You can always come home: RSL can move forward as club brings back Jason Kreis
You can always come home: RSL can move forward as club brings back Jason Kreis
The 50-year-old native of Omaha, Nebraska is back in a dual business/sporting role at Real Salt Lake, another milestone for the club's first player, captain and MLS Cup-winning head coach.
Home is home, and you can always return, if it stays that way.
Jason Kreis didn’t come from Utah. But the 50-year-old native of Omaha, Nebraska is back in a dual business/sporting role at Real Salt Lake, another milestone for the club's first player, captain and MLS Cup-winning head coach.
Kreis was named the club’s first-ever director of operations and special projects Tuesday, a newly-formed role that will report directly to RSL president John Kimball in support of sporting director Kurt Schmid and head coach Pablo Mastroeni amid a coaching staff shakedown, as well as integrating a variety of business and community initiatives under the club’s umbrella.
He won’t be coaching. But Kreis, who won the franchise’s first (and only) MLS Cup nearly 15 years ago, will. be handily involved in the program that helped launch him across the country and briefly overseas in his soccer career.
Kreis was RSL’s first-ever player via trade in October 2004, moving from FC Dallas to Salt Lake and growing to become a club legend from there. He became the inaugural member of Major League Soccer’s 100-goal scoring club and donned the captain’s armband for a team that struggled more than it succeeded in his 58 appearances from 2005-2007.
But fortune favors the bold — Audentes Fortuna Iuvat, as Kreis likes to say, a motto that would become emblazoned across RSL’s properties — and in May 2007, Salt Lake made the bold decision to take Kreis immediately out of retirement from the pitch and trade in the captain’s armband for a head coach’s sweater.
The decision led up to a seven-year run that brought RSL from the league’s cellar to four Cup finals, the 2009 MLS Cup championship, and a 111-68-87 record across all competitions from 2007-13.
Who can forget the RSL’s CONCACAF Champions League final against Mexico’s Monterrey, the #MLS4RSL series that was the first of league teams rallying behind a single banner in the hopes of vexing its rivals to the south for regional supremacy?
Quite simply, Kreis — along with club legends like Nick Rimando, Kyle Beckerman, Jamison Olave and Javier Morales — led Salt Lake to some of its best days in franchise history, and a position the club has rarely seen since he departed in 2014 for another expansion club in New York City FC.
Now he returns to his former longtime home, to a place where he initially began to set down roots and where his youngest son is currently a third-year student at the University of Utah.
“Quite simply, my family and I are elated to return to Utah for this outstanding opportunity,” Kreis said. “It is no secret that the Dave Checketts days are often referred to as ‘Camelot’ by those of us who were lucky enough to experience the highs and lows of building this Club. With David Blitzer and Ryan Smith now serving as the community stewards for our beloved Club, the opportunities here are boundless.”
Kreis, who also spent time leading Orlando City SC for two years, was just 32-21-47 all-time in MLS stops outside of Utah before spending thee years as an assistant at Inter Miami CF and leading the United States’ U-23 side through Olympic qualifying in 2021.
Now he returns to Real Salt Lake, but a very different club — and league — than when he left the Wasatch Front. MLS will add its 30th team when San Diego joins the league in 2025, every team but five plays in a soccer-specific stadium, and Apple has brought the league’s reach worldwide with a 10-year, $2.5 billion media rights deal that has seen MLS matches as available in the United States and Canada as they are in South America, Europe and most of Asia.
Yet in many ways, it’s also never been easier for a small-market, underdog club to compete in the sprawling league that swells across thousands of miles, both coasts, and all four time zones. Columbus Crew SC just won its third MLS Cup title in history, and second in four years, with a 2-1 victory over LAFC this past weekend.
The team that was once on the verge of leaving for Austin has done so with an ownership group committed to the community, a brand-new state-of-the-art stadium at Lower.com Field, and an academy/progression system that ranks among the best in MLS with Crew 2 and beyond.
Sure, Columbus went out and hired a top-class coach in Wilfried Nancy and keyed in on essential targeted acquisitions like Darlington Nagbe and league wunderkind Cucho Hernandez.
The Crew have done little in winning titles that RSL can’t do, with an $80 million training facility in Herriman (that is set to undergo a multimillion-dollar expansion as it adds facilities for the relaunched Utah Royals) and an RSL Academy stretching across the western United States that set the standard for youth academies in North America for years.
What Kreis brings in his return to RSL, though, is unique. He’s not a “yes-man” who only delivers good news; part of his near-universal appreciation from scores of media was for his ability to tell it like it is.
Who can forget the now-infamous confrontation Kreis had with a local reporter who, quite frankly, was consistently off-task following a match before the championship winning head coach simply stopped him mid-press conference to say: “You’ve got bad questions tonight; really bad questions”?
On another occasion, after Kreis made his first return to Salt Lake with New York City FC, the manager took questions from a large thorn of assembled media. When a reporter from Sports Illustrated opened with the generic, “thoughts on the match” that has become a laughingstock in print media, Kreis replied: “Ask a question.”
The Duke-bred soccer talent approaching his third decade in soccer operations knows what his job is, and he knows that others have a job to do, as well. Part of Kreis’ run from 2007-2013 involved putting the right people around him, from assistant coaches (many of whom went on to head coaching jobs across MLS and beyond) to front-office staffers to team executives in both soccer operations and business.
Then, and this is the important part, he held people accountable for their actions.
There’s no reason he can’t hold the same standard in his next go-around in Salt Lake.