Riverhounds captain Kenardo Forbes praises recruitment for ‘much better’ preseason than usual

Pittsburgh Riverhounds captain Kenardo Forbes believes that Bob Lilley’s recruitment strategy over the winter will give the club an advantage compared to previous seasons. 

The 2024 regular season is finally upon us, as the Pittsburgh Riverhounds will tomorrow travel out west to take on New Mexico United at Isotopes Park. Making the trip will of course be club captain and the USL Championship’s all-time leading assist holder Kenardo Forbes. 

Forbes is now in his 7th season with the team and 10th under Bob Lilley, and at the age of 35, he’s certainly no spring chicken to the footballing world or the routines of preseason. As noted before during preseason, one of the big challenges at the USL level is the constant turnover of players who are on short-term contracts. 

Speaking exclusively to Pittsburgh Soccer Now after practice on Thursday, Forbes, who noted that he was feeling “very old” but “in good spirits” spoke about how he manages to get used to different players arriving consistently over the years, especially because as a midfielder and captain he has to know how pretty much every new player within the squad clicks:

“That’s why you have a preseason. So you get those guys in, you know their tendencies, they know what I want to do, I get to know what they want to do. So I think it’s just that’s the reason why we have preseason and we just have to just work together each day to get on the same page with the players and the coaches because the coaches give us a lot of information.”

And having gone through these preseasons since 2015 when he first arrived in the USL Championship, the task of getting used to new players is nothing new to the Jamaican. However he did note that this camp felt a lot better than previous ones, and that’s down to the way the club handled the business of player turnover these past few months: 

“I think this one is much better because we returned like 11 guys and coach signed an additional 6, so I think we came into camp with like 17 signed players, so that’s always a good thing. Over the years, there’s always been like 11 trialists coming in, so we always have guys going in and out over preseason, but this year it’s been constant because we had like 17 players signed already.”