FC Dallas performance coach aims for success

By David Mullen

Stephanie Dominguez of Major League Soccer’s FC Dallas is the first woman performance coach in a male professional football league. She decided to give soccer a shot, although covertly she aimed at another career.

“Back in high school, I was into the justice and crime shows on TV,” said Dominguez, who graduated from college Magna Cum Laude with a criminal justice degree. “I wanted to be on a SWAT team. I wanted to go all out.” 

Just one problem. Dominguez has fired thousands of soccer balls, but has never fired a rifle. 

Dominguez enters her second season as first team assistant performance coach. She is currently athletic performance coach for the U-15 and U-19 Academy teams, the grooming area for would-be pro players. Dominquez joined FC Dallas as an intern for the youth development program and later transitioned to sports science intern with the first team. It was a long road to get to the pros, being born in El Paso, growing up in Juarez, Mexico and being shuffled back and forth.

Raised by her mother, who remained in Juarez as a Mexican citizen, Dominguez was schooled in El Paso living with different relatives. As a United States citizen, Dominguez could travel easily across the border. “My mom didn’t have citizenship, so when I first came to the U.S., I came alone,” Dominquez said. “I honestly came to visit one of my uncles and he took me to school and I just stayed.” Her mother remained in Mexico, and they would visit on weekends. 

“I had a lot of cousins that played soccer back when I was 10 and 11 years old,” Dominguez said. “I was never into sports back then. I loved to dance, I loved to sing and I thought I was going to be an artist. One day, I started going to their practices and something caught my attention and I started playing.” She quickly picked up the game and played on highly competitive all-boy club teams. “The coach started making a girls team for me.”   

A center midfielder, she became good enough to receive a scholarship to NAIA Ashford University in Clinton, Iowa and won the conference championship with the Ashford Saints in 2015. 

“Maybe because it was a smaller school,” Dominguez said, “but we didn’t have a strength and conditioning coach. That’s when I started learning more of it. I went through a hard time with the team where I wasn’t seeing enough minutes on the field and I was struggling, falling into a depression for a year. There was a YWCA close to where I lived and I started going there at 5 a.m. every morning on my own, started doing research about exercise and what I needed. That is when I fell in love with the physical aspect of it.” Dominguez earned a Masters in exercise science from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. in 2018.

“I am in charge of making sure that they [players] are in the best physical aspect to perform,” said Dominguez, 26, “and then try to reduce any risk of injuries with activations or preventives before our training sessions. I have a lot of communication with the players. They come to me when they have any pain or they are feeling tired or sore. There is always communication between me and the players and me and the coaches. We do what it takes to get the players ready to perform at the highest level.”   

Dominguez is optimistic about FC Dallas’ chances in the upcoming season, which kicks off on Saturday, April 17 at Toyota Stadium in Frisco against the Colorado Rapids. “The team is looking good this year,” Dominguez said. “I think it is going to be very competitive. You just don’t have one team that dominates every year.” In fact, a different team has won the last four MLS Cups. 

Now in his third year, former SMU star and FC Dallas head coach Luchi Gonzalez is eying the MLS Cup. But in the difficult Western Conference, the team faces a difficult task.

The team has made an ongoing commitment to building the team from within. But this offseason, they acquired well known players in goal scorer Jader Obrian, defender Jose Antonio Martinez and winger Freddy Vargas, who will compete for starting spots. They join Andrés Ricaurte, Franco Jara, defender Matt Hedges and homegrown 18-year-old Ricardo Pepi to provide a team with much needed depth. 

Texas will now be home to three MLS teams, as Austin FC joins the Houston Dynamo FC and FC Dallas in the Lone Star State. Austin FC will play in the 20,500-seat, soccer-specific Q2 Stadium in the North Burnet section of Austin. The stadium cost an estimated $240 million to build.

Last season, hampered by numerous COVID-19 issues that delayed the team’s start, FC Dallas still finished in sixth place in the Western Conference, beat the Timbers in Portland in the first playoff game before losing 1-0 to the Seattle Sounders in the conference semifinals.

Dominquez is often the first to arrive at the stadium, and when she finally gets home, she continues to work. 

“When I went to grad school, I knew this was what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. I didn’t apply for an internship anywhere else. I knew I was going to be here one way or another.” 

While enjoying working with the FC Dallas Academy, Domingue looks forward to being with the first team on a permanent basis. But it could cost her an important fringe benefit. “I realize how important it is to work with the youth,” Dominquez said, “and I find time to work out daily. And I still play. During training, I’ll jump in with some of the Academy teams. The coaches just look at me and know I am ready to go.” 

It appears that Dominguez is still going “all out.”