Meet the Electric City Shock!

Get to Know NEPA’s Own Semi-Professional Men’s Soccer Franchise

The roughly 10-year-old club has fielded an elite, college/professional level soccer team in the National Premier Soccer League since 2013.

If you ask 20 people on the street if they’d ever heard of the Electric City Shock, how many would say yes? “One, maybe two,” Coach Andy says with a bit of an embittered laugh. “Admittedly, we’re not too well known, locally, but we’re working on that.”

The Electric City Shock are a Scranton-based, semi-professional soccer team in the NPSL, a lower tier division of the U.S. Adult Soccer Association. That’s just four tiers removed from the big time — Major League Soccer. Andy Loughanne is the team’s head coach. Currently the Shock play in the 6-team, Keystone West Conference of the league’s East Region. Their regular season schedule consists of 10 matches, and at least half of them are played right here at the University of Scranton’s Weiss Field.

Electric City Shock Head Coach Andy Loughanne

Perhaps, we should all feel a little ashamed for knowing next to nothing about them.

“Nah. It’s not really like that,” Loughanne says. “We’ve been focused on building the team and the product that we put on the field.” Coach Andy and his tight group of assistants all hold coaching positions at local colleges as well. Budgeting time and energy for marketing and PR tends to be a practice in futility. “We know the support is there,” he says. “We just need a little help getting the word out to let people know that WE are here.”

The Shock field quite an impressive roster of both local and out-of-state players for a relatively unknown soccer club. The Rosado Group, a regional auto dealership group and the Shock’s ownership group, even provide housing for ten of the players from outside the region. The team is largely made up of college-level players – some even hailing from elite Division I schools in Ohio, New Jersey, New York and greater Pennsylvania. About half of the team, however, comes from local, Northeastern Pennsylvania colleges.

For Loughanne, the idea of building something local with local talent is the ultimate goal. He and his coaches know there are great soccer players rising through the youth and high school levels in NEPA. The problem, he sees, is keeping them here. “There is a soccer community here, but it’s a community that, I think, doesn’t always have the resources to help players develop as fully as it could.” He continues, “When those local players reach this level of play, they’ve typically been left with no other choice but to look elsewhere or to clubs well outside the area.”

He does see the tides slowly beginning to turn though. Loughanne states that out of the 50 players in their pool this season, over half are local. And maybe some of that is a result of the Shock’s presence in the community. “We’re always looking for opportunities to give back to the community with youth clinics and similar programs,” Loughanne says. “Our hope is to engage local youth players and show them that this could be a potential pathway for them in the future.”

Another way Loughanne and his staff reach out to the local soccer community is by inviting high school soccer players to train with the team. “We’ve had quite a few local high school players come out to train with us for a few sessions,” he says. “Some are graduating seniors and some are a little younger, and they’re just looking for that high-level training experience that they can’t get at a local club setup.”

EC Shock midfielder and Bloomsburg University standout, Shay Gillen was once one of those local high schoolers. He trained with the team a bit at the invitation of Coach Loughanne a few years ago. “Just having the opportunity to train and play at this higher level has been amazing,” Gillen Says. Now, in his sophomore year at Bloom, Gillen has since joined the Shock. And, still, he manages to find that same feeling of excitement every time he shows up to practice. “I mean there are guys on this field that play for real good Division I programs around the country,” he fawns. “It’s kind of special to consider myself a part of that.”

The Shock currently train three times a week at Weiss Field in Scranton. It’s also where they play all their home matches. In 2022, they finished 9-1 in their conference, losing their final match to FC Motown, the eventual National Champions out of Morristown, New Jersey.

The 2023 season has the Shock facing off with each of their 5 conference mates at least twice. They opened at home last Friday with a tough-fought draw against West Chester United SC. And as for predictions, Coach Andy is just too smart to bite. “I don’t like to get into stats and records,” he quips. “We focus on three things every season, all season – compete hard, prepare well and have fun.”

In a few parting words just before blowing the whistle and rounding up the pre-practice huddle, Coach Andy did manage to circle back around to marketing and PR (it appears he’s warming up to the idea). “If people are looking to see what that higher level of soccer looks like, what dedicated college players look like on the field and the level of competition that’s out there, this is the place to come and get a little sample of that.” He concludes, “We’re a professional setup; the coaches, the players — we all care a lot about what we’re doing here.”

Be sure to check out the Electric City Shock this season, from late May through early July. You can catch all home matches at The University of Scranton’s Weiss Field at 100 Broadway Street, Scranton, PA. And don’t forget to keep up with the team on social media and snap yourself a pic of their full season schedule below.