Real Salt Lake is reaching the final days of the Tucson leg of training camp and now with two games under its belt, has made great strides toward the goals set forth by the coaching staff when preseason started.
However, a 1-0 victory over the New York Red Bulls on Tuesday isn’t enough alone to satisfy Head Coach Jeff Cassar as the team still strives to piece together more of the different objectives laid out before the season started. With March 4 and the season opener against Toronto FC fast approaching, there isn’t time to take things casually as the Claret-and-Cobalt aims to perfect the new elements Cassar and his staff are looking to implement.
“All the credit has to go to the players. They’ve been working incredibly hard in every aspect that we’ve been working on and it transferred over to the game,” Cassar said. “If we’re not competing, everything we worked on was out the door. Both groups competed extremely hard. But it’s always nice to be rewarded for your hard work.”
A good deal of the training sessions in the first 10 days of training camp have been focused on the defensive side of the ball. On Wednesday, though, the team did its most extensive finishing drills. As the focus of the training sessions shifts offensively further up the field, the game plan is becoming more complete.
“We still have a lot of teaching to go,” Cassar said. “It’s not a lot of time, but we want to start planting the seeds of what we want to do and then each and every training session trying to build on it.”
Real Salt Lake will train once more on Thursday and will face the San Jose Earthquakes on Friday before returning to Utah. Among the notes in training this week have been the addition of Emery Welshman to the practice roster – although he isn’t signed to Real Salt Lake or the Monarchs at this point.
