🇻🇮 How the USVI national team became JC Mack III's life's work
Raised by a single mother & without knowledge of his heritage, Mack now cherishes his role with The Dashing Eagle.
He’s not famous in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. He didn’t leave a mark in Chicago, where he started his career, or become a household name in Finland or Iceland or Thailand during stints there. Ask about JC Mack III in the U.S. Virgin Islands, though, and you’ll find plenty of people who know him.
Sure, his three goals tie him as the national team’s all-time leading scorer, making him a recognizable enough figure. But people also know Mack personally, a consequence of offseasons spent there training and fulfilling eligibility requirements to suit up for the team.
“Every winter, I would go and learn about the history, learn about people, and I’d go embed myself in the hood and really say, ‘If I'm going to be this, let's go be this,” Mack told me from New Zealand, where he now plays.
He’d sit side by side in the dollar van with other islanders, taking public transportation en route to leading training sessions for kids or to cultural events, becoming a member of the community in St. Thomas.
They almost didn’t have him.
Mack reached out to the national team ahead of the 2014 World Cup and essentially was told, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ despite his experience abroad. Four years later, he got a call from new coach Marcelo Serrano at 4 a.m. Iceland time wondering if he’d still be interested.
Now working with Gilberto “Giba” Damiano, the team has grown even more, as has Mack.
“He's changed my life,” Mack said.
After years of wandering in the soccer wilderness, bouncing through lower divisions in the U.S. and working in Scandinavia and beyond, Mack said he wanted a place that felt like he belonged.
“You already have a home. You’re with us. You don’t have to go looking for a home. This is where you live.” Mack remembers Damiano telling him.
“So now I’ve got it tattooed into my skin,” Mack said. “I go see people way up in the mountains. It's amazing. It's one of the best experiences.
“The greatest life's work that I have is with the national team.”
It’s remarkable Mack’s identity became so intertwined with being an American Virgin Islander since Mack wasn’t even certain of his heritage before he was a teenager.
Raised by a single mother in Ohio, Mack is eligible to represent the USVI through his father’s side of the family. His relationship with his father and his relatives remains complicated, even as he represents the territory from which they hail.
“It was a real form of pain for me for a really long time because I just didn't associate with his family. I didn't associate with his name,” Mack said.
That’s easier said than done when the name you carry is the exact same.
During a moment of reconnection with his father, he confirmed the Virgin Island heritage, never imagining the outsized role it would play in his life two decades later.
The young Mack loved having the ball at his feet. He excelled at the youth level, playing a tournament hosted by Manchester United when he was 12.
That was both a blessing and a curse, Mack says now, showing him what it means to be a professional but also giving him a distaste for the environment around him.
“As soon as I saw what it meant to play real football, I looked at the United States as a massive waste of time,” he said.
That led to bursts of overconfidence. He turned down the chance to play on Caleb Porter’s Akron team and rejected scholarship offers from college soccer powers like Indiana and New Mexico, opting instead to try to go directly to the Chicago Fire.
“The first thing that happened is I went there and drowned,” he said. “I went to MLS one day after high school to go test. I go into training, and I’m not even near it. I’m nowhere close to it. Phyiscally, just not able to do it.
“I realized, ‘Oh my God, I made a terrible error,’ and my mom looks at me like, ‘You decided what it was going to be.’”
After trials abroad, Mack ended up with the Fire’s PDL outfit and helped the team to a first-place finish in its division, springboarding his European odysseys with an interlude to play with Charleston at the USL Pro (now the USL Championship) level.
While hubris may have been to blame the first time Mack didn’t make it in the U.S., he points the finger at the system the second time around. Despite winning the league in 2012, few players from that Charleston team got shots in the top division. Mack’s mind was made up: His future was elsewhere.
He found life outside the U.S. suited him anyway, enjoying the Scandinavian lifestyle and finding mindsets both there and in his current home of New Zealand more aligned with his own values and political beliefs.
Still, it’s worth it to him to embark upon a journey halfway across the world to play in Concacaf Nations League League C matches. He would’ve done it for World Cup qualification as well, had New Zealand’s pandemic restrictions permitted it.
For June’s CNL matches, Mack went the 90 minutes from his home in Napier to Aukland to get a direct flight to Los Angeles. From LA, he crossed the U.S. to Miami before linking with the USVI squad in Curacao.
Once there, he scored a goal from open play and a penalty as the USVI snapped an eight-match losing streak and later notched its first victory since 2019. Even so, The Dashing Eagle now sits third in a four-team group currently topped by Bonaire, with promotion and a spot in the Gold Cup prelims all but impossible.
Mack is under no illusions he’ll be starring with the USVI on the biggest stage any time soon - and he’s OK with that.
“When I write my life history in my mind, I'm going to remember this,” he said. “I'm going to remember everything with the national team and everything that comes after me way more than I'm going to remember anything in my club.
“It’s priceless. The people in the country really changed the way that I looked at myself and changed the way that I look at football.”
His current teammates and the young players currently being spotted by the USVI’s new programs aimed at identifying young players and getting them into the system sooner give him hope he’ll quickly be surpassed as the country’s all-time leading scorer and see the USVI in the Gold Cup.
“They're going to be able to do something wild. They're all in college, and they're playing wonderful football,” he said. “I think stamping that legacy and being able to give it to someone else is one of the things Giba taught me.
“The first time I stopped thinking about myself is the first time I started to get all of the things I wanted in the first place. So, I started thinking about everybody else. And that's what it’s about. That’s the basis for life's work.”
JC Mack III will never go into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame. He’ll fade from the memory of all but the most dedicated fans of Selfoss or Vikingur Reykjavik.
But the soccer community in the USVI, and those he’s interacted with during time invested in the islands, will long remember the name James Charles Mack III.
“I own the name now. I think that’s something I’ll be proud of. They’ll remember me as the guy who said, ‘I’m going to take this on, I’m going to find out what I’m about, about the history,’” he said. “I think that’s something I can end up being really proud of.”
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