What draft? The tryout tour is here!

By: Melissa | November 15th, 2007

If you’ve stopped by mls.theoffside.com recently, you know many of us are occupying our “oh crap, the season’s over” free time speculating on the upcoming expansion draft and predicting which players on our teams we’d like to protect and which players we’d love to ship out to San Ho with nothing more than (maybe) a thank you card and (perhaps) a pat on the back. Oddly enough, it looks like the folks running the San Jose Earthquakes aren’t quite as focused on which MLS players they’ll acquire on Wednesday. Last week, the whirlwind Earthquakes tryout tour of Norcal kicked off in Sacramento, wound its way through Sonoma county, had a pit stop in San Francisco, and is about to bounce back and forth between Santa Clara and Alameda counties. Photos of the Sacramento and Santa Rosa stops are already online and – hey - hows it going Troy Dayak? You working for the Quakes now too? Is it official? Are we really getting the band back together?

Speaking of the band that may or may not be getting back together, ussoccerplayers.com recently asked former Quake and current Dynamo captain Wade Barrett his opinions on the return of his old club and, err, his response was somewhat bittersweet:

I think it’s fantastic for soccer to go back there. It was a great place to play, and a great area for soccer. There’s a lot of fantastic youth clubs around the Northern California area, specifically in the Bay Area. I think it’s a great city for there to be soccer in the United States.

At the same time, for me, it’s a little disappointing to see them go back there. They just kicked us out a couple of years ago, so it’s a little bit sour to see a team so quickly, particularly when there’s a possibility that they’re going to have a stadium built soon and we’ve moved here to Houston and that hasn’t happened for us just yet.

I don’t want to sound too negative about it, because I’m really excited there’s going to be a team back in San Jose. A team should be in that market. But we were successful in that market, so it’s disappointing that we couldn’t find a way to work there for us.

Wow – I can’t help but think this guy and maybe a few other Dynamo dudes feel somewhat responsible for and perhaps a little bit guilty about the Great Upheaval of 2005. I’m not ready to automatically assume Barrett and other well known ex-San Ho players are going to suddenly drop everything and scurry back to the South Bay, but I really get his sense of what I can only describe here as unfinished business.