Hartford Athletic Preseason Notebook: Expectations High in Week One
Hartford Athletic Preseason Notebook: Expectations High in Week One
"Being a contender and being a winner are two very different things, and we needed winners in the group." - Brendan Burke
The 2024 preseason is finally here for Hartford Athletic, and the past week gave an entirely new roster a chance to take the field together at the Day Hill Dome for the first time.
“Personality wise, it looks like we’re gonna have a lot of fun together,” Head Coach Brendan Burke said. “There’s a lot of veteran guys in the group, which we did on purpose…Internal competition is gonna be huge for us, that’s something I preach all the time, and I want 20 guys scrapping to be in the 11 every weekend.”
The higher experience level was something Burke emphasized repeatedly following the team’s first training session — a veteran presence that he says is vital to bring a much-needed shift in mentality to Hartford.
“I purposely targeted a handful of guys that have a lot of trophies to their name, because being a contender and being a winner are two very different things, and we needed winners in the group,” Burke said. “We needed guys that can drag this culture and bring it to a different place than it’s ever been before and I’m confident that we got that mix right.”
One of the few players that have stuck around from the end of last season — and ever since the inaugural 2019 campaign, in fact — is Danny Barrera. The club signed the veteran midfielder to a multi-year extension in late November that also gave him a coaching role with the academy, but according to both Barrera and Burke, the 34-year-old still has a lot to give on the field.
“He brings the level up, even with over veteran guys around, he’s a really highly-technical player,” Burke said. “I know he’ll push himself through preseason to be as fit as he can be. They style of play is gonna be a little bit different, a little more demanding on the defensive side of the ball with us, but he’s a good pro so I think can make that adjustment and play an important role. From a leadership standpoint, he’s spotless. He does all the right things.”
Burke has full confidence in his ability to turn Hartford’s culture around. He’s no stranger to success, and he says he will rely on his experience across the USL and Major League Scocer to do so. His time out west saw him take a Colorado Springs team in a very similar position to Hartford to a pair of player berth in 2021-22, and his role in Houston running training sessions as an assistant played a vital part in their U.S. Open Cup victory and Western Conference final appearance in 2023. And then, of course, one can’t forget his decade with the Philadelphia Union organization under Hartford Chief Executive Officer Nick Sackiewicz.
“He knows the league, I think that’s very important,” Barrera said. ”He’s won this league, he’s taken teams that have been in our situation and taken them to a final. Him going off to MLS and getting that experience only boasts his resume as far as a winning coach.”
For Burke, the major piece to finding similar success in Hartford was finding the right mix of players — veterans who know what it takes to win and young players who he can develop for the future: “18-19 year old talents who, by the time they’re 25, could be household names in other countries.”
His experience in the league gives him a perspective that is especially important in the USL: knowledge of the travel, importance of depth and competition.
“There needs to be competition amongst the top 20 guys or so on your roster,” Burke said. “You need 18-20 field players plus 3-4 goalkeepers who can insert into a game at a moment’s notice so you can rotate on heavy travel weeks, on multiple game weeks…In Houston, we played 55 games last year, so everyone well and truly played a part in that success, and I think the same is gonna be true here.”
While most USL teams are privy to the yearly roster turnover that happens when a slew of players on one-year deals look for a new suitor, what looks like a similar story for Hartford comes with a different intent: one grounded in sustainability and development for the future. If all goes well, we may not see this level of change for a good few years in Hartford.
“I purposely turned over 20 or more players here, because I don’t want to look at long faces,” Burke. “We have no time to be sorry for ourselves, I want to be here for a very long time and I walked away from MLS with that intent. I want all those guys to understand that, that sacrifices are made and we put people invite places so that we can win and sustain this, and give the fanbase what they deserve. They keep showing up, it’s one of the best fanbases in the league, and the team’s been near the bottom. That has to change.”