Josh Gros has been with the Union for their entire history, and has lots of stories to tell

There aren’t a lot of people who’ve been around the Union for all 16 seasons of their existence. One of the few who has happens to have one of the team’s most important behind-the-scenes jobs.

Josh Gros was hired as Team Coordinator before the club’s first campaign in 2010, and has kept the role ever since. He has a nicer title now, Head of Team Operations, and a bigger staff to work with. But his main duties haven’t changed: overseeing travel logistics, visas, green cards, and budget math for the Union’s first team.

Not many people stay with any MLS team for 16 years, especially when that’s all of a team’s existence. Gros has kept his work through four managers, four sporting-side leaders, and two top executives.

“I take a lot of pride in that,” Gros said. “I feel fortunate that I got the opportunity to come up here and help start the club nothing to what it is now. It’s brought a lot of joy and, yeah, I’m proud of it.”

The now-42-year-old was not new to soccer when he took the job. A Mechanicsburg, Pa., native, he played four years collegiately at Rutgers, then was a fourth-round draft pick by D.C. United (No. 34 overall) in 2004.

Gros surprisingly became a starter, and quickly became a fan favorite on a team that won the MLS Cup in his rookie season. He played three more years before retiring after the season due to repeated head injuries, and took an engineering job that he didn’t like.

In 2009, the manager of that D.C. title-winner, Peter Nowak, became the Union’s first boss heading into the team’s expansion year. Not long afterward, he called Gros to offer a job, and Gros came on board in the summer.

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“I was hoping that it would be a good job ‘til I was 30, when I first took the job, and then I really enjoyed it,” Gros said. “I was lucky to get this job, and, I’m fortunate and thankful that I’m still here.”

Any fan can see how much has changed over the years in MLS, from stadiums to practice facilities to broadcast contracts. But an equally big change happened from 2019-20: the expansion of charter flights for travel.

For over two decades, MLS teams traveled via the same commercial airlines as the public. In 2019, teams could only take four charter flights per year — counting each direction separately. Some teams didn’t even use their full allotment, including the Union, which drew criticism from within.

A new collective bargaining agreement in 2020 raised the limit to eight flights per year, plus the playoffs and Concacaf Champions League (as it was called at the time), with a planned jump to 16 by 2024.

Then the pandemic struck, and the league went exclusively to charters when games resumed. Everyone knew there was no turning back, and so it proved. Now, there’s enough money to go around that no one worries about it anymore.

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“All these gray hairs are from flying commercial,” Gros said, not entirely joking. “We used to go down to the airport with 60 bags, and I’d try to get an extra-special check-in — I’d have to go hours before the team. Now we just roll right up to the plane, they already have the [passenger] manifest, guys go through, walk on the plane, and we’re gone.”

Getting home is also a lot easier. Instead of staying an extra night, waking up at the crack of dawn, and hoping the way home is nonstop, teams now leave town after their games are over and players get proper rest. It’s taken for granted in the big four sports leagues, but it’s still recent enough in MLS to matter.

There’s also a security issue. With the number of international stars in the league now, it matters to be able to keep them separate from members of the public who could harass them.

In 2017, this reporter was coming home from a vacation in Montreal when he encountered Orlando City’s squad — including Brazilian superstar Kaká — in public areas of that city’s airport. Fortunately, there were no incidents, but that wasn’t taken for granted. Nor would it be today, whether with Lionel Messi or young phenoms like Cavan Sullivan.

» READ MORE: Cavan Sullivan showed his talent in his first Union start, but also how far he has to go

At least now it’s easier to laugh when telling old stories.

“Back in 2010, 2011, when we were checking in at the airport, I had multiple people ask me what union we were part of — a plumbers union or pipe-fitting union,” Gros said. “I had to explain to them who we were. Now I don’t think that would happen anymore, but back then that was pretty common.”

There was also the brief time when MLS’s first teen phenom, Freddy Adu, played for the Union from 2011-13. He wasn’t as much of a sensation at that point, but he was still a headliner, and Gros played with him in D.C.

“People noticed him a lot, but nothing crazy happened,” Gros said. “[With] Cavan, there’s a whole different level of fandom now. The guys were practicing the other day and there was kids lined up trying to just get a peek of him. Flying private helps, that we can keep him safer, but yeah, there’s a lot of media attention that we’re not usually accustomed to around here.”

Another thing that doesn’t happen anymore: lost luggage. And yes, it happened quite a bit over the years.

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“We lost a medical bag one year that probably had about $20,000 worth of stuff in it,” Gros said. “Flying commercial, we would tag everything, but you never knew if it was going to come out or not. Now, obviously [with charters], we put it on the plane ourselves and take it off ourselves.”

Hotels and food arrangements are nicer these days, all four-and-five-star places. And traveling parties are bigger, from 25 people back in the day — 18 players and seven staff — to 42 on average now.

Visas are a more serious matter. Gros said the Union have had “pretty good success” getting visas and green cards (for permanent U.S. residency) through the Trump and Biden administrations, and he hopes that continues.

But some of it will always be out of his hands, including when players travel to and from their national teams.

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“I’m not going to name specific players in the past, but we’ve had players that we never knew where they were, and then they would just show up late or not at all,” he said. “So we’ve had issues over the years that we’ve dealt with. But the group we have now, I think, is pretty good.”

He was also a little worried about whether anything might happen when the Union went to Montreal earlier this month, specifically with returning to the United States.

“I talked to the other administrators across the league, and they all had the same concerns,” Gros said. “But we had no issues, so far, at the border.”

There’s one more tale to tell, about one of the Union’s all-timers. In the team’s early years, before it opened practice fields next to Subaru Park in 2015, training was held up the road in Chester Park, or at Houston Park in Wallingford. Gros was in charge of getting the players there and back.

“I would literally drive the players in vans — vans that we still have — out to practice,” Gros said. “They would sweat, get back in the vans, and then we’d take them in the same vans to the airport.”

Sometimes, that feels long ago, but it really isn’t. Gros knows that better than anyone, and there’s no one better to tell those stories.

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