ORLANDO, Fla. – While his club ended their 2016 league calendar in October, Jason Kreis has hardly allowed himself a moment of respite this autumn, save from a brief holiday swing through his hometown outside New Orleans.
“I’ve not had a moment to stand still,” Orlando City's coach told MLSsoccer.com between travels to Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador and Argentina over the past month and a trip across the Atlantic this week. “We’ve gone straight from the year-end meetings and discussions with the players to traveling, pretty much immediately, down to South America for 15 days, and then to Louisiana for Thanksgiving and getting back here on Sunday.
“And I’m leaving again on Thursday for Europe. I am 100 percent busier now in traveling terms than during the season.”
Kreis has perhaps more reason than most MLS head coaches to be scouting new talent, having released six players last month, including four on the defensive side, and knowing the Lions could well lose one more to Atlanta or Minnesota in the Expansion Draft on December 13.
Having taken over midway through the season, he is also looking to bring in more of his own players, in addition to midfielder Matias Perez Garcia, his lone summer acquisition.
“We’ve been working non-stop, starting this summer when we got here,” Kreis explained. “The transfer window was only open for another 10 days, so we hit the ground running, starting lists of potential new players, and we have continued to work on those lists. We’re working as hard as we can to find new players for 2017.”
That explains the extensive trips to study players in the middle of their seasons ahead of the January transfer window.
“The first part of the trip was to spend some time at [new club technical partners] Atletico Paranaense [in Brazil],” Kreis said. “I wanted to get a feel for what that club looks like and take some ideas from that situation, as well as to talk about the match we will play against them next year here, and about the possibility of taking players on loan. Those discussions are ongoing.
“Then I went from there to Paraguay, from Paraguay to Peru, Peru to Ecuador and Ecuador to Argentina. All those trips were in and around meeting with potential players for next year and scouting potential new players as well.”
Kreis has two principal targets on his travels: to rebuild a defense that was statistically the worst in the league and to add experience and leadership to one of MLS' youngest rosters. While he still has plenty of promising young talent at his disposal, including center backs Jose Aja and Tommy Redding, he says it “wouldn’t be ideal” to start the season with them in tandem.
“On the defensive side, we feel there are good players here we can build around,” he added. “I think we actually have four very good young players, but I don’t think you want to enter a season where you are relying 100 percent on those players. So we’re looking for a mixture of experience, leadership and communication as well as players that are comfortable with the ball because, as we’ve said many times, we want to be a team that’s possession-oriented.
“It can be a difficult task to put all those things together. And we certainly have a process where we may wait for those qualities more than others, because you are never going to find the perfect players because we have to sync it all with the salary cap.”
While defense is the top priority, Kreis is also looking at other parts of the team.
“We believe we need to strengthen in other areas as well,” he confirmed. “We are scouring the earth – MLS, NASL, the college ranks and obviously the rest of the world … It is about finding the absolute best players for the positions we need.”
Kreis has one other offseason target high on his agenda: working on Cyle Larin, the big striker who led the team with 14 goals in 2016, but only two in the final 11 games.
“We don’t we need to shy away from the opinion that the second half of the season wasn’t Cyle’s best, so we need to address that,” Kreis said. “There are several reasons for it and it’s not as simple as one might think. So we address that in the offseason through pinpointing what it is that we thought was the problem and looking to improve those things. It starts with the offseason workouts and how fit he comes into the preseason, because I think that’s a pretty good place to start, to raise your fitness level to an all-time high.
“From my point of view, it is not so much to do with technique, it is more to do with tactics and focus.”
