

“After having won a championship in Toronto, that had a unique aspect because it’s my first one,” he says, “but to come back to your hometown after everything that happened and to help play a small role in winning another title and bringing another title to Columbus, for the owners and the fans and the community, it was just a tremendous accomplishment and I’m very proud of that.”

While Bezbatchenko spent his childhood and adolescence honing his soccer skills, his ultimate sights were set on a college roster.

His father coached his U8/U9 team called the Power. He played club soccer for the Club Ohio Dynamo, which put him center stage in front of Division I soccer recruiters.

“That club was one of the best in the Midwest,” he says, “and so it was an opportunity to be seen and to become a bet- ter player and also meet people from all around Columbus.”

He was seen and recruited by many teams, including The Ohio State University, but Bezbatchenko ultimately choose the University of Richmond.

“I do view college as an opportunity to, you know, to see what’s out there and to learn about our country and about myself as a person,” he says.

There, he was named team captain and reached the NCAA Division I tournament with the Spiders in 2002. He graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s in economics and leadership studies.

After graduation, he played professionally for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC, a United Soccer League team, for two seasons. He wanted to pursue a career as an athletic director at a university and spent his time away from the game studying for the LSAT in Pittsburgh and here at the Westerville Public Library.

“I thought I wanted to be a lawyer because I thought having a law degree was broad enough that it would enable and allow me to do something in the sport of soccer,” he says.

He graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 2008 and moved to New York where he worked as an attorney on mergers and acquisitions for Shearman & Sterling LLP.

In 2010, he joined MLS as the senior director of player relations and competition. In 2013, he became the youngest general manager in MLS history when he took the job with Toronto FC at 31.

Now back in central Ohio, he may lead a professional sports team, but some things haven’t changed in his hometown. Namely, he’s still not the most well-known Bezbatchenko in Westerville.

That honor, Bezbatchenko says, would belong to his dad, a dentist with a 46-year career whose patients still ask Bezbatchenko if he’s Dr. Bez’s son.

“What I would say is the city has changed so much, both Columbus and Westerville,” he says. “Yet I feel like in the best ways it stayed the same.”

When he was in town with Toronto for the MLS Cup playoffs in 2017, he began to notice the changes in vibrancy and diversity in Columbus. He realized that Columbus would be the ideal place to live with his wife, Annie, and their two kids, Jack and Sarah.

“Moving back here was an opportunity to raise our children in the area and with similar values and to have a little more space and a little more flexibility around work schedules,” he says.

Bezbatchenko has followed the team since high school when it was playing its first games in Ohio Stadium until 1999, when it moved to what is now known as Historic Crew Stadium. He watched from afar as the Crew claimed its first MLS Cup title, then when it fought to stay in Columbus. After coming home and leading the team to its second Cup win, he is now leading the team into its next phase.

“Now we’re set up to be consistent contenders in MLS and I think that, looking forward, we don’t want to be a team that’s just trying to get to the playoffs each year,” Bezbatchenko says. “We really do want to be contending for championships.”

That plan relies on the ability to buy successful players like the Crew’s Luca Zelarayan, Cucho Hernandez and Darlington Nagbe, but also on growing the game of soccer in the area and developing players locally. An example of that is Aidan Mor- ris, a homegrown player from the Crew Academy, who was the youngest player ever to start in an MLS Cup in 2020 at just 19 years old.

“I don’t want that to be a one-off,” he says. “We really want to demonstrate to the world that we can develop talent here in this country and particularly in Columbus and in the state of Ohio.”

New head coach Wilfried Nancy aligns with this mission, as his roots are in player development.

Bezbatchenko says MLS, which didn’t exist while he was growing up, and the sport of soccer have changed his life.

“I’m committed to the game of soccer. It’s given me so much, given my family so much, and I do not take it for granted, because soccer has failed in this country many times before,” he says. “We have to be laser-focused every day with our club team, with the league office, because if you take your eye off of it, again, like we learned in Save the Crew, your team could leave or the league could fail. So, we have a tremendous responsibility to our communities to make sure it doesn’t.”

By Katie Giffin