Today the Pittsburgh Riverhounds and the Houston Dynamo announced an affiliation partnership for the 2014 season. We saw how affiliation helped a number of teams last season with the poster child being Orlando. The Hounds weren’t kidding when they said they wanted to follow Orlando’s model on their road to an MLS franchise. Kutney emphasized again, “we want to be the next Orlando.” While the pros and cons of affiliation can be argued, by signing top players of their own this off season and affiliating with one of the best MLS franchises, the Hounds are setting themselves up to be THE top team in the USL for years to come.

You can read the full press release on the Hounds website and elsewhere. At some point the entire press conference will be online for you to watch. Also check out the nice post on the Dynamo’s website welcoming us. Espo had a chance to have an in depth talk with Chris Canetti, the president of the Houston Dynamo, and will post his thoughts a little later. In the meantime here are a couple bullet points from the press conference that stuck out to us.

 

The Houston Dynamo are not going to tell the Hounds what to do.

It was stressed a couple times in the press conference that the Dynamo are not going to make the Hounds their puppet team. Any players sent to the Riverhounds will have to fight for a spot in the starting XI just like any other player. The Dynamo FO respects coach Justin Evans and any coaching decisions his staff will make. Evans said they have a “you run your team and I’ll run my team” understanding. This was good to hear as this is one of the bigger fears of affiliating. I’m sure we’ll still see the Dynamo players get a lot of playtime, but Angulo isn’t going to get benched just because Joe Dynamo showed up earlier in the week.

 

The Hounds will have the opportunity to head down to Houston for pre-season training and friendlies against MLS teams and their academies.

This is big. The Hounds pre-seasons haven’t been the greatest in years past. As was so aptly put, “all these other teams were playing together while our guys were playing FIFA on XBOX.” Most of the time the players showed up less than a month before the season started, and beating up on local college teams probably isn’t very challenging. By being able to go down to Houston start training earlier, in better weather, and in the best facilities, we should see a much better team out of the gate.

 

Looking at a friendly against the Dynamo at Highmark Stadium.

This one is fun. It was mentioned the Hounds and Dynamo will look into having a friendly at Highmark Stadium sometime this summer (possibly during the World Cup break). Any regular friendlies against top level teams like Houston or Wigan will do wonders to help raise the Hounds stock locally, and in the MLS.

 

Couple notes not related to Houston: 

The Hounds PDL team is still in the very early stages and not much info is available at this time. We did find out that the PDL team will play at Highmark Stadium, and will probably play most of their matches before Hounds home games. While not confirmed, season tickets will more than likely get you into both matches. The Steel Army might be starting the party early some days.

The much rumored supporters section expansion won’t be happening for the 2014 season. The Hounds are taking their time to make sure it is done right from a construction and a fan experience stand point. Because of this the deadline to have it done for next season has passed, and they’ll look at it again for 2015. They also have expansion ideas for other parts of the stadium.  While we probably won’t see any major enhancements next season we should still see some smaller improvements to Highmark Stadium.

The team store is almost done and ready to be filled with Hounds merch. If you’re attending the holiday party next week you might be able to browse their wares. The online store should be ready to take your money by Christmas. The Hounds are well aware of the jersey shortage last year and are making sure to stock a TON of them this year. It was even hinted at player specific jerseys.

The Hounds will start looking into the international friendly opponent sometime early next year. They want to make sure it’s locked down much earlier than last year to have time to promote the game.

Tuffy’s box of secrets isn’t empty quite yet.

 

#UNLEASH