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SANDY — Real Salt Lake hosted the Brigham Young University Cougars in an exhibition match Monday night, which finished in the Salt Lake club’s favor with a 1-0 win. The match featured the reserve team and saw the return of RSL veteran defender Chris Wingert — a day he’s been itching for.
“It felt great to be out there,” Wingert said. “A little slow and sluggish, but I think maybe that’s to be expected — sometimes your mind thinks that you can do some things that your body can’t. The foot feels good and I just need to keep pushing forward and hopefully start to get a little sharper in the next week or two.”
The 6,335 fans in attendance welcomed him with a loud eruption of cheers, making it feel as though the stadium was sold out as he stepped onto the pitch for the first time this season.
“The fans have been great,” Wingert said. “I mean I feel bad, people are asking me all the time and I don’t have a really great answer for them, I just keep saying ‘soon’ and ‘a few weeks’ and that’s kind of true. It’s kind of where I’ve been at, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to give them an exact response, but it felt great to be out there and they gave me and the team great support.”
Wingert has used the last couple months to recover from a injury last December, a fracture to his right metatarsal — a long bone in the foot.
Wingert entered the match in the 60th minute for RSL defender Rich Balchan, giving him 30-plus minutes of action under his belt for the season thus far and hopes to keep building on that in the next couple weeks.
“I think I could have kept going. I was a little bit winded after making a couple of runs, but then I think I recovered pretty quick,” Wingert said. “I’d like to push it a little bit more throughout this week. Next week in Colorado I think we have a reserve game as well and I’d like to push it further and really try to test it a little bit. Tried to do as much as I could over the past few months, but it’s not quite the same as playing in games.”
With the opportunity to participate in training sessions and log minutes in reserve matches, Wingert is looking to earn him a spot back on the lineup for the first team.
“I think the guys are playing great and nobody owes me anything. I don’t deserve to be on the field unless I’m the best guy for the job,” Wingert said. “We’ll see how that goes. I’m not worried about that in my head in terms of I’m not going to stress over that, I just need to do all that I can to prove to the coaches that I need to be in there and control what I can control. But I absolutely need to win a spot back.”
Kira Terry is a sports writer covering Real Salt Lake for KSL.com. Follow her on Twitter, @kiraterry.
