Peoria City soccer team brings in familiar face as new head coach
The Peoria City soccer team has named former MLS and Bradley player Tim Regan as its head coach for the upcoming season.
Regan, also the Peoria City general manager and associate head coach at Bradley, will lead the USL League Two team into its second season, which is scheduled to begin May 20 with a game at Shea Stadium in Peoria.
Regan replaces Ruben Resendes, who went on to lead his Franklin Pierce team to the NCAA Division II national championship. In December, he was named the new head coach at Division I Bryant College — a role that will not allow him to return to Peoria City.
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Regan is a former Bradley all-American who went on to spend six seasons in the MLS. He also has worked as a scout for the Toronto FC of MLS and for the U.S. Soccer Federation's youth national teams. More recently, he was an assistant and interim head coach for the now USL Championship club Indy Eleven and head coach of St. Louis Scott Gallagher's U.S. Soccer development academy team.
"I am grateful for the opportunity offered to me by Peoria City," Regan said in a release. "The club had a fantastic first season in 2022 with Ruben Resendes leading the team to the playoffs, and I look forward to working on the field with the group this season."
Peoria City is coming off a 6-4-3 season during which it earned the No. 8 seed in the USL League Two playoffs and finished the year as the runnerup in the Deep North Division. Its only three regular-season losses came to the reigning USL League Two champ Des Moines Menace.
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Peoria City Soccer Director of Business Operations Jim DeRose — also Bradley's head coach — said he saw what Peoria City built last season with Regan and then-coach Resendes and wanted to build on that.
“Tim's intimate and extensive knowledge of the USL, college, and professional academy development schemes domestically and abroad," DeRose said, "give Tim the ability to cast a broad net in identifying some of the top talent to play in Peoria."
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Peoria City soccer team hires Bradley, MLS player Tim Regan as coach
