Matt Besler Joins MLS Daily

MLS Daily is pleased to announce this afternoon that Kansas City Wizards rookie defender Matt Besler has agreed to author his own weekly segment for the site. To be called 'Across the Midwest Pitch,' new entries will be posted every Tuesday morning, starting this coming week (June 9th), and will give readers an insight into what it's like to be a professional soccer player in America making the transition from college to the pros. We hope you'll check back each week to read what's on Matt's mind; if you have a question that you want answered, send it to us HERE and he just might answer it in his next entry! Our thanks go out to Matt for taking the time to make this possible!


About Matt Besler:
Originally from Overland Park, Kansas, Matt Besler was a four-year All-Conference player at Blue Valley West High School and led them to the Kansas 5A State Championship in his senior year while scoring 23 goals with 19 assists. He attended college at Notre Dame, playing 90 games in central defense for the Fighting Irish over four years and missing only one match in his entire collegiate career. He helped Notre Dame gain four straight berths to the NCAA Championship, including the program's first two trips to the quarterfinals in 2006 and 2007. In the classroom, Besler finished with a 3.518 cumulative grade-point average and graduated in December with a degree in pre-professional studies and psychology from Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters He was named to the Dean's List in the fall of 2008 after posting a 3.846 semester GPA and earned All-American and Academic All-American honors in his senior season.

Besler was quickly snapped up by the Kansas City Wizards with their first pick in the 2009 MLS SuperDraft (eighth overall), and has already become a mainstay in the club's backline in just his rookie season. The 22-year-old has appeared in all but one game for the Wizards in '09, and has been in the starting lineup for each of Kansas City's last 11 matches.