Bradford Jamieson IV was once a young phenom in Los Angeles. Now he’s a Union assistant coach.

In soccer, as in all of life, sometimes you’ll see a name pop up that you hadn’t heard in a while.

It happened last fall, when the Union quietly announced that Bradford Jamieson IV had joined the reserve team’s coaching staff. Was that the Los Angeles Galaxy youth starlet of a decade ago, and the 2015 U.S. under-20 World Cup team?

It sure was. Now 27 and two years past his playing days, Jamieson has made a new life across the country from his native L.A., with a team he’s come to really like.

“It’s just a good place for a flower to grow as far as the coaching aspect goes, and it’s definitely a really, really special group of kids as well,” Jamieson said in an interview this week. “Obviously there are talented kids. And it’s, I think, really rare to come across a good amount of kids that have great heads on their shoulders, and we have a good mixture of that here as well.”

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Jamieson got to the Union through a connection with reserve team forward Edward Davis, a fellow Southern Californian who was in the New York Red Bulls’ pipeline until mid-2022. David Vazquez is another acquaintance, also from L.A. soccer circles.

On a visit to Davis just over a year ago, Jamieson was introduced to former Union under-17 team coach Tobias Nubbemeyer. That led to an introduction to sporting director Ernst Tanner, and eventually a job offer.

Jamieson knew the Union had a long track record of producing players. He knew the club’s first homegrown player, Upper Dublin’s Zach Pfeffer, back in the day. But he didn’t know the full scale of the operation until he got to town and saw what he called “the methodology and the imagination of the club at its apex.”

The 2014 MLS Cup winner isn’t in Chester just to teach tactics. He knows what it takes to really make it as a pro in the world’s biggest sport.

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“You don’t come across championship teams a lot,” he said. “There’s a reason why there’s always one team that wins, and to be in that environment is also something very special. So to see that be cultivated in smaller pockets, and then grow into bigger pockets, is really nice to see — and you see some of those things here.”

A list of Jamieson’s old Galaxy teammates reads like an All-Star squad. Zlatan Ibrahimović, Steven Gerrard, Landon Donovan, Robbie Keane, Ashley Cole, Jermaine Jones, and many more.

“I don’t know if I’ll end up teaching all the things that I think that I learned from those guys and from that environment,” Jamieson said, “but I definitely try to teach or give as much of it as I can away.”

Keane, for example, is “someone that I repeat the most without ever saying that I’m quoting him — and that has to do with football and not with football.”

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Ibrahimović was — and still is — renowned for his huge ego. But countless Galaxy teammates praised his locker-room leadership. Jamieson called his relationship with the striker “a brotherly type,” as they often lined up together.

Then came a lesson: “How we do some things is how we do all things. And it wasn’t that we treat each person the same way, but that we understood what each person gave, and we were able to then extinguish the things we didn’t need, and really put fuel on the fire for the things you want from them.”

Those stars, Jamieson said, “didn’t just know how to make the best out of everyone else, but they really, really knew how to identify what those things were.”

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The most important lesson might come from not those who made it big, but those who didn’t.

Union fans might know the name Gyasi Zardes, a veteran of four MLS clubs and a former U.S. national team regular. They might not know of José Villarreal or Jack McBean, who were also highly touted Galaxy prospects back then.

In Jamieson’s last year as a pro, at Hartford Athletic of the second-tier USL Championship, he played with Sebastian Elney – a former Union academy player who was once expected to be the club’s first homegrown striker to reach the pros. But after going to college at Maryland, Elney never made it to MLS. Five years after Elney graduated, the Union academy still hasn’t produced a first-team regular at the striker position.

Jamieson nodded as the memories came back, then he added one of his own. Rubio Rubín remains one of his close friends nearly 15 years after they first met. Nine years ago, they were U.S. under-20 teammates at a World Cup with Zack Steffen, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Paul Arriola, Kellyn Acosta, and Matt Miazga.

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Those five made it as pros fast. Rubín didn’t. But he got there eventually, finding stability with Real Salt Lake and Guatemala’s national team.

“A great example of someone who isn’t a huge name, but definitely went through adversity,” Jamieson said. “Someone who just really, really had the most positive expectancy of themselves, and just really professed that reality onto everyone else until it became the truth.”

He called Rubín “delusional,” and knew an outsider wouldn’t see it as the compliment it’s meant to be.

“I’ve never met someone so prepared, and that was one of the biggest examples to me as a young man,” Jamieson said. “He was the same age as me, but by the time I was 16, I was so prepared to become a professional because of him.”

He continued: “Because I knew how often I had to visualize myself doing it before it actually happened. How delusional I had to be to say that, ‘No, no, it’s just me, and I’m going to do it. It’s me, and I’m going to do it, and it doesn’t matter what anyone says.’”

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Imagine Jamieson saying that to kids at the Union’s high school who’ve earned a shot with the reserves, but still have much growing to do. He knows why they’re as committed now as he was then.

“Because by 16, I’ll play professional football with Landon Donovan and Robbie Keane, the two guys I watched growing up when I was little for my hometown club,” he said. “I’m delusional. But it happened.”