New Zealand Football Championship matches for new franchise WaiBOP United. This meant Cambridge became one of six bases for national league football in New Zealand (the others are Auckland, Napier, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin). 2014: Norm Rose (coach), Ray Pooley (director of football), Robbie Greenhalgh (assistant coach), Kim Brierley (goalkeeper coach), Shane Ridgway (manager). WaiBOP Championship, the Waikato/Bay of Plenty’s top competitions. The club had won promotion to the league in 2017 after a two-legged play-off series against Auckland’s Beachlands Maraetai. The departing teams were FC Cincinnati, which joined MLS; the Richmond Kickers and Toronto FC II, both of which became founding members of USL League One, a third-level league that began play in 2019; and the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based Penn FC, which suspended professional operations for 2019 before resuming play in League One in 2020. In addition, both clubs that had gone on hiatus after the 2017 USL season would later announce moves to League One.
