Orlando City Making Slow Strides this Offseason by Jake Martino
Almost halfway through the MLS offseason and my key team that is making moves right now is Orlando City. Not only are the making changes to the organization, but to the team itself. Midway through last season, the team fired head coach Adrian Heath and brought in former NYCFC coach Jason Kreis. The impact from Kreis was significant although the Lions didn’t make the playoffs and his impact in the offseason is shocking to everyone.
Kreis recently brought in Will Johnson, a midfielder who has been playing with a high championship caliber team in Toronto FC. Johnson will be reunited with former coach Jason Kreis after their days at Real Salt Lake. He has reached two MLS Cups in his career, one last year with Toronto and the other with Kreis in 09 when they won the cup. Johnson has some experience already with 212 regular season games played and 193 of those being starts. The club has set goals this year and they brought in a great player like Johnson to accomplish them. But that’s not all, Kreis went down and grabbed Victor Giro, a versatile back from Brazil.
Orlando City is also making strides the organization with the new stadium to be opened this year (still yet to be named). Grass has recently been put in the field and the seats are up and City recently unveiled a new section to the stadium. In the all new downtown stadium, section 12 has been dedicated to the victims of the Pulse Nightclub. There are 49 seats dedicated to the 49 victims, 49 rainbow colored seats that is. Since that day of June 12th, across the world and certainly all over Orlando the hashtag #OrlandoUnited has been very popular, to let people know that these people were in need of our prayers. I bring up the point of #OrlandoUntied because they are engraved into the all new seats in section 12. So when people sit down in those seats they will remember those who died and were injured in the tragedy.
The MLS is almost back for 2017 and Orlando will start the season in their new stadium on Sunday March 5th against NYCFC.
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By Jake Martino
