Swanson: LAFC All-Star Ryan Hollingshead’s recipe for sweet success

Passing along a recipe I learned the other day: Tough to replicate but super sweet, perfect for anyone craving inspiration or aspiring to become an All-Star in their field.

Here’s how LAFC defender Ryan Hollingshead put it together, from scratch. I’ll warn you, it’s a complicated process, one that includes an unprecedented gap year, a broken neck and some chickens.

The result? Chef’s kiss.

Hollingshead’s MLS All-Star Bake

Total time: 10 to 11 years

Servings: 3252

Ingredients: Faith, resilience, talent. Heart, 2.

Step 1: Tell every Major League Soccer team that calls about drafting you to buzz off, respectfully: “Don’t draft me. Not interested. Don’t draft me, don’t draft me. Don’t draft me.”

Step 2: Go off the grid during the draft and then ghost Dallas FC, the team that takes a chance on you anyway. They’re hoping you’re bluffing – and they have no idea that you’re in Haiti with your future wife, Taylor, helping orphans. Return Dallas’ calls weeks later, once you have cell service again, and break the bad news. It’s true: “I’m not coming.”

I know, I know. These first couple steps seem counterintuitive if your intent is to cook up an All-Star career, but keep kneading.

Step 3: Don’t play soccer for a year. Focus on something much more meaningful; help your big brother plant a church. It’ll be just you and Taylor, and Scott and his wife, Erin, wearing a million hats in this endeavor. On the side, throw in a lame job at an apartment leasing office to make ends meet. No regret necessary.

Step 4: Only when Doxa Church, outside of Sacramento, is good and growing – you’ll be able to tell when the time is right – alert your future employers who’ve been checking on your progress every month that, yes, OK, you’ll be ready to clock in soon. Start running sprints alone through your neighborhood streets. These are baby steps on a steep uphill climb that will require you not only to catch up to where you left off at UCLA as the Pac-12 Player of the Year but that you get up to the pros’ speed. This will take about five good, frustrating months.

See? Complicated! It gets harder.

Step 5: Save a stranger’s life. Don’t even think about it. Get out of your car on an icy night in Dallas and make sure that dude is OK after you watched his vehicle collide with the median and come to a stop in the fast lane, headlights blackened. (Actually, please DO think twice before you try this at home in your kitchen.)

Step 6: Wait for three broken vertebrae – C2, C6 and C7 – to heal. Because while you were outside helping that man, another car hit you and launched you 30 yards up the road, leaving you momentarily paralyzed in the middle of the freeway, thinking, well, this is it.

Oh, how you’re going to appreciate every bite from now on.

Step 7: Repeat Step 4. Because Dallas FC has access to a great spine doctor, you’re able to avoid surgery that would have limited your mobility and effectively ended your playing career. Instead, go through another taxing ramp-up. Another five or six months. Just. Thank God.

This recipe kicking your butt yet? There’s more.

Step 8: Add a bunch of kids to the mix. Your four and those you foster, one of whom you’ve adopted. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into that rambunctious, chaotic scene away from the pitch. And toss in some chickens, to taste (but not to taste, they’re like pets!). Let’s say 18 of them, give or take.

Step 9: Fulfill a father-figure type of role at work, too. Provide a steady, positive presence as an attack-minded 6-foot-2 fullback. Put in 25 league goals, the second most by a defender since 2010. Take note: It will seem, at times, like you should be done proving anything, that you’ve waited long enough to be recognized as an All-Star. But the recipe isn’t calling for it yet.

Step 10: Update the résumé; add champion. Make your mark in LAFC’s short, successful history as the mustachioed midseason addition who helped lead the team to its first MLS Cup title. It’s all very fulfilling, and very, very sweet.

Step 11: And hey now, in 2023, you can finally put the cherry on top. Because it’s official, you and LAFC teammate Dénis Bouanga have made the MLS All-Star team.

YESSS, CHEF!!!

Designated by Coach Wayne Rooney – surely one of the world’s truly discriminating soccer connoisseurs – the 32-year-old Hollingshead will be the longest-tenured player among the rookies on the All-Star roster when MLS’ best face Arsenal of the Premier League in Wednesday’s exhibition at Audi Field in Washington D.C.

“It’s one of those moments where you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, how cool,’” said Hollingshead, who is engaging and extremely accommodating during a conversation at LAFC’s performance center. The team had just finished a training session and would defeat Western Conference-leading St. Louis City SC, 3-0, a few days later. After a 1-1 draw against Minnesota United FC on Saturday, the Black & Gold went into the All-Star break four points off the conference lead.

“To look back at where this all started and how it’s all gone,” Hollingshead said, “it’s really special.”

These days, Hollingshead’s family – including baby Jack and his 4-, 5- and 6-year-old siblings, Amari, Quinn and Huck – is having a lot of fun in L.A.

At home here, where Ryan and Taylor met, both then members of the Bruins’ soccer program, as had been Scott and Kevin, the youngest of the four Hollingshead brothers.

And in Northern California, more than 2,000 people now worship weekly at the church where Scott serves as the lead pastor. Doxa will celebrate its 10th year in October, thriving just as Ryan envisioned when he delayed the start of his MLS career to help put down its roots.

“It was just something you have to cultivate,” he said. “It’s super organic. It’s not a business where you’re selling something, it’s like you’re casting a vision for people to see. More artsy than it is scientific, you know?”

You can say the same for his soccer career. So many risky decisions could have been a recipe for disaster. Instead, put together, an inspired recipe for success.

Perhaps that’s because the way Hollingshead works is that he doesn’t want to waste anything: “How can I use this suffering for my good and the good of others?” he asks. “How do I make this something where it’s like, I’m growing, my family’s growing, I’m suffering anyway, so why am I gonna waste it?”

And perhaps, too, because Hollingshead’s boldest choices have been so selfless.

“There’s something about faith in action that’s really powerful and definitely a part of Ryan and what makes him special,” Scott said by phone. “Most people wouldn’t make the sacrifices Ryan makes, but Ryan’s able to make those sacrifices. And he does that all over the place, with his family, his kids, his career and his faith, as well.”

And he’s been that way since he was a kid, Scott said. Way before MLS named Ryan its Humanitarian of the Year in 2017 – the year he broke his neck helping the motorist, stopping, by the way, as he’d been on his way to assist a friend who had been in a different auto accident – their mom, Sue Hollingshead, was calling him the “the kid with two hearts.”

“He really is that good of a guy,” Taylor said when I asked what else she might want people to know about her husband – while he helped wrangle their kids in the background. “Kind and loving and honest and caring in all aspects of his life. A good dude.

“And,” she says, “it’s so sweet that he’s an MLS All-Star.”

Ryan & Taylor Hollingshead met the Shuaib family for the first time since helping them during icy conditions in January. Watch the reunion. pic.twitter.com/GfAt5FccPA

— FC Dallas (@FCDallas) March 30, 2017