The Pittsburgh Riverhounds have both a much more complete roster, and a much earlier kickoff to their preseason in 2017. According to Head Coach Dave Brandt, that’s by design.

“The reason [for starting earlier] is that I value teaching and preparation time,” Brandt said after the club’s opening day of preseason camp on Monday. “Not that other people don’t, but the more I’ve got to try people out, the less I’m investing in actually creating our culture and what we’re doing on the field. … You can’t do both at the same time, or at least I can’t, and so because I value that, that’s why I wanted to go in [to preseason] with most of the team set.”

Brandt arrived with the Riverhounds midseason in 2016 after the side had taken just one victory in its first eight games of the season. After a 2015 season when Pittsburgh reached the USL Cup Playoffs, the chemistry and resoluteness that marked the side’s success appeared to dissipate.

As a result, the locker room that Brandt inherited posed a major challenge in terms of putting the pieces together at all in the remainder of the season. The Riverhounds finished with just six wins, tied for the fewest in the USL’s Eastern Conference, as the club was unable to string together back-to-back victories at any point of the season.

“I think for whatever reason a situation had developed where there was leadership lacking in the team, there was a real sense of a lack of chemistry off the field and a lack of cohesion on the field,” Brandt said of the situation. “That team just hadn’t jelled, and had some issues in terms of chemistry and who they were and what they were about. If you’d asked my sense of what it felt like to walk into that, I think it was very palpable. I felt that pretty quickly that these were the problems in the group.”

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Brandt looked to rectify things with some new faces, and certainly there were some bright spots within the club led by All-League selection Corey Hertzog’s 12 goals. The Reading, Pennsylvania native – who also earned All-League honors in 2012 with Wilmington – is among the players returning for this season, part of a squad of 23 signed players that Brandt has been in regular communication with over the course of the offseason.

“I’m a big believer in setting the table, so to speak, so my communication with guys who are signed, who are going to be the majority of the team this season, has been frequent and very intentional and very directed in terms of how we’ll play, how I want them coming in, what we’ll do during preseason, who we are, and what we’re about,” said Brandt. “I think it’s another thing you can do when you’ve got most of the team and you’ve really got a strong core signed. The guys who’ve come in during the last week or two, who’ve reported into Pittsburgh when we started with things this weekend, know the tone they’re walking into, know some of the intention they’re walking into.”

The tone the players walked into is one that has brought Brandt great success in the college ranks. A four-time NSCAA Coach of the Year winner, and six-time national champion at his alma mater, Messiah College, Brandt has drawn on influences as diverse as the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby team, to NBA coaches Gregg Popovic and Brad Stevens, to legendary UNC Chapel Hill Women’s Coach Anson Dorrance, and current top-flight European managers Thomas Tuchel, Jurgen Klopp and Mauricio Pochettino.

The common thread between them all? The goal of making the collective greater than the sum of its parts. Between that aim, and the style the latter three’s teams bring to the field week in and week out, the Riverhounds have taken aim at what will drive their identity this season, and grab fans’ attention throughout Pittsburgh.

“I’ve always said it’s our job to be worth watching,” said Brandt. “I read about Klopp, when he was at Dortmund, he talked about that everybody in the stadium, everybody in Dortmund should align and resonate with their style of football, so that even if [they played] in red (the primary color of rival Bayern Munich) people should look, and see and say, ‘whoa, that could only be Dortmund.’

“That sort of effect is when you capture attention, you begin to capture hearts. I would say we haven’t captured the heart of this city yet. That’s on us.”

As Brandt aims to put his imprint on a team, and the Riverhounds aim to make their imprint on a city, the task is ready to be tackled, head on.

“I’m not going to give you the three-to-five reasons why it’s all going to be swell this year. I don’t know. We need to work our tails off, and we need to try and earn whatever we get,” Brandt said. “I do think we have a group of guys who are willing to do that. … In terms of the guys who’ve remained from last year and the guys that we’ve brought in, I think it’s a group that’s willing to put their head down and work as hard as they need to work to be successful.”