The Rainy Ride Home
- Jason Longshore
- 1 minute ago
- 5 min read
From walk-on at UC Davis to the United States World Cup roster. Max Arfsten was never supposed to be here. He never believed that for a second.
It was raining in Columbus on the Friday Mauricio Pochettino announced his World Cup roster to the players.
Max Arfsten was fininshing up at the Crew training facility when he got the video, a message from the head coach that started with something like: if you're seeing this, you're on the roster. His sporting director gave him a hug. He had not really processed it yet. Then he got in his car and started driving home.
"Once I got into my car, and I was driving home, and it was raining, so I added the emphasis at the moment," he said, and then laughed a little at himself for saying it. "Yeah, honestly, I started crying. Called my mom, told her that I made the squad."
He is 24 years old. He grew up in Fresno. He walked on at UC Davis. He played MLS NEXT Pro for San Jose, sat on the bench during much of Columbus's 2023 MLS Cup run, and then one night in Monterrey did something that changed everything.
This is not a story about a kid who had every door opened for him. It is a story about a player who kept showing up to closed doors until he forced them open.
Fresno is not part of the typical U.S. soccer pipeline. There are no MLS academies nearby. When Arfsten was 15 and 16, his development happened at the parks, playing pickup against guys four and five years older. He could not fast-track anything. He just played, and absorbed what the older players had, and kept going.
He went to UC Davis as a walk-on. Not a high-profile soccer school, even in California. The clearest proof that it was possible came from a former Aggie: Quincy Amarikwa, who went to Davis and carved out a long MLS career.
"When I got to UC Davis and I found out he went there, I was like, alright," Arfsten said. "It's possible. Like, that's all I needed. There's no excuse now because someone from where I'm from has done it."
He describes himself as the kid who was out on the Davis field alone with cones, doing unglamorous work when nobody was watching. Technical repetitions, not highlights. "It was just me, a ball, some cones. Things that aren't flashy or sexy. But I was doing a lot of that stuff, when nobody was watching, just to try and get my technical ability as good as I possibly could."
After college he signed with San Jose as a reserve player. He wanted to break through there. It did not happen. Columbus drafted him in 2023, and when he first heard the news he was not even sure where Columbus was on a map. He got there, and he was not playing much. The Crew won MLS Cup that year, and he was on the periphery of it.
"I wasn't really playing that much," he said. "I remember I just, my work ethic kind of got me through that."
March 2024. Columbus, in the Concacaf Champions Cup quarterfinals, traveled to Monterrey to play Tigres.
Arfsten was on the bench. He did not know if he was going to play. The match went to penalties. He got put in as the fifth taker, in front of a crowd that was absolutely not rooting for him, in a stadium in northern México on the road in a knockout competition.
As he talked about in a barbershop conversation with MLS, he was not nervous.
"I was in a mind state of like, I'm here. Let's do it," he said. "I feel like I had nothing to lose really because I wasn't playing a lot before that. Nothing to lose, everything to gain."
He did not switch his side. He hit it. It went in. Columbus advanced.
He describes it now as his first real contribution in an important moment for the club. It sounds understated, which is how he talks about most things. But he also acknowledges what it actually did to him internally, even if it took a while to recognize it.
"Subconsciously, it did catapult me," he said. "I feel like it helped me gain confidence, and I feel like from there on is when I started playing regularly for Columbus."
Columbus's head coach Wilfried Nancy had already been doing something that would matter more than anyone could have predicted at the time. He shifted Arfsten into the wing-back and fullback roles. Arfsten thrived. The position became his identity as a player, a reading of the game and an ability to contribute in both phases that he now brings to the national team.
When the roster window was approaching, Arfsten was not sitting around hoping. He was trying to make the decision unavoidable.
"What I really was trying to do, my state of mind was: do everything I can in these games that I'm playing with Columbus to try and make it undeniable," he said. "Every game I play, I wanted to score, assist, because I felt like I had to do everything I could to just keep making noise."
He believed he was good enough. He also understood it was not entirely his call. So he controlled what he could control, which is basically the organizing principle of his whole career.
"I think chip on my shoulder is the right phrase," he said. "I definitely have it every time I step on the field, just because I feel like my whole career I was always in an overlooked situation. Being from Fresno, there was no MLS teams nearby. Going to UC Davis, which wasn't necessarily a big soccer school. Having to start from the bottom with San Jose's second team."
He talks about Fresno with genuine warmth, about the parks where he got his education, about how he wants to be for kids from his hometown what Amarikwa was for him. A proof of concept. An answer to the question of whether it is possible.
Pochettino rewards players who take risks and play boldly. Arfsten said that specifically, and it is worth sitting with for a second. His path was built on exactly that. Taking the situation as it is, with nothing to lose, and going at it.
He cried on the drive home because he thought about his childhood. He thought about UC Davis. He thought about San Jose.
"I thought about, like, the lower moments that have helped me grow," he said.
He will play his first World Cup game in Los Angeles. His family will be in the stands. He grew up two hours up the highway.
He did not know where Columbus was on the map when they drafted him. The World Cup was not a destination he could see from Fresno or Davis or a reserve bench in San Jose. But he kept going, through every detour, and coaches like Nancy and Pochettino helped point the way. The drive that got him here, though, that has always been his own. This summer, the USMNT gets to run on it too.