Charleston Battery’s Adam Grinwis & the Long Open Cup Road
Charleston Battery goalkeeper Adam Grinwis is rekindling a love affair with the Open Cup that started back as a teenage Michigan Buck and ran through to MLS with 2022 champs Orlando City.
Grinwis is in his first year for USL Championship powers Charleston Battery / Photo Victor Schwanke
Grinwis is mobbed by Orlando City teammates in the 2019 Open Cup
Grinwis salutes the fans in Orlando during his MLS days
He won an Open Cup too – in that second stretch in Orlando. He was third in line behind Stajduhar and Gallese, who’d established himself as one of MLS’ best by then. So Grinwis didn’t play any minutes in the 2022 Open Cup run, but he did earn a winners medal and a championship ring as a squad player.
“It feels almost spiritual,” he said of his new home in Charleston, a step down into the country’s second division and at a club that reached the Open Cup Final as underdogs in 2008 (Grinwis was 16 then, pre-dating even his Bucks years). “All those challenging times and you think it’s not going to happen. Working so hard and now to be able to step out on the field at the end of the week and just play,” he said. “To be playing the game you love, I feel so much gratitude.”
A New Home
“Steady” and “selfless” are two words Battery head coach Ben Pirmann – a fellow Michigander – uses to describe his new goalkeeper. “Two things that have surprised me about Adam are: first, how excellent of a leader he is, and, second, how athletic and courageous he is,” the coach added.
There’s no golden road leading to the happy, Hollywood ending of Adam Grinwis lifting the Open Cup trophy as a full-fledged starter in Charleston. But there is the possibility of it. Up first for the Battery in our Round of 32, is a game against a team from a lower division. “That’s the beauty of the Open Cup, right,” said the goalkeeper, ten years in the pro game and living his dream again.
“It’s an opportunity for them, same as it is for me and was for me way back when with the Bucks,” he said of third-division South Georgia Tormenta. “It’s poetic, man, and I’m all for it.”
Fontela is editor-in-chief of usopencup.com. Follow him at @jonahfontela on X/Twitter.