KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Sporting Kansas City’s contracted players, draft picks and selected trialists reported on Monday for the beginning of the preseason, officially marking the start of preparations for the 2011 campaign.
Sporting’s players will spend this week undergoing various fitness tests, taking physicals and partaking in light training at the Kansas City Chiefs’ indoor training facility before moving on to Arizona, where SKC will spend the majority of their time prior to opening their season at Chivas USA.
“From a coaching perspective, it’s very exciting to get back on the field,” Sporting manager Peter Vermes said. “But we still have a lot of work to do in preseason here, preparing the team and acquiring a few more players. There is still a lot of work to be done.”
The work starts with molding the roster.
Kansas City currently have 20 players under contract – 21 if Sunil Chhetri returns to the team – and six draft picks from the recent college drafts to work with entering this week.
[inline_node:326566]Vermes and his assistants will also spend much of this week paring down a group of trialists from the college and international ranks who are participating in a three-day, invitation-only combine for the opportunity to join the club in Arizona.
Vermes said he figured to bring around 35 players to the next phase of preseason, some of which will come from the group of trialists and others from any future signings or trials that materialize in the coming weeks.
“We definitely have some players that we are working with,” Vermes said. “I think we are getting closer and closer. One of them won’t be in until the first seven days of February. There are a few guys that we will be having around with the team in preseason, and we’ll be making some decisions as we move through preseason.”
In truth, the only sure thing when it comes to Sporting’s roster is that the team will have to be at or under 30 players when the season begins.
During the offseason, Vermes has maintained that filling all 30 spots was far from guaranteed and said it was still too early to predict when the roster would be filled, even though the advent of reserve league will put more impetus on the team to have a deep roster.
“It’s a little premature to say,” Vermes said. “I also have our juniors program to consider when we talk about reserve games, so all of that has to be in the mix when we are making those decisions.”
Those decisions will have to be made very soon.
After this week, SKC will have the weekend off before jumping head-first into preseason preparations in Arizona that include games against the Columbus Crew, Houston Dynamo, Colorado Rapids, Portland Timbers and New York Red Bulls, among others.
“To me, there are really five phases to our preseason,” Vermes said, “and each one of them has certain requirements and themes. We have a pretty good handle on what it is we want to do and how we want to get it done.”
