Schedule Changes and Roster Movement

Over the last two days the Rapids have announced 3 schedule changes:

• The Sun. July 12th home game against FSL has been moved to Sat. July 11th at 7pm
• The Sat. October 3rd home game against FSL has been moved to Sun. October 4th at 5pm

What happened is that with the Gold Cup schedule being announced on Thursday the planned FOX Sports 2 coverage of our Rocky Mountain Cup match on July 12th conflicted with FOX's Gold Cup coverage.  So FOX gave the July game back to Altitude and the Rapids moved it to the better attended Saturday night.  In exchange FOX took the October Rocky Mountain Cup game and moved it to their Sunday night national TV slot.

The other change is the Red Bull New York road game on Sat. July 25th.  It has been moved to Wed. April 29th so the Red Bulls can use that Saturday in July for a friendly.  This is a lousy move for the Rapids as it will now have them play Dallas at home on the 25th, fly to NY for the game on the 29th, then turn around and fly to LA for a game 3 days later on May 2nd.  Meanwhile both the Red Bulls and Rapids have a bye this weekend.  Had somebody at MLS or Red Bull been paying attention when the schedule came out months ago they could have rescheduled the game to this weekend and allowed both teams to play on regular rest.  Yes it would have risked an early season weather delay but is that really worse than 3 games in 8 days on both coasts?

Also some roster news.  Reports are that Eloundou is in Charlotte going through preseason training with the Independence.  However it sounds like this is just a temporary thing while he works on his fitness and he's expected to rejoin the Rapids in a couple of weeks.  He missed almost all of preseason due to his visa issue so this is probably a way to get him back into playing shape with other players going through the same thing.

It does sound like that both John Berner and Caleb Calvert will be joining the Independence on a longer-term basis though as part of our partnership with them.  This will be a good chance for both younger players to get some competitive playing time.  If they stayed in Colorado neither of them would be likely to see the field.

The last piece of news today is that Joseph Greenspan is back with the Rapids during the Naval Academy's spring break.  The team is still working with the Navy to maximize Greenspan's time with the team this season but obviously his responsibilities to the Navy will come first.  When announcing this the Rapids also mentioned journeyman Jeff Parke is trialing with the team.  He's a defender that is probably being looked at to help fill out our thin backline, especially with the suspensions we picked up.