BIRMINGHAM — There wasn’t any scoring in the match Saturday but Huntsville City FC Head Coach Jack Collison learned a lot about his first-year team.
HCFC played host Birmingham Legion to a scoreless draw in the club’s first-ever preseason match.
Though the team was together for just five days going into Saturday’s match, Collison said he was pleased with what he saw against the established Legion of the USL Championship.
“I think to get the group in together this week and get a little bit of training under our belt and get a performance like that, I think there were a lot of promising signs,” he said. “For week one, if that’s the bar we’ve set, I think we can be really happy with today’s work.
“It gives us a real good base now to kind of build of off that.”
For Birmingham, Head Coach Tommy Soehn said there is work to be done before their opener.
“You could see the rustiness and some decent plays but overall for what we got out of it — the exercise of having our first game is important, but realizing that there’s tons of stuff to work on,” he said.
Huntsville City FC will continue its preseason with a scrimmage Tuesday against Philadelphia Union II at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla.
Collison said the task at hand is to mold all the players into one team with one mission.
“The thing is to try to knit it together,” he said. “We want a team that represents Huntsville.
“We want to be successful in Huntsville, we want to pack the stadium, we want to win games of football.”
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