Des News series on RSL this week by James

[AreliusII]

Originally Posted by BroncsBomber

This was in the article.


Real Salt Lake released Bosnian defender Senad Halilovic on Tuesday. Halilovic spent nearly six weeks with the team in training camp, but Ellinger said he decided to go in a different direction.

Good catch, I must have missed the last line when I skipped down to the profiles of the players…

[Jim Umber]

Originally Posted by bordelais7

So....he either didn't like it here, or he just sucks.

Oh now, I wouldn't say that. 😲 It may be true, but I wouldn't SAY it. 🙄

[the cup]

Tomorrow's Des News is supposed to have a seperate pull out section dedicated to RSL.

If that's true it sounds like one to get for sure and save in your book of remembrance.

[SoccerPrime]

Anyone want to get me an extra copy?
Please?

[clarette]

The Trib also has a big RSL thing today.

Was going to read it before I left this morning but someone at my house decided to take off with the sports section!

[AreliusII]

Today’s installment:

http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,600122621,00.html

[AreliusII]

Also:

Pastorino patterning RSL after Chicago’s success
Real Salt Lake General Manager Steve Pastorino
By Lauren Gustus
The Salt Lake Tribune

Real Salt Lake general manager Steve Pastorino is trying to reproduce the success he had with the Chicago Fire. (Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune)

He’s done it before. The question is, can he do it again?
Steve Pastorino, the general manager of Real Salt Lake, helped bring Major League Soccer’s Chicago Fire an MLS Cup title in the team’s first season, in 1998. The team averaged more than 17,000 fans that first year.
Pastorino served as Director of Marketing and then as an assistant general manager in Chicago. He resigned from his position with the Fire to take the job in Salt Lake.
"You can see it and sense it and feel it when a team jells," Pastorino said. "A lot of things broke right for the Fire in 1998, and we’ve set ourselves up with Real Salt Lake in 2005 for things to break our way."
Chicago and Real Salt Lake were cast in the same mold, in hopes that a perfect combination of youth and experience would carry the team to success.
RSL is comprised mostly of younger players, but with veterans in key spots, such as Clint Mathis at forward and Eddie Pope in the back, both national team-caliber players.
Jason Kreis, the league’s all-time leading scorer, joins Mathis up front.
Pastorino was especially pleased with the players he was able to add to the team in the expansion draft, held in New York in November. RSL took Jamaican-born midfielder Andy Williams (Fire) in the first round and goalkeeper D.J. Countess (Fire) in the second round.
Each of the 10 existing teams were allowed to protect half of their 24-player roster, and their developmental players, and each team lost at least one player.
"We hoped that other teams’ evaluations of their players works to our benefit . . . " Pastorino said. "We have six or seven guys that will play more than 20 games from our expansion draft. I never would have guessed that six months ago, before I saw the list of players available."
Kreis, a league veteran, believes the team will have success in its first season and he knows where part of the kudos should go if RSL can repeat Chicago’s run in 1998.
"You have to give full credit from the top down," Kreis said. "From the owner giving the coach a license to do what he wants, to the general manager in the draft. "

[AreliusII]

Also:

Phenom Besagno busy helping U-17 qualify
By Lauren Gustus
The Salt Lake Tribune

Nikolas Besagno

He won’t join the team until after he graduates from high school, but Nikolas Besagno is still one of the most talked-about players on Real Salt Lake’s roster.
The 16-year old from Maple Valley, Wash., became the second-youngest player drafted by the MLS, behind 14-year old phenom Freddy Adu.
"Ever since I found out there was a professional league, my goal was to play in it," Besagno told The Salt Lake Tribune the day after he was drafted.
Unlike Adu, who saw action immediately with D.C. United, Besagno isn’t expected to make a significant contribution this season. Adu played his first year in the MLS in 2004.
Real Salt Lake coach John Ellinger had Besagno when he led the under-17 national team. He’s letting the young player hang back to try to help the U.S. U-17 team qualify for the World Cup. The team plays a critical stretch of games April 12 to 16 in Costa Rica.
"The most important thing for Nik is to help his team qualify," Ellinger said. "I’ve been on both sides of that. . . . Every time a young player goes through a qualifying round he picks up a lot. I think it’s important for him."
Besagno, RSL’s top pick in the 2005 MLS SuperDraft, is training with the U-17 team in Bradenton, Fla. He’s working to finish his junior and senior years in high school and should graduate in May.
The plan is for him to join Real Salt Lake at some point this summer, tentatively in June.
He’ll play primarily for RSL’s Generation Adidas team, which is guaranteed 12 games by MLS. Ellinger hopes to add games to the team’s schedule.
It’s the first year for the Generation Adidas developmental program, which was designed to help clubs build up their own young talent.
"We want as many games as we can get for those guys," Ellinger said. "If we can find another 12, that would be great."

[AreliusII]

Also:

Kragthorpe: MLS team not Checketts’ biggest hurdle
By Kurt Kragthorpe
Salt Lake Tribune Columnist

Now that he’s back in the business of Salt Lake Valley professional sports, the first thing Real Salt Lake owner Dave Checketts recognizes is that marketing the soccer club will not be like running the Jazz in the old days.
To him, that’s the encouraging part.
Almost exactly 20 years ago, Checketts was shopping ownership shares of the Jazz. The team was swimming in debt, had trouble filling the 12,000-seat Salt Palace and was headed elsewhere, until he persuaded Larry Miller to invest a few million dollars in the interest of ultimately making a few hundred million.
So regardless of how much skepticism - well, from me, anyway - Real Salt Lake faces in its inaugural season, Checketts can point to having overcome much bigger hurdles.
"This is in much better shape than the Jazz," he said. "The Jazz had this millstone around their neck, with debt, losing money, as a misnamed, orphaned team from New Orleans. The Jazz had an uphill battle."
They also had John Stockton and Karl Malone coming to help save them. Yet the real push behind the Jazz’s success was the growth of the NBA, behind Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. Checketts is convinced Major League Soccer is in a similar position.
"This is something I believe is right on the cusp of developing into a big sport in this country," he said.
I believe him. At least, I believe he believes it, which is fairly significant. Checketts is one of two people - Chris Hill is the other - who could convince me of almost anything.
If anyone other than Checketts was launching this thing, I would be far more dismissive. As it is, this will be a very intriguing experiment in a sports market that Checketts himself may have ruined for everybody else.
He was the driving force behind the Jazz becoming a model NBA franchise and the Salt Lake Valley becoming a market with major-league tastes. Triple-A baseball flourished initially because it was gone for 10 years and returned to play in a new stadium - and because it’s baseball. And now, the ballpark’s novelty has worn off.
Maybe I’m basing too much of my judgment of this market on pro golf tournaments. But clearly, the fact that a lot of Utahns play golf does not necessarily mean they want to watch people they don’t know play golf. The Nationwide Tour brings high-quality golf to town every year, but attendance is relatively low compared with the tour’s top sites, because the players are not famous yet.
It’s almost as if Utahns are consciously saying, "Hey, we’re not Boise."
So I’m not convinced that the thousands of Utahns who have grown up playing soccer will buy tickets to watch it. It may help that "Major League" is part of soccer’s title, but I question Utah fans’ devotion to it on a regular basis.
Having the U.S. men’s soccer team play a World Cup qualifying match in June as part of a doubleheader with Real Salt Lake is brilliant. That’s the kind of event Utahns will support, and it will helpfully skew the home team’s attendance average. But consistent crowds of 15,000, even when a new, soccer-specific stadium is built? I wonder.
This is not Boise. This is not Barcelona, either.
Checketts’ indoctrination into soccer came when he worked for the NBA, exploring the possibility of European franchises. "I just could not believe what a big deal soccer was," he said.
He’s convinced that enough Utahns feel the same way.
This is a guy who would be co-owning the Los Angeles Dodgers right now if he could have finalized a deal to include a television network, and the team is still on his wish list. He also has ideas of owning an NBA club. But he’s studying the sports industry for other, lower-profile investments - like soccer, and maybe lacrosse.
Based on his experience with the NBA, he said, "You just don’t know what the point is when something’s going to explode. . . . I’m kind of on the prowl for what’s ’next.’ "
Real Salt Lake is here now. While Checketts acknowledges RSL represents "a risk," he insists the franchise will succeed. "Utah fans are very passionate," he said.
About soccer, though? We’ll see.
kkragthorpe [at] sltrib.com

[AreliusII]

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RSL: Kings of the City
MLS venture: Signs point to MLS being a big hit in Salt Lake City
By Lauren Gustus
The Salt Lake Tribune

A Major League Soccer team in Utah?
Really?
That’s what many future Real Salt Lake players, who were spread far and wide when the news first broke that Salt Lake would be the recipient of one of the league’s two new teams, thought.
"We were all expecting a team in Seattle or one of the other cities,’’ said league veteran Jason Kreis, who came to RSL from the Dallas Burn. "Salt Lake City kind of came out of the blue a little bit. I was excited to be honest, because it’s a place I had never been before."
The wheels first were set in motion when MLS commissioner Don Garber approached Dave Checketts, who grew up in Bountiful and was president of the Jazz in the ’80s, at a sports-business seminar in Florida about spearheading the pursuit of an MLS franchise.
"I looked at it as an opportunity to do something really valuable for my hometown,"

Jason Kreis

he said.
After the team was announced, it quickly became clear to players that someone - the MLS, Checketts - had done their homework.
Said Eddie Pope, who came to RSL from the MetroStars: "Some people flipped. I knew not to judge a book by its cover. There were some indicators that it would work in Salt Lake. . . . If there aren’t any other pro teams there, that’s a good thing. The youth soccer market, if it’s a strong one, that helps, though it’s been proven it’s not necessary."
Checketts has stressed that he believes the team can be a success as the only pro sport going in the summer, though the WNBA team also played in the summer, but did not last, in Salt Lake.
Still, other factors helped Checketts make his decision. The team plays outdoors, unlike the Starrz, which played in the Delta Center. It’s a family-oriented sport, popular with many kids in Utah.

Most games are on the weekends. And it will appeal to the city’s Latino population.
"This [MLS] is something I believe is right on the cusp of developing into a big sport in this country," Checketts told the Tribune last week.
Some already have compared Salt Lake to one of the league’s most successful franchises, the Colum bus Crew. The Crew is in a similar-sized market and, like RSL, competes with few other sports teams.
The league’s players know a key to success is getting out in the community. In fact, MLS sees player access as one of its biggest strengths. Founded 10 years ago, MLS has made a habit of sending its players out to interact with fans.
"We don’t have eight billion security people around us,’’ said RSL defender Rusty Pierce. "Other sports don’t have to worry about growing their sport so much, they’ve been around for 100 years. Ours has been around for 10. Maybe one day we won’t have to do as much but in the end I hope we do anyway, no matter how big it gets, you know?"
It helps that RSL hasn’t been plagued by bad public relations -- no strikes and no fights.
Said Pope, who recently purchased a house for his family in Salt Lake: "The league is full of good guys. We have no criminals, no guys out there getting arrested . . . They’re guys you want your kids to follow.’’
The team has the players, in Pope, a member of the U.S. national team, and in Clint Mathis, another U.S. national team player, to post more wins that one would expect from an expansion team.
Kreis is the all-time leading scorer for the MLS.
Two other players, Dipsy Selolwane (Botswana) and Marlon Rojas (Trinidad) are pulling national team duty and will join RSL in New York.
Coach John Ellinger also picked up Nikolas Besagno, a 16-year old from Washington, in the SuperDraft after coaching him in the U.S. U-17 program. Besagno is the second-youngest player, behind D.C. United’s Freddy Adu, to be drafted. Though he’ll likely spend the year playing for the developmental team, Ellinger is counting on him for the future.
Real Salt Lake is pleased with its results in the early goings, picking up a winning record in the preseason. They’re finally headed home to start the job of growing their team in its new home.
But two months of preseason can’t compare to a long nine months of road games, injuries and national team commitments that will keep top players away from RSL.
There’s no history for Real Salt Lake. The team isn’t sure how it will respond down 2-0 late in a game on the road.
"A lot goes on in the season that you can’t really expect," said defender Nelson Akwari. "I think you can get too overconfident. We’ve done well in preseason. But the regular season games are totally different from preseason games. The pace is a lot faster and the intensity is a lot higher. We’ll know how good we are in New York on April 2."