Real Salt Lake selected Arturo Alvarez and Luis Gil in the MLS SuperDraft on Thrusday, and landed some allocation money on the side.
At least, that’s how general manager Garth Lagerwey looks at the situation after RSL spent a relatively quiet day on the draft floor, perhaps already more comfortable with their roster than any other team in the mix.
Alvarez and Gil were both previously acquired for picks in this draft, leaving the team with just two picks to work with when the chips were down. And they traded the first one away at No. 14, shipping the pick to former RSL assistant Robin Fraser and his new club Chivas USA for some allocation money.
“We had a list of six guys that we would have taken,” Lagerwey said. “We decided that we were going to wait and see who was there. I think they were all gone in the top ten.”
Unfortunately the picks above them did not pan out in a manner that they had hoped. In past years, the team had a wide discrepancy between their own draft board, and how the actual picks unfolded.
Not the case this time around.
“This was the first year that our rankings of the players were pretty spot on (with how the draft unfolded),”head coach Jason Kreis said.
When it came down to the No. 14 spot there was a flurry of activity and phone calls, which caused the RSL team to do something they rarely get to do in soccer - call a timeout.
“The reason for the timeout is that we had four or five teams that had asked (about a trade), and we followed up with them,” Lagerwey said, “and then it got down to two, and we eventually went with Chivas.”
With pick number 52 in the 3rd round, Real Salt Lake selected Jarad vanSchaik from the University of Portland. VanSchaik is from the same school as last year’s first round selection Collen Warner, and they relied somewhat on Warner’s input as they hadn’t scouted the player much.
“He’s a 6-foot-1, left-footed player,” Kreis said. “Truthfully we haven’t seen the kid play a whole lot, but he has some attributes that we find intriguing. We’ll be looking at him as a candidate to play left back for us.”
