Bezbatchenko has made major moves in his first year as the BKFC president. He’s found a way to centralize the organization’s key operations, including scouting and recruiting. “For instance, instead of a single club utilizing approximately five scouts to identify new players, using BKFC's group platform, clubs have access to 25-plus scouts along with their scouting reports. Now we can cast the net wider, farther, and deeper for each of our Black Knight clubs. The database of players grows much faster this way,” he said.

Not so small beginnings

At the top of his career, Bezbatchenko took the time to reflect on what he learned while at UR. “The university is well-rounded and has a way of making you feel like anything’s possible,” he said.

When Bezbatchenko first entered Dennis Hall during a soccer recruiting trip in the fall of 1999, he knew that he was going to attend the University of Richmond. “It was the best recruiting trip I’d been on because I felt an immediate connection to the team and the campus,” he said. “It was one of the smaller Division I schools with academic and athletic rigor, and that appealed to me,” he said.

He joined the soccer team his first year on campus and became a co-captain by his junior year. He was named to the Atlantic 10 All-Conference First Team and was twice named to the NCAA Academic All-American.

An economics major and leadership studies and Spanish double minor, he enjoyed the personalized attention from his professors that smaller student-to-faculty ratios allowed. “They really took the time to help you develop and dedicated themselves to teaching.”

Bezbatchenko credits economics professor Robert Dolan with changing his course of study. “I’d gone into school thinking I’d major in biology but quickly changed my mind once I took his class,” he said. “Macroeconomics taught me the interconnectedness of decision-making and the cascade effect certain events have on domestic and global economies. It really brought together math, political science, leadership, and economics in a way that I'd never seen before,” he said.

While he said that it was hard to pick just one class that helped prepare him for his current leadership role, perhaps the most memorable was the Foundations of Leadership course he took during his second semester freshman year. It was where he met his wife Annie, who now serves on the Jepson School Executive Board of Advisors and as senior program officer at the Teagle Foundation. “I remember we had a group project in Lora Robins and Annie lived in that hall. I really enjoyed that aspect of the group project,” he said with a laugh.

A triple threat

After graduation, Bezbatchenko decided to pursue his longtime dream playing professional soccer. “I’d been playing for nearly my whole life at that point, so I thought I’d try and see if I could get paid doing what I loved to do.”

He fulfilled that dream by playing two seasons with the Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC, from 2004-2005. While he knew his playing career would eventually come to an end, it was at that point that he made the decision to find a way to stay in the sport and turn it into a career.

After obtaining his law degree from the University of Cincinnati and working at firms in London and New York doing mergers and acquisitions, he was able to blend his career with his passion for soccer by joining the MLS as a director of player relations and competition in New York. He then became general manager of Toronto FC and president and general manager of the Columbus Crew, which led to three MLS Cups during his time at the two clubs.

With a successful first year under the belt with the Black Knights, Betzbachenko is focused on finding new ways to improve team performance and grow the group's network, including new partnerships within the MLS and in Japan.