DErek Martin has something to smile about. On the last day of November, as the frost melts across Halifax, the HFX Wanderers FC founder and president is grinning as he greets reporters at the club’s Sackville Street office and holds forth on his soccer club’s future.
For the first time in the Wanderers’ four-year history as a Canadian Premier League team, Martin has a coaching change to reveal: On Wednesday, the club announced Patrice Gheisar as its newest bench boss, concluding a nearly seven-week search for a successor to long-time coach Stephen Hart.
Gheisar arrives at the club after three seasons as head coach (and five more as assistant coach) with the semi-professional League1 Ontario side Vaughan Azzurri, where he led the club to the 2022 league championship and won back-to-back honors as Coach of the Year. In his three years helming Azzurri, Gheisar compiled a regular season record of 41 wins, five draws and two losses.
The Wanderers, in their four seasons, have finished with 26 wins, 30 draws and 38 losses.
Although Gheisar has never coached in the Canadian Premier League or within Major League Soccer, his fingerprints are all over the sport’s highest levels in North America. Three of his former charges—CF Montreal’s Alistair Johnston and Kamal Miller, and Minnesota United’s Dayne St. Clair—are representing Canada at the men’s World Cup in Qatar. (Johnston, ever ascendant, is about to complete a $4.8-million transfer to Scottish club Celtic FC.)
Wanderers forward Ryan Robinson joined the club from Azzurri in 2022 after a pre-season friendly. And four more of Gheisar’s former players have suited up for the Wanderers in past seasons: Matthew Arnone, Duran Lee, Alejandro Portal and Tomasz Skublak.
Challenges ahead
The Wanderers, for all their fan support, have not had much to smile about since 2020.
Gheisar inherits a team in desperate need of firepower. For two years running, the Wanderers have scored the fewest goals (28 and 24) of any CPL club.
That’s made it hard for the Wanderers to win games—and, to Martin’s chagrin, reach the playoffs. This past season, the gap between seventh-place Wanderers and fourth-place Pacific FC, which held the final playoff spot, was 17 points.
Martin told The Coast in October that he expects “around 50%” of the Wanderers’ roster could turn over this off-season, with a number of expiring player contracts. Already, former leading goal scorer Akeem Garcia has left the club to pursue a coaching career, midfielder Pierre Lamothe has joined Pacific FC and key midfielder Jérémy Gagnon-Laparé announced he’d be moving on from the club.
Assistant coach Alex Dorado also announced on Instagram that he wouldn’t be returning, telling his followers that it was the “right time for me to seek a new challenge.”
.