It’s a Tuesday morning in January and the Portland Hearts of Pine’s third-floor office on Union Wharf is bustling.

The players won’t begin training for two more weeks. The first game is two months away. Fans won’t flock to Fitzpatrick Stadium for another three months.

But behind the scenes, Maine’s men’s professional soccer club is hard at work. The Hearts of Pine didn’t become the darling franchise of lower-level United States soccer by accident. It was the result of purposeful planning and attention to detail. Now the challenge is to continue to evolve and improve.

Year 2 in USL League One is fast approaching.

“What I don’t want to do is completely change the way we do business,” said Gabe Hoffman-Johnson, the 34-year-old club founder and chief community officer. “Sure, we want to continue to be a beacon for Maine and for lower-division soccer, but those are just outcomes. It’s about staying focused on who we are and the process.”

The club has already sold out its season-ticket allotment. An office whiteboard shows 4,132 season tickets have been sold with a 6,320-seat waiting list. The club is searching for short- and long-term solutions to meet its ticket demand.

The New Year’s Day reveal of the new Lighthouse Kit uniform showed the Hearts’ marketing team will continue to produce brand-defining multimedia content and merchandise.

With a 20% bump to its player compensation budget, Portland has added proven pros and new talent to a strong core of returning players with the goal of improving on its seventh-place finish and run to the USL1 semifinals.

“The biggest thing in Year 2 is proving it’s not first-year luck,” said star midfielder and leading scorer Ollie Wright. “It’s not necessarily an improvement thing, it’s maintaining. The second year is all about maintaining and slightly growing.”

ON THE FIELD

Preseason training begins Jan. 26 at the Portland Sports Complex. Coach and sporting director Bobby Murphy and his returning technical staff will get the team outdoor workouts and games in Bermuda and South Carolina in February. The first USL1 game is March 14 at the expansion New York Cosmos. The home opener is April 11 against defending champion One Knoxville.

Key returning players Wright and captain Mikey Lopez said the onus to improve is more squarely on the players and coaches this season.

“That’s the most important thing, that we win,” Lopez said. “People want to come see winners, and we want to be winners.”

Overall, the Hearts’ first season was a sporting success. The Hearts were 12-8-12 playing an entertaining, fast-paced style favored by Murphy. They upset No. 2-seed Chattanooga in the first round of the playoffs before losing to Spokane in semifinals in the seventh round of penalty kicks.

“Reaching the semifinals last year, you can only go one better than that,” Wright said. “I’m looking forward to that, and it’s something I feel we can achieve as a team.”

Fourteen players return to the current 19-man roster for 2026. Murphy emphasized defense in his offseason transactions, adding four backs, including USL1 All-League second-team pick Brecc Evans from FC Naples. The defense will continue to feature All-League first-teamer Nathan Messer, who starred at left back.

“We have to give up fewer goals, and to have the energy to sustain the way we want to play over 10 months,” Murphy said. “We were probably eight to 10 goals away from being in the top four.”

Murphy also added striker and all-time USL1 goals leader Emiliano Terzaghi. In six seasons with the Richmond Kickers, Terzaghi scored 61 goals, including four last season. Terzaghi could address an offensive shortcoming. Portland scored only one of its 51 goals (tied for second in USL1) on a set play.

Last season, Portland had a slow start, not surprising for an expansion franchise. Portland was 1-2-5 with eight goals scored through eight league matches. A three-goal effort by Wright in a mid-June home win against Union Omaha seemed to flip a switch. The Hearts scored 43 goals and went 11-6-7 over their final 24 games.

Lopez expects a faster start this season.

“The culture’s been set. We already have a foundation we can build on,” Lopez said.

The addition of Evans and Terzaghi speak both to Portland’s reputation as a place players want to be and the Hearts increasing its player compensation budget by about 20% to give Murphy a bit more leeway in contract negotiations.

Still, finding players who fit the club’s culture and ideals is the priority, Murphy said. After all, no one is getting rich playing third-division soccer in the USL1 ranks.

Neither the Hearts of Pine nor the USL release player contract details. What is known is that the minimum compensation for 2026 — which includes the value of player housing — per the league’s collective bargaining agreement is $2,350 per month on a 10-month contract.

Most players do earn more than the minimum.

According to a well-informed source, roughly 31% of USL1 players will have a gross monthly compensation between $3,000 to $4,000 in 2026, with another 29% between $4,000 and $5,000. About 20% will earn below $3,000 monthly, while less than than 4% make more than $6,500 in monthly salary and housing.

In addition to housing and salary, clubs routinely cover expenses like meals on training days, massage and chiropractic care, and housing utilities, while incurring the significant travel costs that come with being in a national league.

IN THE STANDS

The biggest challenge facing the Hearts of Pine is a good one to have: How do they meet the huge demand to see the team play?

Last season, the Hearts averaged a league-record 5,808 fans for their 17 USL home dates, outdrawing 15 of the 24 teams in the second-division USL Championship. Tickets on the secondary market sold for 10 times face value — or more. They could easily sell more but Fitzpatrick Stadium has a listed capacity of 5,500.

As team president Kevin Schohl points out, Fitzpatrick Stadium has been integral to the club’s success, serving as a central hub where 6,000 folks can congregate and celebrate. The Hearts of Pine invested $2.5 million in renovations to the city-owned facility, including installing a new artificial surface and upgraded lighting and have a 10-year, rent-free lease agreement.

In an effort to increase the amount of face-value single-game tickets, the club has eliminated the multimatch ticket plans it had in 2025 (with a few grandfathered exceptions). Single-game tickets will go on sale in March, Schohl said. Fans are advised to keep abreast of the Hearts of Pine’s social media channels for ticket updates.

But the stadium’s limitation when Hoffman-Johnson publicly laid the franchise’s first foundational stones in 2019 is still there: The eight-lane outdoor track — the only one in the city for interscholastic and public use. It constricts the field width from meeting U.S. Soccer requirements of 70 yards (it is 66 yards wide) and now the track hinders relatively easy seating capacity expansions.

“We have a lot of people who wish they could attend and wish we had a bigger stadium,” Schohl said. “We owe it to fans to figure out how do we provide for access in the current configuration, but also how do we grow? We’re much more focused on growing and being a community asset for a long time.”

OUT IN THE COMMUNITY

One potential way to introduce the Hearts of Pine to more people is by adding a preprofessional women’s team to compete in the USLW. It’s a concept the club is actively exploring for 2027.

The club will continue to lean into its storytelling and branding, as evidenced by the Lighthouse Kit uniform launch. The new uniform features horizontal red and white hoops and is a nod to both the famous West Quoddy Lighthouse and the U.S. men’s national team’s “Where’s Waldo” uniform worn at the 2012 London Olympics.

Portland was able to get former U.S. captain Landon Donovan to join Lopez, Hoffman-Johnson, and the creative staff for a photo and video shoot at West Quoddy Lighthouse.

“It speaks to the reach of this club, to get arguably the best American men’s soccer player ever to come to Lubec to be part of a jersey reveal,” Hoffman-Johnson said.

Hoffman-Johnson said he’s constantly focused on finding new and varied ways to connect Mainers to their soccer club beyond a game-day experience, including World Cup watch parties, a free and expanding after-school program, and the nonprofit Hearts of Pine Foundation that is focused on widening the club’s community programming.

“After all, we are the soccer club of Maine,” he said.