Hartford Athletic Head Coach Brendan Burke Reflects on 2024 Season: "We Have a Foundation"
The Hartford manager discusses chemistry, expectations, and why there's reason for optimism
2024 was an up-and-down season for Hartford Athletic.
After a promising start, the team hit a skid that reached five consecutive losses — including the worst loss in club history, 6-0 at Louisville City — in the league and at midseason the club had won five matches, drawn two, and lost 10 in the USL Championship as well as being dumped out of the U.S. Open Cup by NYCFC II. The second half of the season didn’t exactly start with a bang — Hartford lost 3-1 to Pittsburgh and won only one of their first four games — but things did improve with the side putting together a club-record seven-game unbeaten streak which included four consecutive clean sheets, a club record.
From an unpromising position at midseason, the Latics entered the last week of the season with a chance at the playoffs. It proved too much of a mountain to climb, but the progress was unmistakable. It’s the closest the club has been to the playoffs since the pandemic-hit 2020 season when Hartford played 12 games against MLS II teams.
Brendan Burke reflected on the magnitude of the task facing the club.
“I think…we were tight…because there were expectations based on what we've all accomplished individually in our careers,” he told The Blazing Musket. “I think the players felt that. I probably felt that a little bit like everyone expected, ‘bang! year one, a bomb goes off and now we're good.’ There's a reason we weren't good for five years here. So I think we had more work to do to correct on the whole than people realized and I think I was one of those people. I think the players were guilty of the same thing.”
Burke’s hiring was reflective of the work that had to be done: he’s the sixth full-time manager of the Latics in six seasons and only Harry Watling had lasted more than one full season in charge. It was also reflected in the roster turnover coming into the season: only four players (Danny Barrera, Kyle Edwards, Triston Hodge and Beverly Makangila) returned from the dismal 2023 season.
That level of turnover always poses potential chemistry problems and Burke pointed to this as one key driver of the poor form in the first half of the season.
“I think those [results] were married to chemistry and lack of trust in each other,” the coach said. “I do. When you're a team that's banded together and fighting for each other and concentrated on just results, finding ways to get results, even really good, entertaining teams can find ugly results through the course of the season. And we, we got really far away from that…we were expecting teams to back off a little bit because of who we had in one position or another. And the league's gotten way too good for that in terms of the talent level.”
For Burke, solving the problem was partly a question of relaxing expectations.
“One we were able to pull it back to, we said fun, free, and focused, but we just got back to let's not worry about any of the other things that are going on around us,” he said. “Let's do what we have always done well and what's put you here, What's put us here in a position in a place where we want to be and we know we can change the complexion of it. Get back to that.”
It was also partly a question of figuring out the chemistry on the pitch - even as the realities of the USL Championship made that more complicated.
“So Joey Akpononu did great by the time he left, but he left just as he was getting great for us last year,” Burke said. “So we have to look at how we manage that differently going into the pre season this year. But I was really happy with those guys, with Joe, with Jordan. You saw once they both got fit how effective we could be and trust those guys to cover big spaces because we want to be on top of teams.”
Jordan Scarlett’s return from injury was a key moment for the team, as was that of Renan Ribeiro, who was a finalist for USL Championship Goalkeeper of the Year, despite not playing in the first six games.
Perhaps the biggest key moment, though, was the switch from Romario Williams to Mamadou Dieng at forward. Dieng played somewhat sparingly during the first half of the season, with his most significant appearance being a fill-in while Williams was on international duty. Once Dieng did enter the starting lineup he excelled, scoring 11 goals in slightly less than 1,700 minutes.
Only Golden Boot winner Nick Markanich scored more goals across that span and by any other measure of forward play, Dieng was one of the top players in the league.
“[Dieng] only played 60% of the available minutes. I mean, that's on me,” Burke said. “I should have moved on from Romario and started playing him sooner. That doesn't mean Romario is not a good veteran forward. He is. He's proved that over his career. We just didn't know how good Mo was going to be. We knew he was going to be good and we saw glimpses in preseason and he needed some time to adjust his body to the demands of the level and man. Once he did, it was like…I could see him chasing goals records.” Indeed, Dieng already set the Hartford single-season scoring record, and needs only eight more to pass Danny Barrera for the all-time club record - a total that should come easily if he stays with the club.
Burke pointed to the club’s ability to grind out results in the latter part of the season as a sign of growth. He mentioned the ability to get results wasn’t something that the team was capable of earlier in the campaign.
The results weren’t there on the road early in the season. After winning the road opener at El Paso Locomotive, the Latics didn’t get another point on the road for nearly five months and didn’t get another win away from Trinity Health Stadium until they beat Miami in the middle of September. While it wasn’t always pretty, Hartford did get results in five of their last six road games, only losing an ultimately meaningless game in Orange County on the final day of the season.
In the final analysis, the season was a mixed bag: positive signs, but a failure to realize the hopes that were there to begin the year. For Burke, the season ended on a note of optimism.
“Yeah, I think you never sleep on on a season where you don't accomplish everything you want,” he said. “But I do feel like every person who's left in this building that's front office, that's, that's on the technical side, that's at the ownership level got way better at what they do. And I believe that genuinely, we just had, we had a big gap to close. But I feel like we closed the biggest part of the gap. And now it becomes about these little incremental gains that are right there for us. We have to see them and, and grab them or if we miss them, we'll continue to pay the price for missing them. But I feel like everyone got better. I genuinely feel a different energy in the building. A different energy and focus in the players. More freedom, less apprehensiveness. We know who we are now. We have a foundation and it's time to get after it. We just have to wait two months, unfortunately, to be after it.”