Like the rest of us, most athletes have their favorite indulgences, be it tattoos, cars, jewelry, social media or any number of other pleasures.
Jacob Shaffelburg’s father recently revealed one of the Nashville SC winger’s after he helped the Canadian men’s national team knock off Venezuela in the Copa América quarterfinals, dropping a tidbit both revealing and heartwarming as his son rockets into the wider footballing consciousness.
“Family's very important to all of us. And so his brother and sister are here again, his wife is here, his mom and dad are here,” Michael Shaffelburg told CTV News Atlantic from CanMNT camp in New Jersey this week. “I knew we were doing something right when, after the Chile game, so the game before last, we all went back to Jacob's hotel room afterwards. And when Jacob has a good game, he gets McDonald's, that's his treat – so a hamburger, fries and a Coke.
“His brother is the comedian of the family, he got in bed because he was a little cold, and he started telling stories, and my daughter Jessica, who's seven months pregnant, was lying on the bed. His wife Robyne, who's also seven months pregnant, was kneeling on the floor, and Jacob and his mom were on the couch, and we told stories till 1 in the morning, and there were lots of belly laughs. And after that, Jacob was so thankful, because he said it doesn't feel like I'm at a soccer tournament, it feels like I'm on a family vacation.”
Staying grounded
In the midst of the most clutch performances of his career, all playing out under probably the brightest spotlight he’s ever experienced, Shaffelburg, 24, retains the down-home qualities nurtured in the tiny Nova Scotia village of Port Williams (population: 1,120), a spot far removed from the traditional power centers of North American soccer.
“He's somebody that enjoys the simple things in life, being around good people and surrounding himself with people that love him, which is not hard to find,” Dan Lovitz, his partner on NSC’s left flank, told MLSsoccer.com this week. “So he’s a really delightful guy to be around, and if you ever have any issues with any horticulture or trying to figure out what kind of bird that may be keeping me up in the morning early, he’ll probably know what it is.”
That’s not a joke; Shaffelburg is a committed homebody. With the baby on the way, he and Robyne are settled into a house in a hip neighborhood on Nashville’s east side; Lovitz reports that Jacob is carefully nurturing a lush lawn and garden.
“He's like my younger brother, but he's also like an old soul,” said his teammate and fellow Canadian Lukas MacNaughton. “He likes to be at home, have his coffee, be in his slippers, tend to his garden, do all the things that a 60-year-old man who’s had a great life would love to do. He does all those things, but at the same time, he's just such a genuine, nice guy, very friendly, and just enjoys his life.”
Slippers?
“When I first moved here, I moved in the same apartment complex as him and his wife, because it's right next to the training facility,” explained MacNaughton. “And whenever I’d go over to his for coffee or something, he's always in his slippers … He's got his house slippers, he's got the Crocs version, he's got the Ugg version, he's got the Birkenstock version. He's got every kind of comfort. And then now, recently, he bought a house and he started gardening. So he's out there in his garden with every type of garden slipper, too.
“People from the East Coast are supposed to be very open, and everybody's really friendly and laid-back. And that's how he is, honestly … Nothing's ever too much of a stress.”
That would seem to cut in sharp contrast to Shaffelburg’s energetic, combative style on the pitch. Constantly in motion, he’s shown a penchant for driving opponents to distraction with his sheer directness and work rate, often drawing rough, occasionally even brutal challenges from defenders.
“Jacob has a great relationship with the ground, fortunately or unfortunately. He always does get back up, the most important part, something I credit him immensely for,” Lovitz said dryly. “He has that X factor that seems to irk the other team, and rightfully so. I don't think people are used to seeing or playing against a guy that runs that hard, that consistently.”
Where did a seemingly easygoing kid from the Maritime provinces pick up that relentlessness, that combative edge? Answering that takes us from the icy Bay of Fundy down to the forested Berkshire highlands, and beyond.
Berkshire roots
Charlie Bour admits he’s had something of a hard time believing his eyes as he watches Shaffelburg star for Canada on Les Rouges’ unexpected Copa run this summer.
Though Bour sees dramatic improvement in his work against the ball – “his commitment to the defensive aspect of his game now, I think it's absurd, watching him get up and down the full wing,” Bour told MLSsoccer.com this week – the baby-faced attacker still sports the same blond, mulleted curls, still runs at defenders with the same pacey intensity as he did when Bour coached him back in his prep-school days.
Now he’s doing so against some of the best in the world.
“He's scoring goals, he's in the national team, he's playing against Messi, etc. I mean, this kid stayed at our house for weeks one summer,” Bour recalled of Shaffelburg. “My wife had him vacuuming the living room floor! He's just the most humble, mama's-boy, family-oriented kid, and then obviously when he's on the pitch, he's an animal, you know? He's so competitive and he's so passionate about soccer.”
Bour, in fact, even helped Shaffelburg learn how to drive a manual-transmission car during his time at the Berkshire School, the secluded New England institution tucked under Mount Everett in a quiet corner of western Massachusetts, where Canada’s breakout performer attended school and took big steps forward both in soccer and life before beginning his journey as a professional.
To tell that story, though, Bour first needs to explain about the bears – not the school’s mascot, the actual wild bears who’d emerge from the thick Appalachian woods to raid its trash receptacles.
“They used to have these big dumpsters outside the dorms, where you’d walk down and throw your trash in, but the bears were getting into them too much,” he explained. “So they removed them, and everyone had to take their trash over to this one big dumpster area with a compacter that would not only secure the trash a little bit more, but it was also to just isolate the bears going to that area, away from the dorm and school part of the campus.”
Barely 16 at the time, Shaffelburg saw this newly-imposed micro-commute as a chance to work on his driving skills, with his coach’s assistance, of course. It was an early example of the sort of opportunity he’s been spotting and seizing upon for most of his life.
“So Shaff was like, ‘I want to learn how to drive stick,’” Bour continued. “He jumps in the car, I get in the passenger seat and I'm helping him, and then we go; he's throwing in the trash, and it's just, those are the types of memories that make me most fond of coaching.”
The whole picture
Berkshire was one stop among several on Shaffelburg’s winding road from his childhood in Port Williams to his present moment. But it might just have been the most important: a place where he was both cared for and challenged, guided towards maturity and self-knowledge before wading into the cutthroat, sink-or-swim environment of the pro ranks.
Traditionally known as a hockey powerhouse, Berkshire has more recently grown into a fertile cradle of soccer talent.
Former New York City FC winger Jack Harrison, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 MLS SuperDraft now playing in the English Premier League for Everton, is an alum. So is Ifunanyachi Achara, a 2020 first-round draft pick of Toronto FC who currently plays for Houston Dynamo’s second team, along with a growing list of former Bears plying their trade in leagues across North America and beyond.
Much of that can be credited to Jon Moodey, who coached Berkshire to multiple New England Prep School championships and No. 1 national prep rankings during his 11 years at the helm of the program, along the way showing an adept eye for recruiting. It was Moodey who helped Harrison cross the Atlantic from Manchester United’s academy, connecting the young winger with a holistic learning experience that unlocked his potential.
As it turns out, that involves a lot more than just soccer. Beyond the substantial academic demands, Berkshire student-athletes are encouraged and often required to participate in other activities, be it different sports, clubs or performance groups like Greensleeves and Ursa Minor, the school’s a cappella ensembles.
“It's a traditional boarding school,” explained Moodey. “In a traditional view of how you might view soccer development, it's not a great environment, because you don't have as much [training] time as you might think, and there's a lot of requirements for the kids outside of that. So Jacob, like Jack, had to do other sports. In the winter, he played squash and then in the spring he did track and field, and obviously in track and field, you can imagine he was pretty good.
“The boarding school model was encouraging your players to engage fully in the life of the school, taking that three-sport responsibility seriously, and also the things away from the field were something we emphasized. … In that sense, it was a really good incubator for development because I think the attributes that make a great pro – the resiliency, the determination, the unrelenting spirit – comes by learning how to apply those things to your whole life.”
Much like NCAA regulations, the school’s athletic conference imposed limitations on organized team activities outside of the primary autumn season. Yet players turned that obstacle into an opportunity, with a team leader knocking on Moodey’s door right after Thanksgiving break.
“As legend would have it, but it was true, Jack Harrison would show up at my doorstep and say, ‘Can I have the soccer bag?’” the coach recalled. “It was a little gym bag with one futsal ball and 10 pennies in there. And I'd say sure, and I'd give it to him and then off he would go. And what would happen is, they would play during every free second they had, unstructured futsal in the gym. Excuse my French, they’d just kick the s--t out of each other: winner stays on, and there was a queue of players, and it grew and grew as the program grew. It was like the proving grounds.
“It was really unique to the development pathway for those guys, and you can see it a little bit in them, is they're not too rigid. There's a freedom, a freeness about how they play, which I think is important. I think you can over-coach players to a point where they're just robotic, and they don't have any sort of ingenuity on the field.”
Maritimes to MLS
Such settings honed the skill set Shaffelburg had been constructing since childhood. Though Canadian Premier League club HFX Wanderers have thrived in Halifax, the nearest major city to his home, since their 2019 debut, the Maritimes aren’t exactly known as soccer hotbeds. Hockey still rules the region – NHL star Sidney Crosby is a native, while the Ottawa Senators’ Drake Batherson was one of Shaffelburg’s neighbors growing up – and the all-time list of locals who’ve reached the Canadian national teams is vanishingly small.
“I’ve been overlooked my whole life. Being from Nova Scotia, it sometimes feels like it’s not even part of Canada,” Shaffelburg told The Athletic last month.
Yet Moodey sniffed out the Shaffelburg family with the help of Mike Hudson, a longtime youth coach and former technical director of the Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia provincial soccer programs.
“I go to Nova Scotia every summer with my family, since I was born, to the northern tips,” said Moodey, a native New Englander. “Nova Scotia was always a near and dear place to me. And as a recruiter, I'm always looking for the hidden gems that are out there in markets that don't get appreciated enough. I figure any small market has a few special players in it. Nobody's looking in Nova Scotia. And so I started going up there to visit.”
It started with Jacob’s older brother Zach, a promising talent in his teens who explored opportunities in the United States but found his pathway repeatedly disrupted (the middle sibling, Jessica, was also a top player and played collegiately at Jacksonville University). Zach attended Brad Friedel’s Premier Soccer Academies in Ohio, only for that program to shut down with little warning, and a subsequent stint at D.C. United’s academy came to naught as well.
Zach was set to matriculate at Berkshire, but backed out late in the process – and despite the frustration that created for Moodey and his staff, the two parties made a positive impression on one another, something Michael and Linda Shaffelburg remembered when Jacob decided he needed to leave Nova Scotia to chase his dreams.
Once he arrived at the school, it didn’t take long for Jacob’s potential to show itself.
“Our first preseason game, we were playing at Brandeis [University], it was against Exeter or something,” recounted Moodey. “I remember putting him in and I think he scored. But he was just like a rocket – he was so aggressive going forward, I remember calling some people afterwards and saying, ‘I think I have the next Jack Harrison.’
“He just played with such fearlessness and confidence just going forward – and disregard for older players, he just didn't care. And you can see that in how he plays now. There's no fear in the kid's eyes, he just goes for it. I love that about him.”
Pro path
That aggressive mindset would prove essential in the coming years. Toronto FC had caught wind of this Canadian kid balling out at a New England prep school – Berkshire went 19-0 his senior season – and invited him in for summer training stints with their third team. They would continue to court him persistently, even after he declined their initial offer to leave school early to join their academy.
Therein lies a counterintuitive facet of Shaffelburg’s story, given the prevailing conventional wisdom about youth development.
“If Jacob had not gone to Berkshire,” Hudson told The Athletic, “he would not be playing professionally right now.”
TFC’s pitch to Shaffelburg was eventually successful, beating out interest from the Philadelphia Union and New England Revolution and a full scholarship from the University of Virginia. He signed a second-team contract with the Reds in the fall of 2018, then earned an MLS homegrown deal the following summer after a roaring start to that campaign.
Yet he would turn into a casualty of Toronto’s big spending on imported veterans like Lorenzo Insigne and Federico Bernardeschi, struggling for playing time despite mostly showing well when he did get on the pitch. As TFC’s ambitious blueprint unraveled over a nightmare 2022, Nashville swooped in to acquire him on loan that August, later exercising a purchase option for what now looks like a song: $300,000 in General Allocation Money and a potential $50,000 in additional performance-based metrics.
Music City has proven a welcoming home, on and off the pitch.
“The hardest moment of my career so far was just before getting traded to Nashville,” Shaffelburg revealed to OneSoccer’s Kristian Jack in a recent one-on-one interview. “I was going through a rough spot, up and down from the [TFC] first team to the second team, not getting a lot of feedback or help during that time.
“I was talking to my dad quite a bit, my mom, just trying to figure out what the next best step was, because I was just in a really bad place. So it was just whether or not to keep playing or what the best option was – maybe go back to Halifax Wanderers, just to be close to family, because I'm a big family guy. So that was kind of what was going through my head, it wasn't really clear. But luckily, Nashville believed in me.”
Music City
Former NSC assistant coach Steve Guppy, a standout winger during his own distinguished two-decade career, provided vital mentorship and instruction.
“I was lucky enough to have Steve Guppy, who kind of took me under his arm,” said Shaffelburg. “I have the utmost respect for him and can't thank him enough for how he brought me out of a really dark place, to shining in MLS.”
Nashville suits him.
“What I find in Nashville, and Tennessee, people will speak to you on the street. They'll say, ‘Hey, how you doing? Are you having a good day?’ In Toronto that doesn't really happen,” said MacNaughton. “So I think he connects, one, really well with the people here, who are so friendly and open and want to be helpful all the time.
“And two, just from a playing perspective, I think a lot comes from playing as well; the coach gives you a little bit of freedom. And I think Jacob thrives on the freedom of just being able to be himself. So if he's able to do that on the field and in his personal life, he's just a happy guy. And I think you see that when he plays, he's just happy.”
After Shaffelburg’s eye-catching performances for Canada, rumors of transfer interest from European clubs have begun to bubble. Clubs in Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands are said to be watching closely, and given his progress to date, it’s not hard to imagine him embracing new challenges at some point.
Whatever the next step, though, his roots will keep him grounded.
“It's very interesting, we go to Nashville and people stop Jacob on the streets and get his picture taken,” his father told CTV News Atlantic. “And this is me being a little obnoxious, but his jersey is the No. 13-selling jersey in MLS.
“But we come home and he's not that well-known in Nova Scotia, and that's not a knock on Nova Scotia, that's just how we are. We're pretty low-key, and we like it that way. So to have all this attention around him, that's bizarre for us, but welcome.”
