So what’s the plan?

By: Melissa | February 19th, 2008

After Saturday’s game, our Frank talked to the SF Chronicle and laid out a bit of “the plan” for 2008. The article compares SJ and other recent MLS expansion teams, leaving the question open whether we can emulate the Fire’s breakout season rather than Chivas USA or Toronto. Yallop says he wants to make it to the playoffs this year and he gives a little insight on his next steps to make that happen.

“The hardest part in this game is being creative and scoring goals,” Yallop said. “That’s what our next step is.”

Each year it gets tougher for an expansion team to find standout players because the pool keeps shrinking, he said. When the Fire started, it picked up four international stars right away. “The league did a good job of helping them get those guys,” he said.

Yallop’s game plan is different. “You don’t want to go out and get six or seven guys from different countries because it takes a while for them to fit into MLS,” he said.

He and his staff will be scanning the other rosters for players who don’t make the final cuts March 3.

I do hope this means our boys Salinas, Smarte, and Morales have a good chance to make it past March (…and Noel too! Just one game and I’m already attached.). And it looks like we’ve added a two more trialists: Hayden Tinto from Trinidad & Tobago and Argentinian midfielder Marco Marlin (he was the mysterious #24 from Saturday’s game). Good luck guys!

Adam Smarte also talked to the Santa Cruz Sentinel about playing against another former Banana Slug, Steven Wondolowski.

“You know, we’re a D-III school,” Smarte said of UCSC. “There’s not a lot of exposure. So to see that we’re playing at the highest level you can in the U.S., it’s pretty cool to look across the field and see my [former UCSC] teammate at the same level as I am, doing what we want to do. You can’t beat that. It was one of the best feelings that I had.”

They also hung out together in between games which according to Smarte consisted mainly of “trash talk” (nice!). But the article does not say whether they reminisced about their time at college. But if their experiences at Santa Cruz were anything like mine, they’d have trash to talk about for years to come. I think one of my favorite incidents was my Physics major friend (who now works on the nuclear accelerator at the Lawrence Livermore Labs) one day having a random sh*t fit about the Social Science buildings and announcing that Psychology and Sociology aren’t real sciences. He came back a few days later with a makeshift quotation marks stencil and convinced us to go to every sign on campus for that Social Sciences building and spray paint quotation marks around the word Science. Good times.