A hometown name with a fifteen-year professional career and four seasons on NWSL benches becomes Dallas Trinity’s next manager, the first sporting decision made by an ownership group that closed on the club a week ago.
Dallas Trinity FC‘s first move under new ownership is a homecoming. The club is hiring Lee Nguyen, the Richardson-born and Plano-raised former United States international, as its next First Team Manager and Technical Director. The move ends the tenure of Nathan Thackeray and closes the book on founding general manager Chris Petrucelli, the two men who built and coached the roster Nguyen now inherits.
Nguyen steps into a somewhat dual role, running the bench and absorbing much of the club management Petrucelli held. Nguyen will work under sporting director Brian Corcoran, who now oversees the men’s and women’s sides beneath the USL Dallas, LLC umbrella that closed on Trinity June 30.
Corcoran has been the de facto authority on the women’s side since the sale and keeps that oversight rather than take the general manager title himself. Trinity will run, for now, without a standalone GM. The exact split of authority between Corcoran and Nguyen has not been made public.
“This is an important moment for Dallas Trinity FC,” said Corcoran. “Lee’s résumé speaks for itself, but what impressed us most was his vision for building a winning culture. Since taking over the club, we’ve been clear that we want to invest in local players and local coaches whenever we can. Bringing home someone who grew up in this community, earned respect throughout the game as both a player and a coach, and now has the opportunity to lead this club made perfect sense. We’re excited to see him lead Dallas Trinity into its next chapter.”
Nguyen left Plano East as the Gatorade National Boys Player of the Year and turned professional at PSV Eindhoven the following year, the start of a fifteen-season career that ran through Denmark, Vietnam, and three MLS clubs. FC Dallas twice tried to sign Nguyen only to be blocked by outside forces. Nguyen scored 55 goals and added 59 assists across 256 regular-season matches for New England, LAFC, and Inter Miami, took the Revolution to the 2014 MLS Cup final as an MVP finalist, and won the 2019 Supporters’ Shield in Los Angeles. He earned nine caps for the United States between 2007 and 2016.
Chairman Matt Valentine, who says he has known Nguyen since he was a kid, calls him “one of the best players ever to come out of Dallas.”
The job is his first as a manager, at any level, though not his first title. Nguyen was on the Washington Spirit’s staff for the 2021 NWSL Championship, his first season out of retirement, and has coached in the league every year since: Kansas City in 2023, Angel City in 2024, and Seattle Reign this past season under Laura Harvey. Dallas is wagering that nine seasons in Major League Soccer and the NWSL benches he has worked will translate to a first-time manager who can run a professional locker room from the first day.
“Coming home to North Texas to lead Dallas Trinity FC is an incredible opportunity,” said Nguyen. “This club has already established a strong foundation, and I’m excited to work with our players, staff and supporters as we continue building something special. Dallas has always been part of who I am, and it’s an honor to help shape the future of this club and continue growing the women’s game in this community.”
Thackeray is gone roughly six months after he arrived. Hired in January from the North Carolina Courage, where he spent eight seasons as an assistant before finishing 2025 as acting head coach of a team that missed the NWSL playoffs by a single point, he took over Trinity’s spring stretch and carried the club to the playoff semifinal at Lexington, where the run ended May 23. He never worked a match under the ownership that just removed him. Valentine kept the decision at arm’s length, casting himself as hands-off on the sporting side and pointing to Corcoran, who wanted his own hire. Valentine also called Thackeray a good man and a good coach.
Petrucelli’s exit cuts deeper into the club’s short history. He was Trinity’s first soccer hire and built the roster that reached a semifinal in each of its two seasons. His record before Dallas ran 415-178-52 across 30 years as a college and professional head coach, a .684 winning percentage, and includes back-to-back NSCAA National Coach of the Year honors in 1994 and 1995, a distinction no other collegiate coach has repeated in consecutive years. He won the 1995 national championship at Notre Dame and later spent a season with the Chicago Red Stars, going 9-7-6 and reaching the playoffs in his first year as a professional head coach. His front office now belongs to Corcoran.
Fourteen players received public “thank you” posts from the club in May, widely read at the time as departures, leaving just eight players returning. The roster is real, rebuilt, and not yet public. Players and coaches report Sunday, with practices starting next week, and the group that walks in is the one the previous regime assembled on its way out. Valentine has said the Neil family described it as the best roster the club has put together. So Nguyen takes over a roster that neither he nor Corcoran had a hand in building.
Valentine has already extended the grace that timing buys a new manager, saying someone handed a roster he did not build, days before players report, cannot be judged on the fall results.
That past matters, because the fall is not the season Nguyen was hired for. His real first year is 2027, when the Super League moves to a spring-to-fall calendar, and he builds a roster that is finally his.
Valentine tied the search to a youth-to-pro pathway, a plan to make Trinity the club where the metroplex’s best teenagers turn professional, and Nguyen spent his NWSL years developing exactly those kinds of players. That, more than a fourteen-game sprint season, is the job.
The Golden Girls are scheduled to open the sprint season at home at Cotton Bowl Stadium hosting Tampa Bay Sun on Saturday, August 15th. 3rd Degree expects roster updates in the coming days.
I find it interesting that this league did the opposite of what USL did (or the same if you look at it a different way) :-). Kind of strange timing imo
You mean the Calendar flip?