FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – While his players bundled up in head-to-toe layers to battle the 16-degree temperatures at Tuesday morning’s first preseason training session at Gillette Stadium, New England Revolution head coach Brad Friedel waltzed onto the field in shorts.
In that sense, Friedel is very much the same coach he was last year, his focus transfixed on winning games and improving his squad every day, undistracted by external factors – or, apparently, the cold.
But in several ways, 2019 will be very different for Friedel and his staff as they enter season two in New England. Last year’s “getting-to-know-you” preseason atmosphere is a distant memory. Friedel knows his players, and they know him, so expectations don’t need to be established through the next several weeks – they’re firmly in place from day one.
“It’s huge having one year under his belt and under all the guys that are coming back from last year to know what he expects, the demands that he has, and bringing the new guys into that and getting them acclimated as soon as possible,” said veteran right back Andrew Farrell, entering his seventh season in Foxborough. “He has high expectations, and that’s how it should be. We’re here to meet those.”
New England fell short of those expectations last year, missing out on the playoffs for a third straight season. But Friedel is confident that the Revs will be a much-improved group in 2019, now that he and his staff have had a full year to shape their own squad.
Of the 24 players currently signed to New England’s roster, 13 have been added since Friedel’s arrival. But just as important, Friedel has now had time to truly get to know the 11 holdovers from the previous regime, keeping only those players he felt were the right fit in Foxborough.
“You gain relationships with the players that were here, and you find out which players are going to be of the right mentality that you want for your own system,” said Friedel. “The ones that have left, it doesn’t mean that they’re bad players. It just means that they’re not going to be the players that fit into our system the way that we want to go forward.
“The most important lesson that you learn – and it doesn’t matter whether you’re in MLS or somewhere else – is what your own players that you have under contract are all about. That’s the most important lesson that can be learned. I’m not sure if it’s even a lesson. It’s just gaining as much knowledge as you can along the way.
“It’s very important to have that year under our belt, and we can’t wait to get going this year.”
Friedel added that the Revs “hope to still make a couple more additions to the team” as preseason gets underway, but they’ll begin working towards their 2019 objectives in earnest as they depart for a two-week training trip to Marbella, Spain on Friday evening.
A long-awaited return to the playoffs is one of several targets on New England’s radar this year, but for now, the Revs are simply focused on improving every day.
“There’s a lot of different goals we have this season. There’s going to be some short-term and some long-term, but that’s all left in-house. It’ll be interesting to see if the players tell you what they are,” Friedel said with a smile. “For me, we’re just focused on the task at hand. We know what we want to try to accomplish, and hopefully with hard work, we can do that.”
