'We were blown away...' - Berwick Rangers' American director Chris Butler opens up on love for the club

“That is the number one question that I get asked”, Chris Butler admits. In fairness, it is an understandable query - how exactly does an American wedding venue owner, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and based in Elk Creek, Virginia, become so heavily involved with a club like Berwick Rangers?

The answer, it turns out, is a stroke of serendipity and - for the man who earns his living hosting marriage ceremonies - a healthy dose of love at first sight. “We got involved with another club in Scotland, up in Glasgow”, Chris explains. “We could have gone over any time, and gone to any stadium, but it happened to be by chance of fate that they were playing Berwick Rangers that day. We went down to Berwick - my wife, my daughter, and I - and from the moment we walked through the door, we were blown away by everybody.

“You just got a feeling that these were people you wanted to get to know. They almost felt like friends from that point on. We loved the town itself. But then during that day and during that match, we kept talking to board members, and I started talking a lot to Kevin Dixon, the chairman of the club, and we just realised that there was a friendship there that could blossom.”

Indeed, Chris was so smitten with Rangers that he took the decision to amicably end his association with the aforementioned “other club”, Caledonian Braves, and instead refocus his attention on Shielfield Park. From there, his involvement has grown rapidly.

Despite living on the far side of the Atlantic - and having a notable time difference to contend with - Chris speaks with Kevin on a daily basis over the phone, and after his initial forays as a director at the club, currently occupies a role as Berwick’s vice-chairman. Supporters might even recognise his unmistakeable accent from a series of videos and player interviews posted to Rangers’ official social media channels - an endeavour made possible by his commitment to visiting the United Kingdom every couple of months or so.

It’s not bad going for a man who, by his own admission, came to find his love for football relatively late in life - not that you would know it from talking to him. Chris’ affection for Berwick is both radiant and infectious, and he speaks like an ardent fan who has always had black and gold coursing through their veins. His respect and admiration for the ethos underpinning Rangers’ storied history, as well as the rigours of lower league football writ large, are palpable - on more than one occasion he refers to his experiences in the sport as “humbling” - and it is evident that he treats his newfound role as a custodian with the reverence it truly deserves.

As he puts it: “To me, when I started this, I didn't come in and say, ‘How can I come in and put my stamp on this?’ That was never the goal. The goal was, ‘How can I maintain and protect the history of this club?’ We're coming up on 150 years, in four years from now, for the club - how do we make sure that this club survives for another 150 years? How do we make sure that we are good stewards of this football club so that my kids can come over and help take over, my grandchildren can come over and be part of this and everything involved in it?

“That's what we wanted to do from the beginning. I never came in and thought, ‘This needs changing, that needs changing’. We came in and said, ‘How do we enhance what is happening here and truly become a good steward of a football club that has been around for almost 150 years now, and make sure that it survives?’”

But that’s not to say that Chris isn’t ambitious too. Asked about his aspirations for Berwick’s future, he responds: “My goal... I tell people what my goal is - and this makes Kevin Dixon extremely uncomfortable because we realise how hard it is to follow through on this - is that I would like to be back into the league, the SPFL, by our 150th anniversary. So we've got about four-and-a-half years or so to make that happen.

“It is a daunting task... I can't say this is what's definitely going to happen. What I can say is that I think we need to put ourselves in position. You know, I feel like fans will give you that grace if you put yourself in position... But I don't think it's fair to sit back and say, ‘Hey, we want you to pay X amount to come through the gate, and we appreciate that, but we're only going to be in the middle of the league or towards the bottom of the table’.”

He continues: “I think that fans should expect from us that we have some sort of goal, that we have some sort of ambition - and the ambition has to be to get back into the league. I do not think that that is an easy task. I think, as I said, this is one of the most humbling experiences that I've ever undertaken.

“I kind of thought, ‘Oh, you go in, you make a few changes, you put some money in it - boom, you're done!’ In football, I have found that there's never enough money, and so you could do that all day, and money isn't just what's going to get you there. There are so many other things. There are big things that are out of our hands. All we can do is really hope to put a team on the pitch that is capable of doing what we want to do, and letting them progress through the league.

“We went from 16th last year to eighth this year. That's a tremendous increase. We were better in goals scored, we were better in goals conceded, more people came through the gate. There are so many positives that we have, and so the goal is to try to keep a lot of that team together, and really, you almost hate to see the season end because things were going so well.”

And again, you find yourself coming back to that central question: why is Chris, this recent footballing convert who spends most of his days three-and-a-half thousand miles away, so dead set on doing right by Berwick Rangers? Well, to him, the reason is simple: “The moment I walked into Shielfield Park, something about that felt special. You don't know what it is.

“It's so corny to say it feels like home, but it does. When you are standing there, and you're talking to people, and the love that they've had for this club since the 1960s and 1970s... I will probably insult some people by saying this, but I look at some of the sides in Scottish football, and you could almost say that there are teams and there are clubs. This is a proper club, and this is a club with history and with people.

“There's a home to it, there's a romance to it that draws you in - at least it did for me. Now, others, again, are going to tell me I'm crazy... I get told I'm crazy, but that's okay.”