Dusting Up on the ‘07 Draftees

By: Jeff | February 28th, 2007

“(The veterans) have looked at the guys that have come in and have all pricked their ears up and thought ‘uh-oh, I need to watch my back here’, which is always what you are hoping to do when you bring in some of the young guys. This year, hand on heart, that is exactly what has happened.”

With New England Revolution head coach Steve Nicol saying such things during informal chats about preseason training, now seems like a good idea to find out as much as possible about the new faces in the Revs’ locker room. Seeing as the Revs didn’t add – dang – anyone outside of the draft, there’s nothing in the way of a history in Major League Soccer (MLS) with which to work; and that means there’s nothing for it but some digging.

So, over the next days (weeks? we’ll see…), I’ll be searching Google and the news archives of various colleges and, where it applies, non-academic environments to see what I can find about the Revs’ six new players. Four of them – Wells Thompson, Ryan Solle, Amaechi Igwe, and even Adam Cristman, who, for reasons of which I’m currently unaware, does not appear on the current roster – went to colleges across the country, so I’ve already approached the soccer programs at Wake Forest and Santa Clara to see whether they’ll talk..and, no, I don’t have ways of making them. We’ll see what happens there and, if I don’t hear back, there’s always Google, right?

I’m going to grandfather Miguel Gonzalez and Arsene Oka into this project, in spite of the fact that both players signed late last season as opposed to getting drafted ahead of the current one. Whenever they signed, I don’t know anything about them.

You’ll notice all the names listed above, with the exception of Cristman, are highlighted; those links will take you to the profiles posted by the New England organization. There’s decent stuff in them, notably statistics for each player, as well as dross like favorite movies and music. But I’m hoping to find information beyond numbers and an appreciation for Korn (though no one, to my knowledge, confessed to the latter); is the player fast, mentally resilient, a team-leader, etc.

Let’s see what the Web can teach us, people.