Portland Timbers Training Today at Jeld-Wen Field & The Academy

A short update on Portland Timbers activities:

1. Some younger players continue developmental training during the off-season and those lads, plus two Academy players, trained at JELD-WEN Field today. The two Academy players joining were Christian Desir and Issa Hassan.

2. Christian Desir plays with the U-18’s and Issa Hassan is with the U-16’s. In considering their efforts today both settled in well, showed their individual skills and contributed when the opportunity presented itself.

3. Timbers first team players involved included Danny Mwanga, Bright Dike, AJ Baptiste, Kalif Alhassan, Ryan Kawulok, Brent Richards, Jose Valencia, Sebastian Rincon, and Charles Renken. Ian Hogg and Dustin Corea also participated while Chris Taylor continued to rehab jogging and stretching on the sidelines. All of them under the age of 23 with the exception of Bright.

4. Both Jake Gleeson and Joe Bendik trained with Mike Toshack for awhile before joining the others in the technical training session.

5. As for the training session itself – a number of activities occurred to include some strong technical training on short passes, movement (with and without the ball) and targeting some key areas on finishing touches.

6. All told, a good session that was interesting to take in; especially when seeing AJ Baptiste and Bright Dike battle it out against each other a few times. And no, nobody got ‘Dike’d’ and nobody got ‘Baptiste’d’ “(baptized)”…

7. No critical information to pass on with respect to activities by Gavin Wilkinson or Caleb Porter; Gavin is in travel mode and Caleb, as appropriate, is preparing Akron for their next match.

8. I did have a quick chat with Danny afterwards and he will be considering where he might do some additional off-season training when the sessions end here. He mentioned he might return to where he trained last off-season.

9. As for the Timbers Academy activities; they continue to train in preparation for their trip to California as well as an upcoming trip to Florida.

10. I can offer that the U-18’s have been training quite hard; the last session I attended was a hard workout focusing on different scenarios that thankfully took place with a bit of rain. As additional information becomes available I will pass along.

More later as the off-season unfolds.