Matt Besler and his Sporting KC teammates are locked down. But the training continues

On a typical weekday morning, Matt Besler will wake up alongside his wife, Amanda, around 9 a.m. The pair then begin their daily routine of rousting their two young daughters, Parker and Marin, and preparing them for the day ahead.

This routine takes about an hour each morning. After that, Besler gets ready for his morning workout at 10:30 a.m. with his Sporting Kansas City teammates.

Donning athletic gear and a pair of sneakers, Besler leaves his family soon after breakfast and heads downstairs to his basement.

“We do team Zoom training three times a week and there are three different groups,” Besler said Thursday. “So we have roughly 30 guys on our roster, so we split up into three groups, so you’ve got around eight to 10 guys in each workout.”

Since the suspension of Major League Soccer’s season on March 12 due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Besler and his teammates have taken to computer screens and engage in team workouts three times a week.

The workouts take between one to two hours each. The other two days of the week, Sporting KC’s players are left to figure out their own workout schedules.

In the month since Sporting KC, alongside every other professional sports team in the country, moved to this online training, Kansas City’s players have come to realize just how long they may be out of action.

Originally, the Zoom workouts were designed to keep Besler and his teammates in game shape. The hope was to give them the ability to jump onto the field as soon as possible if MLS games were suddenly rescheduled for an upcoming weekend. But as the suspension in play drags on, expectations about fitness levels are beginning to simmer.

“Now it’s been so long that we’re going to have to have some sort of period where we get back to training, that we have at least three to four weeks of another preseason,” Besler said.

Sporting’s players and coaching staff are also faced with the challenge of working around each others’ needs. Gadi Kinda’s religious beliefs limit his technology use to a minimum — between sunup and sundown only — while other players can’t do elaborate training because they live in apartments.

Coach Peter Vermes has stayed in close contact with his team. He’s called every player several times since the the self-quarantine began; he talks to Besler every couple of days regarding the latest news within the league or MLS Players’ Association.

That’s all well and good, but that training alone ... that has been tough.

“Every time we get together on our Zoom meetings, workouts, a couple of yoga sessions, you can just feel the energy within the group,” Besler said. “Everyone misses each other and everyone is saying that we can’t wait to get started again and hope to see everyone again soon.

“Soccer is a team game, so it’s pretty hard to train by yourself. You can do workouts by yourself on the treadmill and weight workouts, but it’s almost impossible to play soccer by yourself.”

If there is one positive to being isolated as the nation seeks to flatten the curve, it’s that Besler and many of his mates are seeing more of their families. Following his morning workouts, Besler spends the rest of his days with his wife and children.

He tries to get his kids outside as much as possible before settling down for the evening after dinner.

“Something like this has never happened before, so everyone is just kind of dealing with it as best as they can,” Besler said. “And whenever we do start playing (again), I think everyone will be looking forward to that moment.”

This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 4:10 PM with the headline "Matt Besler and his Sporting KC teammates are locked down. But the training continues."