The Pittsburgh Riverhounds have both a much more complete roster, and a much earlier kickoff to their preseason in 2017. According to Head Coach Dave Brandt, that’s by design.

“The reason [for starting earlier] is that I value teaching and preparation time,” Brandt said after the club’s opening day of preseason camp on Monday. “Not that other people don’t, but the more I’ve got to try people out, the less I’m investing in actually creating our culture and what we’re doing on the field. … You can’t do both at the same time, or at least I can’t, and so because I value that, that’s why I wanted to go in [to preseason] with most of the team set.”

Brandt arrived with the Riverhounds midseason in 2016 after the side had taken just one victory in its first eight games of the season. After a 2015 season when Pittsburgh reached the USL Cup Playoffs, the chemistry and resoluteness that marked the side’s success appeared to dissipate.

As a result, the locker room that Brandt inherited posed a major challenge in terms of putting the pieces together at all in the remainder of the season. The Riverhounds finished with just six wins, tied for the fewest in the USL’s Eastern Conference, as the club was unable to string together back-to-back victories at any point of the season.

“I think for whatever reason a situation had developed where there was leadership lacking in the team, there was a real sense of a lack of chemistry off the field and a lack of cohesion on the field,” Brandt said of the situation. “That team just hadn’t jelled, and had some issues in terms of chemistry and who they were and what they were about. If you’d asked my sense of what it felt like to walk into that, I think it was very palpable. I felt that pretty quickly that these were the problems in the group.”