And so it begins…

At the first day of camp, even goalkeeper Joe Cannon played a field position in the small-sided games. Photo: Jay Hipps, centerlinesoccer.com.

A cold but clear day greeted the Earthquakes yesterday for their first training session of the 2009 season, and Stanton Field buzzed with activity all morning. The first two-thirds of the session was devoted to fitness, as players ran a complex circuit around the turf, with small-sided games taking up the last hour or so. There were a number of trialists in — Jeff Carlisle reports on them here — but here at the Solar Powered Soccer Blog, our attention fell to the team’s efforts to bring in a few new faces.

Despite voicing some frustrations with the on-again, off-again nature of some of the discussions, both GM John Doyle and coach Frank Yallop were optimistic about the process. “We’re in a good position to get a few players,” said Doyle. “We have allocation money, we have cap space. We’re all right.”

Yallop concurred, noting that their evaluation process has revealed a number of players that they’d be comfortable bringing into the team. “We’ve got enough people that we’ve gone down the line with that we like,” he said. We don’t want to overpay anyone, but we need bodies and we need players for the start of the year, and we’ll have that.”

Doyle also explained that their job is easier this year, in part simply because they have a dedicated workspace for viewing game footage and DVDs on prospective players. That’s a step up from last year at this time, when their current facilities were under construction.

“I think in some ways it’s a lot easier because we have a locker room,” he said. “There were certain things (last year) that made it difficult just to work on a daily basis.”

Even bigger than that is the fact that the team now has a history together rather than just a memory of past San Jose glories. “We had our great history of the team before, but we had a season together last year… we have players under contract that we know are going to be back, we have a team, we have structure, we just have to add two or three pieces to the structure.”

It marks for a sharp contrast from last year, when the team could have used name tags on opening day because so few players knew each other.

Doyle noted one thing that was more difficult about this season, though. “One nice thing about last year is that we didn’t have to get rid of anybody, either, and the contracts were all in place so we didn’t have to sign anybody to any new contracts last year. Guys were all on options and the options were picked up. On the negative side, we were spending a lot of time just evaluating what we did last year and how we were going to move forward with contracts for players, and that takes a little bit of time.”