After playing in 67 of 70 matches in four years at George Washington University, Pittsburgh Riverhounds rookie defender Tobi Adewole found himself in an unfamiliar spot to open the 2017 USL season: the bench.

He wasn’t just there for the Hounds’ 3-3 season-opening tie to the New York Red Bulls II on March 25; Adewole sat out each of Pittsburgh’s first 15 league matches.

“Even though I wasn’t getting playing time in the beginning, I just kept working hard, hoping I would get my shot,” Adewole said.

That shot finally came on July 4. Adewole started at center back in the Hounds’ 3-1 loss to the Charlotte Independence at Highmark Stadium. He played the entire match and finished with two tackles and a 58.3 percent passing accuracy.

Since then, Adewole has started each of the following three matches. His passing percentage has been more than 60 percent in each match, and he’s beginning to feel more comfortable.

“I feel like I’ve earned my spot by basically coming into practice with a chip on my shoulder, feeling that I want to be the best defender that I can be, the best defender here,” Adewole said.

The journey to becoming a lineup regular began last fall. Hounds head coach Dave Brandt, familiar with Adewole from his days coaching Navy men’s soccer, invited his former intraconference foe to a pair of tryouts in Pittsburgh.

Adewole wowed his future coach.

“He is the only one we pursued out of the second (trial),” Brandt said. “Trials are pretty big. There’s 60 to 70 guys and Tobi really stood out there.”

Brandt cited Adewole’s intelligence and athleticism as primary reasons for coveting him.

Despite an “average,” as Brandt described it, center back crop eligible for the 2017 MLS SuperDraft, Adewole was not expected to be selected. Instead, he signed with the Hounds on Jan. 9, two days before the SuperDraft began.

Adewole was looking forward to joining the Hounds immediately. He planned to take online classes through George Washington to finish out his senior spring semester while training full-time in Pittsburgh.

Unfortunately for Adewole, he was not offered financial aid if he was not a full-time student in-person at George Washington’s campus in Washington D.C.

However, Brandt wanted Adewole on his team and that was all that mattered. The Hounds would work with Adewole.

“At that point, with us knowing we wouldn’t really have a center back until May, we were faced with a choice,” Brandt said. “We could have voided the contract and said, ‘well, ok, if you can’t be here until May, we’re not going to sign you.’ It was frustrating for Tobi and frustrating for us to not really have him, but I think it was the right decision in the end to keep him.”

The process wasn’t easy for either side. Adewole shuttled back and forth from Washington D.C to Pittsburgh from January to May. Weekdays were spent in the nation’s capital and weekends in the Steel City.

Adewole also trained with his alma mater at times while in D.C. It meant more time around his former head coach, Craig Jones, who named Adewole the Colonials’ captain his senior season. Despite the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the delayed start of Adewole’s USL career, Jones helped keep Adewole’s spirits up.

“My big thing [that I told him] was be patient, wait for your chance and when you get it, take it,” Jones said. “We had him [at George Washington], so we knew he could do it, it was just whether he could get that chance.”