BEAVERTON, Ore. – It came down to the final game of the season.
On September 24, Portland Timbers 2 hosted Arizona United SC in the final match of the 2016 USL regular season. Up to that point, T2 had been on a red-hot run, winning each of its previous four matches and putting itself in surprise contention for a spot in the USL Playoffs.
Though T2 won the game 3-2 over Arizona, elsewhere in league action, Orange County Blues won their final match 4-0 over Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC, eliminating T2 from playoff contention on goal differential by two goals.
Despite the disappointment of missing the playoffs, the late-season run was a remarkable turn of events for a Timbers' developmental squad that had begun its season with just five wins from its first 20 matches.
“We needed to be patient with that group,” said T2 head coach Andrew Gregor in a recent offseason interview. “There were some times throughout the year when we had some really good halves [of soccer]...So we just needed to be patient with [the players] and it just kind of all came together towards the end of the year there and we went on a run.”
T2 won seven of its final 10 games and over its last five matches—all wins—the team outscored its opponents 12-5. Forward Villyan Bijev, brought in before the 2016 season, scored or assisted on eight of those goals.
“We always want to win,” explained Gregor of missing out on the playoffs. “We always want to try and get [to] the playoffs and try and win a championship because that helps with development as well. But moving forward, development's the key thing.”
This past offseason, Gregor and his staff made moves explicitly designed to make T2 a younger squad, bringing several players up from the Timbers Academy and working in other young players like Bijev, forward Augustine Williams and midfielders Victor Arboleda and Dylan Damraoui. Those moves made T2 among the youngest MLS development sides in the USL.
So it came as no surprise when three weeks after that final match against Arizona United, the Timbers announced the signing of former Academy and T2 player Marco Farfan. Farfan, who appeared 18 times for T2 this season and played nearly 1500 minutes, is 17 years-old.
That signing illustrates the organization's developmental pathway and signals its intention to move players up from the Academy to the first team. It also signals Gregor's own willingness to give young Academy players like Farfan, Blake Bodily, and Terrell Lowe the opportunities to earn valuable minutes training and playing in a professional environment.
“You just put them in the environment and test them and see what they're about,” Gregor said of brining players up through the academy. “As [players], they thrive in those circumstances because they want to get better, they want to compete, they want to continue pushing higher and higher.
“We put Marco [Farfan] in from the very beginning and he took his lumps; he made some mistakes,” he added. “But you've got to believe in [the developmental process] and continue to work with them and coach them up and give them the confidence that they can go and he took it and ran with it.”
While Gregor finds it personally rewarding to see one of his former players sign with the first team – “it's awesome,” he said—he also knows how much work he and the rest of the coaching staff still have to do to help Farfan, and other young players like him, make that leap up to the MLS level.
“It's an exciting first step and I'd like to see [those signings] more often, but that's the challenge for us and we've got to continue pushing on it and trying to develop these guys to get them through [to the first team].”
To accomplish this and many of Gregor's other ambitious goals for the 2017 season—making the playoffs, starting the season stronger, getting younger as a team, and moving more Academy players into T2—he and the coaching staff have kept a foundational group of T2 players whom they hope will challenge for spots on the first team roster beginning next year.
“The core group that we have now did a good job of [pushing themselves] last year and the expectation is that they need to keep pushing and they need to produce and they need to go out and do what's expected of them within the confines of this club and our philosophy and not just be happy with being a pretty good USL player.”
But for Gregor, who only just completed his first full season coaching professionally, 2017 will also provide an opportunity for personal growth as well.
“Being around this club, being a part of this club for a long time, you're always continually learning,” he said. “There's a lot of very experienced people around this place that you can continue to learn from.”
