FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – “What’s a bye week?”
That question was posed to me via Twitter this past weekend, and under the circumstances, it’s a perfectly legitimate inquiry. Because the Revolution haven’t had a bye week for a long, long time.
In fact, this upcoming weekend will be the first without a Revs game since February – yes, preseason – after the club played on the first 22 weekends of the 2015 MLS schedule. Their last official bye week during the regular season was August 9-10, 2014, exactly one year ago.
But while the break will be welcomed after a grueling stretch from March through July, it doesn’t necessarily come at a great time for a Revolution side which has started to find its groove in recent weeks, going 2-0-1 in the last three games to snap out of another summer slump.
“Can’t control our schedule,” head coach Jay Heaps said on Tuesday morning. “Obviously it’s a strange time for a bye week, but at the same time, we’ve just got to keep doing what we’re doing.”
Heaps said the Revs will do their best to maintain a sense of normalcy this week, with the caveat that their training regimen will be altered to account for the fact that there is no game on the weekend.
That means a bit of extra fitness sprinkled liberally throughout the week, including some sprints up the hill adjacent to the Revolution’s training field outside Gillette Stadium.
“It’s a fitness tool,” Heaps said. “With the bye week, we want to make sure that we’re adding the loads, because they’re not going to have the game on Saturday. We add the loads throughout the week so that come Saturday they can get a good break and a couple days off to decompress.”
The players will have three days off – Saturday, Sunday and Monday – to recharge both physically and mentally ahead of the final three months of the season.
This won’t be their only chance to do so, though – after playing through the first five months of the campaign without a bye, the Revs will have two more off weekends (Aug. 22-23 and Oct. 10-11) before the conclusion of the regular season.
