So, if you stayed up late enough to see my recap of Saturday’s 1-1 season-ending draw against San Jose, you know that things didn’t go to plan for the two Austin-based media members who showed up to the post-match Zoom.
As a result, I was able to do an impromptu solo interview with each Wolff — head coach Josh Wolff and midfielder Owen Wolff — to answer what might be some burning questions from this last 2023 game — and perhaps more importantly, toward the coming offseason.
We’ll start with one head-scratching quote, though, that came from a question live in San Jose from a reporter there — in the first few minutes of the press conference, concerning his biggest lessons learned as a coach so far.
Josh Wolff started answering that by saying, “I think it's obviously managing expectations. I think, you know, we're two years old, three years old now,” before the Zoom feed cut out. It seems to be harkening back to something he told The Athletic’s Pablo Maurer and Felipe Cardenas before the 2023 season started.
Inherently, because of the way that we finished last year, there’s much more expectation in year three than the last year or two. Managing that expectation is going to be the tricky part. Of course, when you get to the conference finals, and you lose, there’s this expectation that you’ll just simply get back there. I know, and our staff knows ,and many of the players know, it’s not that easy. Especially combined with Concacaf Champions League, Leagues Cup, Open Cup and regular season, we could be looking at 45 to 55 games, easily. Building depth is a big part of it. I think we have okay depth. We’re still three years in. Other teams have constantly built and changed and brought in quality and moved quality when necessary. We have to keep that in mind moving forward.
That dovetailed into the conversation the coach and I had Saturday night, in which Wolff went back to the remarkable element of having eight different corner backs platoon throughout the season — an indication of how ravaged the squad was with injuries.
