Roster Moves

The Rapids have made a raft of roster moves over the last couple of days.

The big one is our newest homegrown signing.  Seventeen year old goalkeeper Abraham Rodriguez was signed to a homegrown contract yesterday.  Abe signed and played with the Colorado Springs Switchbacks last season and when the Rapids camp opened with only three keepers in it (Irwin, Rawls, and Rodriguez) it was fairly obvious he was going to be signed to be the team's third keeper this season.  He's already won USL Player of the Week honors last year, and Tim Howard has said how impressed he is by him, so that's a nice CV to bring to the role.  In case you're wondering the Rapids have only ever used their "3rd keeper" in 5 league games in their history, and 4 of those were Pablo's dalliance with Joe Nasco for 4 games in 2014.  (Steward Ceus playing the opening game of 2013 was the 5th).

Today the Rapids announced that Rodriguez, along with Niki Jackson, Seb Anderson, and Abdul Rwatubyaye, have been loaned to the Switchbacks for the 2020 season.  Given that Rodriguez has already started for the Springs he'll be expected to compete to start this year.  That makes it very unlikely we'll see him in a Rapids uniform this year, unless he's backing up Rawls in a friendly or something.  There's a slight chance we could see him as a backup for an Open Cup game but most likely he'll be cup-tied to the Switchbacks before we enter the competition.  Also today Matt Hundley was loaned to Howard's Memphis 901 side for the season.  The Rapids maintain the right to recall all of their players at any time should it be necessary.

Also catching up on preseason results the scrimmage on Wednesday resulted in a 2-1 Galaxy win.  Rubio had the Rapids goal to give us the 1-0 lead.  This was largely Rapids reserves versus Galaxy starters so its hard to draw much from the result but the one thing that's stood out to me over the two games I've seen is that both Trusty and Moor have struggled at center back.  That's suddenly gone from a position I was fairly comfortable with to our area of biggest concern, especially since Ford hasn't seen any minutes this preseason which is probably indicative of a further delay in his recovery.  In this match Trusty was beaten for the first goal and Moor gave LA their second goal on an own goal.  This will bear watching early this season.