FOR REAL: Kyle Beckerman Pt 3
20. You have the persona as a free spirit: the dreadlocks, and it looks like from your myspace page that Reggae is your musical choice, and I hear you’re a surfer and those kind of things. Is that an accurate reflection of who you are? Yeah. I would say I’m one person on the field and another off. I really in the games am sometimes too emotional in the game. I get stupid yellow cards sometimes. But off the field, I’m just real mellow. And I like outdoor stuff, so being in Utah is nice. We’re just missing that beach right down the street, but yeah that’s pretty accurate.
21. When did you first try out the dreads? Well about 3 or 4 years a couple of them started coming in, and I just decided that I’m gonna keep growing them. And so here I am.
22. I hear you are a guitar player, what kind of guitar do you play? I like anything acoustic. I like a lot of Jack Johnson – I learned a lot of his stuff. I like Tom Petty, OAR, Dispatch. I like anything acoustic.
23. So how does someone from Crofton, Maryland pick up surfing – where does that come from? Well that starts… we have Ocean City, Maryland’s kind of a summer place that you go in Maryland. So I started to go a little bit there. So I’m playing with Under-17 national team and a lot of our camps are in San Diego to get ready for wherever we had to go. And me and former Salt Laker’s Seth Trembly and DJ Countess – we’d get a day off and DJ’s uncle had a place in San Diego and we’d get a day off and start to go. So we’d go a little bit. We’d just battle with the whitewater, nothing serious because it’s a tough sport. So we continued to keep going and then with the offseason that we had here we were able to go a little bit longer. A buddy of mine has a place in San Clemente, California, and one off-season we went out there for about a month and pretty much went morning, lunch and evening and then got it.
24. I heard that the last couple of off-season’s you have been in Costa Rica? How’s that? It’s nice, really nice. A couple of years before we went to Hawaii. Then the past three we’ve been going to Costa Rica. Every year I go let’s go somewhere different and then we just end up going there. We get there right at the beginning of dry season, they have a rainy season – right at the end of our season it’s raining, raining, raining, then when we get there it stops, it’s sunny and the waves are good. Perfect conditions.
25. What would most people be surprised to know about you? Umm, nothing.
26. Where did you pick up the Spanish? The Spanish. I took Spanish I in school, I guess most schools you have to take a foreign language. So I took Spanish I from 7th grade, 8th grade, and then I went to a private school and took it again, and then I came back to my public school and took Spanish II. So I kind of got a basis of Spanish I, and then it’s just been going, luckily in preseason we’ve been going to Spanish speaking countries for a couple of weeks here and there. And then getting guys on the team that speak Spanish. And it’s a little better here, cause on most teams the foreign guys stick to themselves, but here their just like us. So they are trying to learn English and I’m trying to learn Spanish and we just trade off.
27. How about the stadium, you were around with the Colorado opening, what do you see that being like for you as a team? Yeah it’s going to be great. It will be a shame leaving Rice Eccles. It’s a great atmosphere for the fans. It’s close, it’s loud. And we’ve learned how to do well there. But at this stadium the grass is going to be perfect, so I think we’ll get better as a team playing on the grass. I think it will help our away form, and for the fans it’s going to be awesome. There’s not a bad seat in the house. It will be really loud. It’ll just be special because it’s our house. You know, we are not sharing with anybody. It’s a big deal to have your own place.
28. Do you think it will take a transition period, like you said we struggle more when playing away on wide, grass fields, is that something you see as happening? It could, but I think we’re going to have at least a month before to practice in every day. And I think that will be huge for us, because we need it. So hopefully – I mean there’s going to be no excuses –but it’s been seen that sometimes when you go into a new pitch, and different dimensions of the field it could hamper you. We’ll hopefully be prepared, and just ready to continue.
29. Like you said though, probably it will help you in the long run? Yeah I think in the long run it will definitely help.
30. What do you think is the most important thing for this team to take it to the next level, you know competing for an MLS Cup – what’s the thing you see that’s still lacking? We definitely need to get better on the road. And I think that’s not even wins, it’s less losses, just getting some draws on the road. Sometimes when we are not playing well we’ve gotta find a way to get a draw or a win. That’s the thing, I think all of our draws except maybe one – I think we played pretty well in Chicago – we’ve been the better team. We’ve been the team that dominated the game. We’ve gotten more shots on goal, more chances, and we weren’t able to finish them off. I think that’s something that you’ve gotta take care of that. In the games that you draw you want those to be the games that maybe you’ve gotten outplayed. If we can switch those around, I think we should easily be at 10 wins.
31. What do you think the difference is on the road? Obviously you are in a different environment, but is it a mindset, is it personnel that we have for the road versus home? I can’t really put my finger on it. I feel like the confidence is there, I think even the last game I felt like everybody was ready. We felt pretty confident going in thinking we can get a win here, there’s no reason not, we just beat them at home. We got out there and we just didn’t have the energy. And I think it’s something we’ll work on, and as guys mature and we get playing together more – I think we’re learning a lot this year, it’s been a big learning curve for us. It’s gone this way and we learn from it, and we come back the next road trip and it’s been better. So if we can continue that, continue learning, then I guess it’s going to be second nature. It’s not really one thing, we just need to get better. It’ll come around I think, but if you look at the history of the league not many teams do so well, and I don’t really no why that is. You are on the road, but it’s not like you are going to Manchester United or something like that. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but for some reason that’s the way it is. But if we can get better at that, then we can definitely be at the top of the league. If we can keep the way that we are playing at home. If we can get better on the road and just clean up those ties at home, then we should be sitting pretty.
32. One last question, you have been here a little over a year, right? Do you hate the Rapids yet? Well now that they just got rid of Clavijo I don’t hate them as much, I don’t think. No, I like some of the players. But some of the players now that I’ve played against them a couple of times, I don’t really like too much anymore.
