Real Salt Lake Head Coach Jeff Cassar and President Bill Manning met with the media on Thursday as the club prepared to kick off the 2015 preseason over the weekend.
Cassar talked with reporters about his biggest lessons learned in his first year as Head Coach, the changes afoot with the RSL roster and couldn’t help but exude optimism for what’s to come at Rio Tinto Stadium in 2015.
With a slew of new faces in the locker room when camp opened on Friday, Cassar looked at how those changes altered the team’s makeup.
“I really look and I think our team is faster, we're more athletic, more dynamic, I think it's going to cause other teams a lot more problems than we have in the past,” Cassar told the assembled media. “Obviously, we want to still keep that same kind of possession game, but we also want to threaten and be threatening from several different areas and I think when we put out our team, they're going to look and go, 'Who do we focus on here?' I can put on a team right now where you can focus on all 11 and then our bench is going be off the charts as well. It's going to be young, dynamic, powerful and fast. I think that teams are really going to look at us as being threatening.”
In the Salt Lake Tribune, the focus of the story was on the way the club has adapted to the changes to the roster.
With those changes may come a change in formations for RSL, who has been known through the years for mastering the diamond midfield formation.
“You just look at our roster, it's evolving,” Cassar said. “If you have a lot of midfielders, you play a midfield formation. I think we have a few less midfielders this year, a few more forwards, we've added some speed in the back, so I think, you know, the roster's evolving. We've planned that, but we also planned it knowing what was going to happen during expansion draft.”
Meanwhile, the Deseret News focused on how RSL changed relative to the rest of the league, further noting Cassar’s optimistic approach.
“I’m looking around the league and there’s massive change going on everywhere when they didn’t even have to do it. Where change is tough at times, it’s exciting, and I think we’re well prepared,” said Cassar.
For full audio of Cassar’s meeting with the press, click here.
