After practice on a damp, cold Wednesday night in early March, players from Boulder’s Harpos FC linger in the parking lot of a suburban high school football stadium drinking beer. By day, they are engineers and sales reps, youth soccer coaches and graduate students. The one with an unkempt beard and long hair is an undercover cop. Most of them played college soccer. A few went on to play for lower-tier professional teams. They range in age from 20 to almost 40. For most of them, it is the camaraderie and a love of the game that brings them out on nights like this. The opportunity to square off against a global icon of the game in a few months’ time? That’s just a bonus.

An amateur men’s soccer team, Harpos FC typically plays other amateur men’s soccer teams in the Colorado Premier League (CPL), which competes in the fifth of five tiers in the U.S. Soccer pyramid. Although they’re the lowest rung on the ladder, local amateur leagues are still part of U.S. Soccer, the sport’s governing body in America, which means they’re eligible to compete in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, an annual knockout competition that fields teams from every level of the domestic game—from billion-dollar, tier-one Major League Soccer (MLS) franchises like Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami CF all the way down to amateur pub league teams like Harpos.

Founded as an intramural team at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1997, Harpos will now travel to El Paso to face Locomotive FC, a second-tier professional side, in the first round of the U.S. Open Cup on Wednesday, March 19. (The Arvada-based Flatirons Rush, representatives of the fourth-tier national amateur leagues, will make their Open Cup debut March 20 versus Union Omaha at Stermole Soccer Stadium at the Colorado School of Mines.)

“I grew up watching the Open Cup, wanting to play in it,” says Harpos goalkeeper Joel Chavez, a Longmont native who played at Sterling College and as a reserve for third-tier professional side Northern Colorado Hailstorm before joining Harpos. “I’ve seen some crazy things happen in this tournament.” The Colorado Rapids, for example, hold the inglorious distinction of being the first and only MLS team to lose an Open Cup championship match to a lower division team, falling 2-0 to the Rochester Raging Rhinos in 1999. (This year, the Rapids qualified for the CONCACAF Champions Cup, so the team will not be competing in the Open Cup.)

On paper, Harpos does not stand a chance against a team of fitter, faster professionals whose job it is to play soccer. Even before MLS’ LAFC was crowned 2024 Open Cup Champion last September, Harpos and 113 other teams across the country were neck-deep in a tournament that whittled the number of amateur qualifiers down to just nine. Harpos strolled through the melee without allowing a single goal. Still, Harpos founder and managing director Johnny Freestone concedes the current roster isn’t as strong as 2020’s.

Going into that year’s Open Cup, Harpos was widely considered to be one of the best amateur teams in the country. Stacked with former professionals—including ex-Portland Timbers’ player Freddie Braun and Juan Pablo Caffa, an Argentine who finished his career in the United States after a long stint in Spain’s premier La Liga division—oddsmakers predicated that Harpos would make a deep run in the tournament. They never got the chance: COVID-19 hit just weeks before the opening round matches.

The Harpos FC soccer team poses for a picture
Harpos FC. Photo courtesy of A.D. Mosier

By the time qualifying for the 2022 Open Cup rolled around, Harpos had rebuilt their roster in a different direction, opting for a core of former local college players with a smattering of ex-pros like Richi Perez, who played for the Rapids, the Colorado Springs Switchbacks, and other lower-tier pro teams. “After a couple of down years, the pieces are coming back together. We may not have the team we did in 2020, but we have enough here to make some noise,” says Freestone, who joined the squad as a player in 2005, when it was still called Harpo’s after the now defunct Boulder sports bar the team frequented after games. Freestone began running the club in 2008 and views the Open Cup as a gateway to eventually turning the club professional.

Freestone says this year’s squad resembles the 2015 and 2016 teams that put Harpos on the map by making consecutive trips to the Open Cup’s second round, falling both times to the Switchbacks, a second-tier professional team, by a single goal. “Everyone was willing to fight, to bleed for each other,” Freestone says.

Judson McKinney is one of three holdovers from the earlier Harpos teams. The elder statesmen now at 36, he still anchors the Harpos defense. He has lost a step or two, and he can no longer out-jump most everyone like he did over his 15-year professional career, mostly in the second tier. “All the pressure is on the other guys,” McKinney says. “We don’t really have any pressure. They’re expected to kill us. If they don’t win 6-0, then they messed up somewhere. There’s no pressure to win. It’s just a chance to go out and prove ourselves.”

Colorado Teams Competing in the U.S. Open Cup

  1. Colorado Springs Switchbacks (from United Soccer League Championship, Tier Two)
  2. Flatirons Rush (from United Soccer League League Two, Tier Four)
  3. Harpos FC (from the Colorado Premier League, Tier Five)

Harpos FC faces El Paso Locomotive FC in the first round of the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup on Wednesday, March 19, at 7 p.m. in El Paso. Follow along live on the ESPN dashboard here.