Who is Stanley Holmes?
Stanley Holmes is the founder and president of the Puget Sound Premier League – a U.S. Club Soccer league in Washington state since 2008.
For more than 20 years before becoming immersed in running a 20,000 player soccer league, Stanley was involved in a different kind of sport —– the winners and losers of global business. All the while he was harboring a secret desire to write about the sport he has played, coached and watched since childhood when the only soccer on TV could be found on Sunday mornings on PBS — — “Toby Charles Soccer Made in Germany.”‘ To say it was a near religious experience is putting it mildly.
Meanwhile, Stanley climbed the ranks of journalism, covering business for The Chicago Tribune, The Rocky Mountain News, The Seattle Times, The Los Angeles Times and Business Week Magazine, where he was named a 2004 finalist for National Magazine and Gerald Loeb awards.
Stanley grew up in the Seattle area, graduated from Western Washington University with a bachelor’s and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism. Among his proudest soccer and journalism moments was being the first Business Week writer to publish a business story about soccer in the magazine’s then 77-year history: “Can Britain’s No. 1 Soccer Club Score in America? Hugely Profitable Manchester United wants to crack the U.S. market.”
His other Kodak moment: playing soccer for a small village in the south of France where the wine was better than the team. Now, Stanley joins SoccerToday as Editor-at-Large and will write a regular Opinion column.
