Major League Soccer

MLS Playoffs: After Early Stumbles, Real Salt Lake Found Their Way

Administrative blunders, such as exposing key player Jason Kreis in the expansion draft, were part of the team's rough start in the league, but now the club is poised to win it all if they can defeat the Los Angeles Galaxy on Sunday.

Nov 20, 2009 2:53:19 AM

MLS: Andy Williams, Real Salt Lake, June 2008 (ISI)

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MLS: Andy Williams, Real Salt Lake, June 2008 (ISI)

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Real Salt Lake

Jason Kreis was with Real Salt Lake during their difficult 2005 expansion season - but as a player, his influence was limited to the effect he had on the field.

As coach of the Utah club, Kreis has more power to set the course for the team, and he has now guided them to the championship final in Major League Soccer.

"There was a spell at the end of last year where I really felt like, ‘Okay, we’re really starting to come together now,'" Kreis explained to Goal.com. "We’re starting to play the game like I like to see it played. We’re having some success."

For Real Salt Lake veteran Andy Williams, the key move for the organization was to put Kreis in charge in the first place - as well as making an important move for a certain dread-locked midfielder.

"I would have to say it would be the hiring of Jason followed by Garth and then the big trade that we made to get Kyle Beckerman here," said Williams of RSL's change in fortune. "That was a big, major step in trying to turn things around. He’s not a household name, a star, but he’s the backbone of this team. We kind of feed off of him and he’s a good person to build that club around. That’s why he’s the captain of this team. Those three steps were big turnarounds for this club."

At the start of the team's tenure in MLS, it was known not only for a clumsy name, but bumbling administrative moves as well, such as drafting a 16-year-old Nik Besagno with the first pick in 2005. The team's iconic leader and star striker, Kreis, was then left exposed in the expansion draft of 2006. Real Salt Lake gambled that the new club, Toronto FC, would not pick Kreis because of his large salary. However, they did, and it cost RSL, as they then scrambled to make a trade deal to get Kreis back to their club.

"It was a traumatic experience," said Kreis. "You get a message one way and then at the eleventh hour you get a message the other way. But listen, soccer is like life. There are no definites. It can be hard sometimes from a player’s point of view and say you want the truth and you want it now, because the truth is kind of changing."

One good thing came out of the fiasco, however.

"Even when I was still playing I understood that those decisions needed to be a bit fluid and what meant the most to me was that they were willing to step up and get me back," said Kreis. "It showed me how important the club thought I was, not only in the short term but in the long term."

Eventually, RSL owner Dave Checketts stepped in to secure Kreis in an entirely new position. The star striker became the first person in MLS to transition from player to coach in the same season, retiring to take on the direct leadership of the team.

"When he approached me about coaching the team, it was almost always going to be an impossibility to turn it down," said Klein. "I want to do well for him and that’s something that makes this club different."

It was unprecedented that a team would hand so much power to someone who had obviously had no professional coaching experience, but RSL's owner thought Kreis was worth the gamble.

"I do think that along the way, it has been demonstrated to me very clearly that I’m liked in the club and I think that starts with Dave Checketts," Kreis said. "Even the very first day I came here, I felt like there was something very different about this club, there’s definitely something different about this owner and I really, really appreciated it ever since."

The transition wasn't easy, as Kreis had to learn to put friendships aside and look objectively at his squad.

"To be honest, when I stepped in I didn’t think that all those changes were going to be necessary," Kreis acknowledged. "I thought it was going to be fairly easy. I thought I was going to come in and there were a few tweaks I could make that would turn us into a successful club and through that season that was one of the most difficult lessons I learned, that that was pretty much an impossibility, that the roster would have to be completely overhauled, the whole mentality of the team would have to be completely overhauled and that meant we changed like 25, 26 players out of 28 from 2007 to 2008."

Yet even if the breakthrough happened in 2008, the 2009 season was a struggle. Salt Lake was atrocious on the road, away from their rowdy fans, and their ability to change that around versus tough teams like the Columbus Crew and Chicago Fire has been the biggest shock of the playoffs.

"The answer is that there is no easy answer," Kreis clarified. "There is no switch. There is no ‘Well, we did this and it meant we were a much better team.’ The answer is that is a cumulative belief over an entire season that, yeah, we’ve had a difficult season, yeah, we’ve done some silly things on the road and, yeah, we haven’t reacted well in certain situations as a team but we continued to believe and continued to think that we could do better, such in the penultimate game when the chips were clearly, clearly down, I think we learned from all the little errors that we had made along the way and we had all that belief that we knew that was there, that was underlying the entire season."

As Williams pointed out, the expansion teams from 2005 have earned their way as contenders in the league.

"Not for one bit do I think we’ve been lucky to get into the playoffs," said Williams. "We took our best chance to do it and left it up to other teams to do what they had to do to make it. We did and it’s been tough, especially for the last four years."

Luis Bueno, Andrea Canales, Goal.com

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