Is 2024 Really “Championship or Bust” for Battery?

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As the Charleston Battery have begun their 2024 USL Championship season with a record-breaking 11-match unbeaten run ahead of an exciting Round of 16 tilt in the US Open Cup at home against Atlanta United, questions have been asked about title credentials for this team already. It then becomes important to put this early run into perspective, and hopefully understand what the goals are this year. So with that in mind, there are some thoughts I like to share.

It is quite obvious that the Battery have started off the season picking up where they left off, and perhaps with a score to settle after their loss against Phoenix in the 2023 Championship game. Behind Nick Markanich’s early season goalscoring run and bolstered by new additions such as MD Meyers, Adam Grinwis, and Aaron Molloy adding to the already solid base from 2023 and helping to fill the void left by the departures from the previous campaign, the Black and Yellow have shown they mean business. Still, no one could have expected to be unbeaten after 11 games, five points clear of Louisville in second, with the best record in the league.

Ben Pirmann and Lee Cohen were telling the media in the lead-up to the 2023 final that the team was “perhaps a year” ahead of schedule, but everyone could see that the remarkable turnaround from 2022 was the result of everyone at the club from the ownership group, to Cohen, Pirmann and his staff to the fans singing from the same hymnsheet.

That is something that from a fan’s perspective hadn’t been the case for quite a while. We are now in that year, we are supposedly on schedule, and as yet, the Battery have been electric. After successive draws to start the season which showed promise but just couldn’t get the result they wanted, the Black and Yellow are in good shape so far. It is unrealistic to expect that they will go the entire season unbeaten, but it is important to ride the wave all the same.

Given their early form and Eastern-Conference-Champion status, the question has been asked, is 2024 the “Championship or Bust” campaign? The players are certainly playing like it, but in reality, only time will tell. The idea in 2023 was to steady the ship, get the ideas across, and build for 2024.

There wasn’t a massive weight of expectation on the side, and you could say that is what allowed them to achieve what they did. From a personal standpoint, no one believed that they could get where they were in 2023, and while this writer can tell you personally that the sense of belief that Pirmann and co. have instilled in the team and our fans is something truly inspiring, the USL season is a grueling one, where oftentimes teams that start amazingly out of the gate aren’t necessarily the ones who make it happen later on in the season.

This is not to say that we should not be excited for the journey to come. I believe that I can speak for everyone who occupies Patriot’s Point’s opposite ends on a Saturday evening that the excitement and belief that wasn’t there after 2022 has turned into utmost faith in Pirmann and his charges two years later, which is perhaps the most important turnaround of all, 33 point swing and an Eastern Conference title in the cabinet included. But the manager’s philosophy is based around the belief in the players, fans, and staff as a collective to succeed, and that hard work is the basis for that success, even when it isn’t immediate, and not expectations.

The idea isn’t to downplay that excitement here, it is to remain patient and enjoy the ride, whatever it holds for us. We have seen in the past the way that expectation has weighed the team down, but as long as we are behind the Black and Yellow from the first minute to the last, that should be the only expectation we put on ourselves.

In conclusion, the answer to “Is 2024 ‘Championship or Bust’? is anyone’s guess. But I can’t wait to see what the year has in store.

FEATURED IMAGE: MD MEYERS, JUAN DAVID TORRES AND CHRIS ALLAN CELEBRATE AS THE BATTERY SCORE. ALL PHOTOS CREDIT ROSS ALMERS PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN.