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Over three years after Austin FC was announced as an upcoming MLS team, Head Coach Josh Wolff spoke with the media on Tuesday about the team's first days on the pitch.
The team is now two days down with official preseason training as the team prepares for their inaugural season starting April 17. Wolff said that it is satisfying to finally make it onto the field after years of work.
"There's a lot of people that put in a lot of work over the past two years for us to get us to this point," Wolff said. "For it to finally come to fruition and be out the field with the guys this last week... it's great."
Wolff talked leadership, strategy and player health in the team's first-ever preseason press conference. Here's a few key takeaways on the state of the club:
Training strategy
Wolff has described his leadership style as "being detailed and disciplined and having energy," and said he's happy to have both experienced and young players on the team.
"I want a dynamic group that's hungry and eager to play," Wolff said. "We want to play a certain way that's going to take a bit of bravery and courage."
With players from all levels of experience and all corners of the globe, Wolff said their initial strategy has been unifying player strategies by focusing on offense.
"I think the first thing is trying to get the players to understand philosophically how we want to play, that the ball is our friend and we want to possess the game," Wolff said. "That's the starting point, to sort of bridge all of these different ideas and personalities together into a collective mold."
When finding a unifying team culture, Wolff said it's important for team leadership to help embody Austin FC standards.
"You certainly want to set the standard quickly," Wolff said. "It starts with the environment of our leadership, our coaches, our front office, and that's something that we bleed into the team."
Team leadership
Wolff said that no team captain has been announced but that there are plenty of players who carry leadership qualities.
"I think we've done a good job bringing in a lot of players that exude that leadership quality... and that helps build out our identity," Wolff said. "I don't think we'll be short on leadership options."
While no captains have been released, forwards Rodney Redes and Cecilio Dominguez have been standouts in the first two days of training. Redes, who was filmed scoring a goal in a team video, has been described as having great energy on and off the field.
"Rodney's always smiling (and) he works tirelessly," Wolff said. "His verticality, to run behind lines, to arrive in the penalty box, I think that's the most impressive."
Wolff said that Dominguez, who has been training as an attacking midfielder and can play both inside and wing positions, has great position flexibility.
"Most importantly, he's got great energy, but his ability to hear what we're trying to teach and apply it quickly is nice to see," Wolff said. "What you like about him is his calm and cleverness, his mobility and movements in and around the box and his desire to score goals."
Recruits, injuries and transfer updates
With 23 players on its roster, Wolff said that their senior roster is "near completion" but that they will continue to look for supplemental players throughout the season.
The team is currently missing two signed players: designated player Tomas Pochettino and young Slovenian defender Zan Kolmanic. While Pochettino should be available next week, Wolff is unsure when Kolmanic will make it into town.
Luckily, no players have injuries that should sustain into the season so far (knock on wood), and Wolff said that the team is fairly healthy.
Although ATXFC is finally on the field, Wolff said he doesn't know if they'll ever feel a "we made it" moment unless a trophy is lifted.
"It's a testament of where we've come as a club and an organization in a short time," Wolff said. "You're able to get out on the field which is certainly a pinnacle of all the work that we've done, but it's just the beginning."
While no official schedule has been announced, it is rumored that the MLS will announce home openers Wednesday afternoon with full team schedules to be released in coming weeks.
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Popular
(Pexels)
If you are a committed, grunge-wearing resident of the Pacific Northwest, it is easy–almost automatic–to look at Texas as an extraordinarily dry, hot and culturally oppressive place that is better to avoid, especially in the summer. Our two granddaughters live with their parents in Portland.
Recently we decided to take the older girl, who is 15, to Dallas. Setting aside the summer heat, a Portlander can adjust to the vibes of Austin without effort. So let’s take Texas with all of its excesses straight up. Dallas, here we come.
Our 15-year-old granddaughter and her sister, 12, have spent summer weeks with us, usually separately so that we could better get to know each individually. In visits focused on Austin and Port Aransas, the girls seemed to be developing an affection for Texas.
Houston and Dallas are two great American cities, the 4th and 9th largest, each loaded with cultural treasures, each standing in glittering and starchy contrast to Austin’s more louche, T-shirts and shorts ways.
Three hours up I-35, Dallas loomed before us as a set of gray skyscrapers in a filmy haze, accessed only through a concrete mixmaster of freeways, ramps and exits. I drove with false confidence. Be calm, I said to myself, it will all end in 10 minutes under the hotel entrance canopy. And it did.
The pool at the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. (Crescent Court Hotel)
We stayed three nights at the Crescent Court Hotel ($622 a night for two queens), a high-end hotel in Uptown, patronized by women in white blazers, business people in suits, and tall, lean professional athletes, their shiny Escalades and Corvettes darting in and out, and other celebrities like Bill Barr, the former attorney general who shoe-horned his ample self into a Toyota.
Each morning as I walked to Whole Foods for a cappuccino, a fellow identified by a bellman as Billy the Oilman arrived in his Rolls Royce Phantom. Where does he park? “Wherever he wants to. He likes the Starbucks here.”
We garaged our more modest set of wheels for the visit. We were chauffeured for tips by Matt Cooney and Alfonza “The Rev” Scott in the hotel’s black Audi sedan. They drove us to museums, restaurants and past the enclaves of the rich and famous. In Highland Park, The Rev pointed out the homes of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and Troy Aikman along with the family compound of the Hunts, oil and gas tycoons.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Cartier and Islam” exhibit (until Sept. 18) attracted an older crowd; the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science was a powerful whirlpool of kids’ groups ricocheting from the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the oil fracking exhibit. Watch your shins.
A Geogia O'Keeffe oil painting called "Ranchos Church, New Mexico" at the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art. (Rich Oppel)
For us, the best museum was the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, a 50-minute, madcap drive away via a 75 mph toll lane along I-30. Don’t try it during rush hour. The Carter has an exquisite collection of Remington paintings and sculptures and an excellent array of 19th and 20th-century paintings as well. Pick one museum? The Amon Carter. Peaceful, beautiful, uncrowded, free admission and small enough to manage in two hours.
The Fort Worth Stockyards, a place of history (with a dab of schmaltz), fun and good shopping, filled one of our mornings. The 98 acres brand the city as Cowboy Town, with a rodeo and a twice-daily (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) cattle drive. We shopped for boots, drank coffee and watched the “herd” of 18 longhorns. So languid was their progress that if this were a real market drive the beef would have been very tough and leathery before it hit the steakhouse dinner plate.
The cattle drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards. (Rich Oppel)
But we could identify: the temperature was 97. “I saw a dog chasing a cat today,” said the emcee, deploying a very old joke. “It was so hot that both were walking.”
With limited time, we chose three very different restaurants:
- Nobu, in the Crescent Court Hotel; Jia, a modern Chinese restaurant in Highland Park; and Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Nobu’s exotic Japanese menu set us back $480, with tip, for four (we had a guest), but it was worth it.
- Jia was an ordinary suburban strip mall restaurant, but with good food and a reasonable tab of $110 for four.
- Joe T.’s is an 85-year-old Fort Worth institution (think Matt’s El Rancho but larger), a fine Mexican restaurant where a meal with two drinks was $115.
Sushi at high-end restaurant Nobu. (Crescent Hotel)
It was all a splurge for a grandchild’s visit. Now we will get back to our ordinary road trips of Hampton Inns, where a room rate is closer to the Crescent Court’s overnight parking rate of $52. And to corner cafes in small towns.
Did Dallas change our 15-year-old’s view of Texas? “Yes. I think it’s a lot cooler than I did. The fashion, the food.” So, not only Austin is cool. Take Texas as a whole. It’s a big, complex, diverse and wonderful state.
(Tesla)
Giga Texas, the massive Tesla factory in southeast Travis County is getting even bigger.
The company filed with the city of Austin this week to expand its headquarters with a new 500,000-square-foot building. The permit application notes “GA 2 and 3 expansion,” which indicates the company will make two general assembly lines in the building.
More details about the plans for the building are unclear. The gigafactory has been focused on Model Y production since it opened in April, but the company is also aiming for Cybertruck production to kick off in mid-2023.
While there is room for expansion on the 3.3 square miles of land Tesla has, this move comes after CEO Elon Musk’s recent comments about the state of the economy and its impact on Tesla.
In a May interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, Musk said the gigafactories in Berlin and Austin are “gigantic money furnaces” and said Giga Texas had manufactured only a small number of cars.
And in June, Musk sent a company wide email saying Tesla will be reducing salaried headcount by 10%, then later tweeted salaried headcount should be fairly flat.
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