With a bevy of young talent, the Young Reds fit their nickname heading into their season opener on Saturday vs North Texas.
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TORONTO, ON- When Toronto FC II kick off their 2021 USL League 1 campaign against North Texas Rising SC on May 22, it will be the first time that the Young Reds have played a competitive match in nearly two years.
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595 days after playing to a 1-1 draw with the Chatanooga Red Wolves, TFC II looks a lot different. While many players have re-signed, most of the group has either graduated to the MLS side or moved on to other chapters in their lives.
The 2021 USL League 1 season will also be extremely different from past USL campaigns, as no matches will occur in the GTA; instead, TFC II will make their home Casa Grande, AZ and Kissimmee FL.
While new players will try to establish themselves within the club, Head Coach Mike Munoz will also debut with TFC’s second team. Ali Curtis and TFC staff appointed Munoz to the position in , but the 37-year-old has yet to walk the sidelines in match action.
Meanwhile, former TFC II head coach Michael Rabasca, who initially moved onto become TFC’s Mississippi installment loan laws director of high performance, is back with the LA Galaxy as their director of cognitive performance.
Before joining Toronto, Munoz spent six years with the Galaxy, where he amassed coaching experience with the U14s, U16s, U18s, LA’s USL side and served as the Galaxy Academy Director. With several years of experience managing young players and learning the intricacies of working in an MLS club, Munoz is a good fit for a young and raw TFC II roster.
With the new coach also comes new players. So without further adieu, a brief rundown of the faces on Toronto’s, nay, Casa Grande’s USL League 1 team. The players are listed by their experience with TFC II in the past.
Caleb Patterson-Sewell is the most experienced player on the TFC II roster and is the oldest by nearly a but is returning to the roster not only as a steady hand in net but a player-coach to help many of his teammates in their first pro seasons.
Most recently, he served as the pool keeper for MLS in the 2020 season. The emergency goalkeeper role was just the latest stop on his 16-year professional career, and rejoining the club he was last at in a new role signals the end of a long-playing career.
However, while he is an experienced member to make the pro adjustment easier on the youth, he is also a solid goalkeeper after recording five clean sheets in 25 matches with TFC II. He will likely get a split of games with Andreas Vaikla, who is next on our list.
You see? You didn’t have to read much more to get to Andreas Vaikla, TFC II’s new Estonian international between the sticks.
Vaikla was born in Toronto but has spent the majority of his career in Europe. At 24-years-old, the 6-foot-5 goalkeeper comes to Toronto from JK Narva Trans of Estonia, where he made 11 appearances and kept a clean sheet in 2020’s shortened season.
He has three caps with the Estonian senior national team, including a clean sheet in his debut back in . Although it has been a while since he has represented Estonia, a good run of games in the USL could put him back in the fold of the 116th ranked FIFA nation. Vaikla is likely to split starts with Patterson-Sewell in Arizona, before Brogan Engbers also enters the fold in Florida.