FC Motown (National Premier Soccer League) @ Ranger Stadium (Madison, NJ)

26 IN 26 STOP 13

*This trip occurred on May 16, 2026.

The National Premier Soccer League is...a bit hard to explain. It’s the highest level of an amateur system called the United States Adult Soccer Association (or USASA), and features purely amateur players (i.e. non-professionals). There are a fair number of college players in the league (as part of the season is during the summer, and it's essentially the same level as USL2), but the schedule for the NPSL is WEIRD: the league is divided into many divisions based on geography, but the divisions don’t all fully share a leadership group. What you end up with is a league that is “decentralized”: each division has its own schedule, and some divisions start way earlier than others (though I've heard that this is partially weather related).

To illustrate the weirdness of this decentralized scheduling, I’ll use quite possibly the most famous team from the NPSL: El Farolito. El Farolito is a team named after a chain of taquerias in the San Francisco Bay Area who famously beat two teams in divisions above them during a U.S. Open Cup run back in 2024, but after that run ended, they continued to be successful - winning the NPSL’s national championship. That year, my understanding of the NPSL website indicates that their “regular season” began with a game on March 9th, but their opponents for the championship game didn’t play their first regular season game until May 5th. Coincidentally, the team they beat in that championship game is the team I'm discussing today: FC Motown!

Now when you hear the name “Motown”, you’re probably thinking that they’re from somewhere near Detroit, right?

WRONG! They’re from New Jersey!

The club was established in 2012 in Morristown, New Jersey - a place famous for housing George Washington during the Revolutionary War. They started in an amateur league based in New Jersey, then in 2018 joined the National Premier Soccer League by, in essence, taking over another team’s slot (who they had been working with prior to joining the NPSL). While they did lose the 2024 NPSL championship game as mentioned earlier, the team DID win a few years prior in 2022 and also made another national final in 2018; outside of that, there’s not much to say about them on the field - so let’s move on to the field itself.

The club’s (main) home¹ is Ranger Stadium on the campus of Drew University in Madison, NJ - a short drive from Morristown down the aptly named Madison Avenue, which, for some reason, doesn’t get renamed after it leaves Morristown (and thus has multiple buildings with similar addresses - something a friend of mine learned the hard way). Drew University is a school that is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, though it does not impose any religious requirements on its students (which makes me wonder about other schools that are CURRENTLY Methodist²). Truth be told, it is very much one of those schools where I think most folks would not know of it unless they knew someone who went there; for me, my brother actually graduated from there.

As an aside, a summer baseball team called the Jersey Pilots played at Drew a few years ago. I legitimately cannot tell you ANYTHING about them except that they were in a summer league which is WAY smaller/more obscure than most others, I went to a game one time and there were no concessions or merch, and they seem to have folded. However, this isn’t about the Pilots - it’s about FC Motown.

As you might expect from a D-III school, there’s not much to talk about in terms of the stadium: there’s only one set of bleachers here along one of the sides, and that's pretty much it. There is one other thing at the stadium, but I'll get to that later.

FC Motown is the team that more or less introduced me to the NPSL as a whole (despite hearing about El Farolito during their US Open Cup run). I'll get into how I found out about them soon enough, but the big thing is that this is far and away the closest soccer team to me, so I decided to check them out³.

This game - Motown's home opener - saw them DOMINATE visiting Hershey SC even beyond winning 5-0: the game featured almost exclusively "one way traffic" (i.e. Motown had the ball WAY more than Hershey did), and the stadium's scoreboard had the visitors recording ZERO shots on goal.

As a final note, there is a STRONG possibility that I will see FC Motown again in the near future - whether or not I write about it is yet to be seen, but I do want to try other types of postings (plus one other reason...).

MERCH

Just a heads up: I'm going to be watching a lot of these "smaller" soccer teams in the coming weeks, and one thing with these teams: merchandise is always a crapshoot. Some of them do have a few things at games or online, while others don’t; for example, I’ve been to two USL2 games in the Boston area (one of which featured Vermont Green as the visitors); one featured a small merchandise selection (where I had to Zelle the team’s owner for a scarf), and the other had...nothing (also, RBNY II and the Jersey Bearcats had nothing when I saw them).

Anyway, when I first learned about FC Motown, I found out that the company that makes their jerseys sells direct to fans! I could not find any other "forms" of merchandise online, but at the match, there's a "snack shack" which has concessions and a few merchandise items (this is the "other thing" at the stadium I mentioned earlier).

There was a list of several things that were , but the only items I saw were a hacky sack, a logo, and one of the aforementioned jerseys - which thankfully they had in my size.