Last Saturday was a busy day for
the Fire in Chicagoland.
With the first team having
qualified for their 14th consecutive Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup days
before in a shootout victory over the San Jose Earthquakes, they welcomed the
team they’d just beaten to Toyota Park for a scheduled league fixture Saturday
night.
Thirty miles north of Bridgeview
and an hour earlier in Evanston, Chicago Fire Premier, the club’s amateur
entrant in the USL’s Premier Development League had their own Open Cup
qualification on the line as they entertained the River City Rovers (Louisville,
KY). The first four matches of every PDL team’s season doubling as U.S. Open
Cup qualifiers, the Fire Premier had gone 2-0 to start the 2011 campaign with
matching 2-0 wins over Akron (May 14) and Cincinnati (May 21).
With other results in the division
going the team’s way, namely perennial division powers the Michigan Bucks
earning only one point through their first two matches, a win last Saturday vs.
the Louisville-based club was all that was required for the Fire PDL side to earn
its spot in the prestigious Open Cup tournament. It usually takes teams all
four matches to clinch qualification.
They won, but the goal came late
as a Indiana striker Chris Estridge hit a 91st minute winner,
tallying his team-leading third goal of the season, while putting the Fire
Premier into their fourth U.S. Open Cup proper.
Heading to Detroit to take on the
Bucks on Memorial Day, the team dropped its first result of the year, 2-0 to a
Michigan side looking to play catch up in the Great Lakes Division race.
“I think it’s been a very good
start for us this year,” said Fire Premier Head Coach Mark Spooner. “We played
very well in the first three games and even in the loss [to Michigan] we played
well. It’s great to qualify for the Open Cup. It means a lot to me, it means a
lot to the players and a lot to the club as well. Qualifying is one of the
goals we had at the start of the season and its very nice to check that off our
list so early on.”
U.S. Soccer released the first
round pairings for the Open Cup Wednesday and the Fire Premier will start their
quest on the road against USASA side, the Iowa Menace. Basically a reserve team
for PDL powerhouse Des Moines Menace, who failed to qualify out of the
Heartland Division, it is expected players from the regular PDL side will
lineup in the Open Cup match when the two teams face off on Tuesday, June 14.
“When you reach the first round
stage of the Open Cup, there’s not going to be an easy game. It makes it very
difficult for us to have to go into Des Moines, IA, where they’re a fairly
soccer crazy town. I’m sure they’ll have a lot of fans at the game, in the Des
Moines Menace they have a very reputable program and the same expectations that
we do. It should be a very good game of two historically very good franchises.”
In the meantime, the team will
continue to plug away at another goal for the year, qualification for the PDL
postseason. In his second-year as a coach for the Fire PDL side, Spooner, who
also served as head coach of the Kalamazoo Outrage in 2009, knows all too well
how difficult finishing in the top two of the Great Lakes Division can be.
“I’ve said it when I was at
Kalamazoo and I’ve said it since I’ve been with Chicago. The Great Lakes
Division is one of, if not the toughest division in the country. That’s because
the quality of the teams from top to bottom is very good. There’s no easy game
at this level and the division continually provides a challenge in schedule for
us which is good for our guys.”
More than results, the Fire
Premier program is one built mainly around research and development. With an
alumni roster featuring the likes of future Fire first teamers Dasan Robinson
and Chris Rolfe as well as U.S. internationals Jay DeMerit, Brad Guzan,
Jonathan Spector and Ricardo Clark, the team has a proven track record of
helping to send players on to the next level.
With the advent of the MLS Home
Grown Player Initiative in 2007, the Fire Premier find a number of players on
the current roster that are eligible to sign directly with the first team after
spending two years in the club’s development program.
Seven players on the PDL team
currently fall under that classification: strikers Marco Gutierrez (Cicero, IL;
UIC) and Harry Shipp (Highland Park, IL; Notre Dame), midfielders Ian
Christianson (Rockford, IL; Georgetown) and Jacob Bushue (Champaign, IL;
Indiana), defenders Harrison Petts (Zionsville, IN; Indiana) and Bradley
Horton (Rockford, IL; Northern Illinois) and goalkeeper David Meves (Arlington Heights, IL; Akron).
“For us development is the most
important part of the PDL program. If we can prepare players for the next step
of their Chicago Fire careers that’s all for the better. Nothing would please
me more if at the end of the season we had a few guys pushing to make their way
into the first team.”
Next up, the Fire Premier have two
home games before their U.S. Open Cup match at Iowa on June 14. The team will play their
first-ever match vs. expansion Hamilton FC Rage on Friday at 6:30pm before
welcoming the Indiana Invaders next Thursday, June 9. Both matches will be
played at Evanston Township High School.
For more information on Chicago
Fire Premier, visit www.chicagofirepremier.com.
Jeff Crandall is the Team Writer for the Chicago Fire. Follow him on
Twitter @JefeCrandall.
PDL Catchup
