Many Princeton players share past stops on the club and academy circuit before arriving at Princeton, but junior forward Kevin Kelley and sophomore midfielder Kristian Kelley have been teammates their entire lives.
Soccer has taken the brothers far from their hometown of Dallas, from training programs at clubs like FC Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain to U.S. national team camps, and finally to Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium, where they recently helped the team secure a place in the upcoming NCAA tournament.
Kevin started playing soccer at age two. By seven, he was spending two hours every evening training with his father. Kristian remembers watching his older brother, who he describes as “one of the biggest inspirations” for everything he does, playing with another family friend.
Kristian soon joined the backyard training sessions. They studied soccer techniques and combed them with drills from basketball and American football.
“When he was our age, his family couldn’t afford [to have him] play soccer,” Kevin said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “It wasn’t a thing that Black people could do. Now that we had the opportunity to do it, he was always going to make sure that we had more opportunities than he did.”
Their family’s hard work paid off when Kevin was eight. He was scouted to the selection team at Fluminense, a club in Rio De Janeiro, and was joined there by Kristian and their mother. Kristian, too young to play for Fluminense, developed his technique on indoor futsal teams. The skills he learned there, he said, remain a big part of his game today.
After scoring both of his team’s goals against FC Barcelona at a tournament in Portugal, Kevin earned an offer that would take him and Kristian across the world: a chance to train at La Masia, Barcelona’s famed youth academy and the development ground for players like Lionel Messi, Xavi, Andres Iniesta, and rising star Lamine Yamal.
“I was deciding, do I stay [in Dallas] with all my friends and family, or do I go play in Europe? And at this time I’m nine years old, so it's a very big decision, but my parents left it completely up to me, and I decided to move to Barcelona,” Kevin said.
“It took me some time to really adapt, and for a lot of the time, I didn’t want to be there, honestly,” Kristian remembered of the move. “I would get really upset. I was like, I’m not even here for me. I want to be at home, play with my friends, hang out.”
Kristian soon got his own opportunity, invited to play for another club in La Liga, RCD Espanyol. This shifted his mindset.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this is really what I want to do with my life,’” Kristian said.
Despite playing in the training academies of two of the biggest clubs in Spain, the brothers faced discrimination and racism from coaches, teammates, and fans.
“We were called Negro or mono at games,” Kevin recalled. “[Kristian] had a banana thrown at him whenever we were on the field. He was 10 years old, and stuff like that would constantly happen.”
“We were constantly racialized in Spain. We weren’t allowed to play in the midfield, and Kristian wanted to play midfielder,” he continued. “He was one of the better technical players there, but because he wasn’t Spanish, they made him play either defender or they made him play on the wing.”
When Kristian was given the opportunity to leave Spain for Paris Saint-Germain, he wanted to take it, but also wanted his brother to join him.
“[That] was the first time he followed me somewhere,” Kristian said.
“We loved Paris so much more, because Paris was a lot more diverse,” Kevin said. “Like, absolutely the majority of the team was Black in France.”
However, a combination of issues surrounding FIFA regulations for American players in Europe and their parents' desire for the brothers to receive an American education led the Kelleys back to Dallas by the time Kevin was 14.
Their mother, an educator who served as the vice principal of their high school in Barcelona, homeschooled the brothers after they moved back so they could focus on their soccer careers.
Kevin continued to develop, playing for the U14 and U15 U.S. National Teams and the development academy at FC Dallas. Kristian played for the Real Monarch’s MLS Next Pro team.
By the time Kevin turned 17, he had nearly finished school and was weighing college against a move into professional soccer.
“I was choosing between either going to Princeton or signing back with PSG,” he said. “I went back on trial there, and I trained with them for about three to four weeks, and then I came back because I couldn’t sign until I was 18, and I decided not to sign with them. I wanted to go to college.”
Kevin said he was inspired by meeting Kneeland Youngblood ’78, who he described as “one of the richest Black men in Dallas.” “He introduced me to his friends, Jose Feliciano ’94 and Kwanzaa Jones ’93,” he said. Jose Feliciano’s investment firm owns Chelsea FC. “That changed my perspective. I decided instead of just playing for teams, I’d rather go to Princeton and get an education and find a way to own a team one day.”
Kristian weighed the decision to play professionally or go to college, too, but his brother’s choice played a big factor.
“After I heard Kevin tell me why he wanted to go to Princeton, [I thought] yeah, there’s no way I’m gonna let you do this and I don’t do it too,” he said.
Head Coach Jim Barlow ’91 said that he didn’t expect to end up with both brothers on the team. “When we were recruiting Kevin, we were focused on Kevin, and then later, when we realized that Kristian was also a very good player, [we] became interested in him as well,” Barlow told the ‘Prince.’
On the field, the Kelleys make their presence known, Barlow said. “They have big personalities on the field. They want the ball. They want to make things happen. They’re comfortable on the ball, on the run.”
However, their playing styles differ slightly.
“Kevin is a little bit more of a cover ground very quickly, press defend, close people down, turn the ball over with his defending. And Kristian is probably a little bit more finding the ball in space, connecting with his teammates on the move,” Barlow said.
When both brothers are on the field, both coach Barlow and their former teammate, Khamari Hadaway ’25, noted that they seemed to have a sixth sense for how the other was going to play. “They complement each other; they definitely know what the other person’s good at, and they know how to predict, obviously playing together for their entire life, how the other person moves,” Hadaway told the ‘Prince.’
The Kelleys described Hadaway and their other former teammate Issa Mudashiru ’25 as “inspirations” when they joined the team.
“Khamari and Issa were really like this second and third big brother to me, honestly, from all the way from when I came in to starting in the NCAA Tournament,” Kristian said. “Even though sometimes you [might] think it’s competitive because me and Isa played the same position last year, it was really just a brotherhood .”
Hadaway recalled that when he first met Kevin as a first-year, he was “intentional with who he makes relationships with and who he surrounds himself with, and who he lets in.”
“Issa and I being the two other Black guys on the team, obviously we had an ability to connect with him in a way that others didn’t. So we tried to bring him in as quickly as possible. And it was nice. He opened up to us pretty quickly, and the bond developed pretty quickly there after that,” Hadaway added.
When Kristian arrived to Princeton in Kevin’s sophomore year, Hadaway felt even more motivated to look out for them.
“I guess it kind of put a little bit more emotion into the team, having both of them be on it,” Hadaway said. “I saw guys that were like me, and I wanted to make sure that they had the most comfortable transition and [felt] empowered to express themselves on a team and campus like Princeton.”
For the brothers — and indeed anyone watching their journey to Princeton — it may have seemed like an unlikely path. After Brazil, Europe, and a return to Dallas, a small town in New Jersey wasn’t the obvious next destination. But their journey has been a purpose-driven one, molded and shaped by experience.
In 2025, it’s not just the Kelley brothers, but the whole team that has found connection. And with their best squad assembled since the 1990s, the Tigers — as ever — will be hoping to take it all the way.
Leela Hensler is a staff News writer and contributing Sports writer for the ‘Prince’ from Berkeley, Calif.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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