From 'I'm fired' to the Holy Trinity: The career turnaround of former Whitecaps broadcaster Pete Schaad

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Pete Schaad had an idea what the Zoom call was about. It wasn’t a feeling of foreboding, but he knew something was up.

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What was up turned out to be his time with Bell affiliate TSN and his role as the Vancouver Whitecaps play-by-play voice. Six years of service, and in April 2021, it was over.

“It was really weird because it was like a week before the season and I’d heard nothing and I wasn’t getting responses,” he said. “Having been part of mass layoffs before, that’s one thing — I’ve gone through that three or four times in my career; it’s the nature of the beast — but when you’re kind of singled out from the team as being expendable, that stung me quite a bit. I loved the job. I loved calling games. So that was hard to take.”

He was still employed, working as B.C. Soccer’s marketing and communications expert, but he was also a man in his 50s, a victim of a shrinking broadcast industry, now cast adrift and cut off from the job he’d wanted since he was 13 years old.

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When Schaad was 10, he watched the Whitecaps win the NASL Soccer Bowl, igniting his interest. He began watching Big League Soccer — a repackaged North American offering of English soccer — which featured the usual heavyweights of the time: Manchester United, Liverpool, Tottenham, and 1980 league champs Aston Villa. The baby blue and claret team across the Atlantic captured his imagination.

“First of all, you don’t choose Aston Villa,” he said with a theatric pause and a knowing smile. “Aston Villa chooses you.”

“But the colours, the stadium, the name, and everything about it just spoke to me immediately. I had no interest in the Manchester Uniteds, the Arsenals … they didn’t speak to me. Aston Villa did. That was age 10, and I’ve never stopped being hard core.”

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Decades later, as he sat in his man cave — the Villa Parlour — and its walls festooned with jerseys, memorabilia and posters dedicated to Villa, he pondered his future. Among the calls of condolences he was fielding from his colleagues across Major League Soccer was one from Rob Young, who’d worked TSN broadcast production, seeking content ideas. Schaad had kicked around the idea of an Aston Villa podcast for a few years, and with some encouragement from his wife Sandra and Young’s production expertise — everything from lenses, lighting, camera angles and editing — set about making it happen.

The month after the news of his Whitecaps gig ending became public, Schaad had a new gig: Aston Villa YouTube podcaster, and host of The Holy Trinity Show. Since then, he’s produced nearly 200 shows and racked up millions of views.

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It was a crowded amateur broadcast space surrounding the Lions already, and he was talking about a team that was thousands of kilometres away, in another country, playing in a stadium he’d never been to.

“I thought if I get 100 people viewing this, I’m considering that a victory. And it very quickly, went to 500, then 700 then 1000, and I’m like holy smokes,” Schaad said. “The funny thing is that, I think being Canadian initially was hard to get over, but it is a novelty that actually does differentiate me. So I don’t think people minded. I throw in (phrases) like ‘two-bagel’ and people will love that. ‘Two-bagel? I’ve never heard of that. Is that a Canadian thing? Yeah, it is.’

“People don’t distinguish between the (U.S. and Canada) but I always say ‘I’m from the colonies.’

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If people know what you’re talking about, there is a little bit of forgiveness with vernacular and certain things. I understand the game intimately and I love the club … and that’s why I think the Villa family kind of adopted me pretty quickly. Messages of support, like, really nice messages, kept coming and the views kept growing. So I was being encouraged that first year and that drove me on.”

As his viewership and reputation outside of Vancouver grew, so did his cognizance that he had to actually make the trip to Villa Park — the real one, not the replica he’d built as a kid around his Subbuteo table — to be taken seriously.

“It became clear that until I went there, it’s hard to be legit,” he said. “ You can’t spend 40 years of fantasizing about going to a game. At some point, you’ve got to pick up and go.”

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He started a Super Thanks, a YouTube feature that allows viewers to show their appreciation financially, and by drips and drabs collected enough to cover his plane tickets. Then, Richard Davies, a Villa fan who runs a Honda dealership in Midland, Ont., (not to be confused with the West Midlands, where Villa’s city of Birmingham is located) offered to pay for his entire trip. Two more fans of the show, Tony Gibson and Chris Woods, invited him to share their suite at the stadium when he arrived.

On a sunny spring Monday morning in April 2023, Schaad and wife Sandra cabbed to the stadium, and for the first time since his Villa fandom started 43 years before, he set foot in Villa Park. Thirty seconds later, he’s recognized. “Hey! You made it! can I get a picture?’” Five, 10, 15 people cluster around the jet-lagged Canadian, his wife juggling a conveyor belt of cellphones handed to her as she snaps pictures for fans, all the while Schaad was struggling to break through the weight of the moment and his travel.

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“I’ve seen the team play a million times on television. I’ve seen every picture of Villa Park, every video that was ever made, I’ve seen it all on the screen. But until you actually stand there it is surreal. It’s a surreal feeling. You feel the history of seven generations of people on that site going to watch their team,” he said. “I was still in a fog trying desperately hard to remember names and engage in conversations without being so wowed by the whole thing. I’ve used the word too many times, but it was a totally surreal when it’s all happening in 3D live.”

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From there, it was a whirlwind of introductions. Woods and Gibson introduced Schaad to Gerry O’Halloran, a legendary Villa fan figure, who arranged an introduction to club legend Tony Morley, who set up the winning goal against Bayern Munich in the 1982 European Cup. He did an interview with Morley at a golf club, both well into their cups (“he’s brilliant. The guy has the wit, the timing. He’s just really a wonderful, wonderful guy,” said Schaad) and it made his next episode of the HTS.

Another superfan caught his episode, and only realized then that he was 50 yards away from Schaad and Morley during their chat. He reached out to O’Halloran for an introduction, and it eventually resulted in the fan, Paul Handsaker, becoming a primary sponsor for the show through his company.

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Schaad wasn’t one to speak specifics, but allowed that he was making more money with his show than he did at TSN.

The creation of the Holy Trinity Show happened to coincide with Villa’s rise back to relevance. Relegated to the English League Championship for three years, they gained promotion back to the Premier League in 2020. This past season, the Lions finished fourth in the table.

Schaad’s profile has grown along with the club’s success. When Charlotte FC came to play the Whitecaps in March, he put in a request to the communications staff to speak with coach Dean Smith — another legendary Villa alumnus. When Smith heard the name of the YouTuber who was asking, he cleared his schedule for an hour-long chat on game day — something that rarely happens in pro sports, especially for independent commentators.

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This wasn’t a future he envisioned, but it’s one that he’s embraced.

“I’m not gonna lie. I love doing football on TV, play by play. Who wouldn’t?” he said. “But there’s also things about it that were difficult and challenging at times. And so I never thought that this is the end of my broadcasting career (when I got fired). I thought (YouTube) was a different avenue that broadcasting helped me get to. … What I recognize was that the time you put in and what you learned, all of a sudden converges all together and helps you go in a different direction. And that’s what I feel very grateful for.

“My viewers are from all over the world. This is the thing that was really hard to sort of wrap my head around when I went to that first game.

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“Views are just numbers and comments are comments. When you see the people that are telling you stories about how they watch, where they watch, what they remember, and then all that just becomes more real and tangible.”

jadams@postmedia.com

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