October 5, 2022 – Major League Soccer (MLS) – New York City FC News Release
A New Year brings new challenges and new opportunities. For Kevin O’Toole, it brought New York City.
In January 2022, O’Toole – a two-time Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year with Princeton – sat nervously on a couch watching the MLS SuperDraft unfold before him.
With his family and friends gathered around the TV, silence broke into screams of joy when, with the 34th pick, it was announced he would be playing professional soccer with the reigning MLS Cup Champions.
Fast forward a whirlwind eight months and O’Toole has already celebrated his first senior trophy: the Campeones Cup, having played the full 90 minutes on an historic night at Yankee Stadium against Atlas F.C.
Not many players can say they lifted silverware on their second appearance, as O’Toole admits!
“It is really unique!” he laughs. “It was funny… Maxime Chanot keeps joking with me that he had to play 10,000 minutes to play in a Cup Final and I started one on my second game! It was a great night.
“I wasn’t really sure if I was even going to be on the roster, though I’d hoped to. Then we had a meeting, Nick Cushing put out the starting XI and I was in it. I was really shocked and really pleasantly surprised, very happy. It was a very surreal moment!
“It’s a huge game and it’s not very often you get to make a start in a Cup Final so I was just really excited for the opportunity. My heart rate went up for sure, sitting in that meeting room, but it was all good nerves from then until the game.
“My original goal at the start of the season of course was just to make the roster. I was really excited to be drafted by New York City; I was a Draft pick so I wasn’t guaranteed to even have a spot. If you’d have told me in January I would be on the roster at all, I’d have been thrilled with that.
“I knew it was going to be a challenge to break in. I was just eager to get to pre-season and learn a lot from the guys on the team who had already won an MLS Cup, learning how they approach the game, how they approach life off the field. That was all very exciting to me.
“Of course, there were frustrations in the beginning with my concussion injury and COVID but I did my best to stay grounded and reflect, reminding myself that what I’d done up to that point – coming up from college – was a pretty good achievement.
“It took a bit of a combination of being eager to work super hard every day to earn a spot but also exercising some…
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