Major announcement set for Saturday: RSL Academy plans in Herriman?

During Monday's airing of OnFrame, a Real Salt Lake-produced radio show that covers soccer in the United States generally and the team specifically, news dropped that a big academy announcement is set for Saturday.

That announcement? It certainly involves Real Salt Lake's academy efforts.

Trey Fitz-Gerald, RSL's vice president of media and communications, said academy news is the subject of the announcement.

"There's some big academy, youth development news coming down the pipe," Fitz-Gerald said during the radio show. "Big. Game-changing. ... There may be some teasers on this station, on KMYU with (Brian Dunseth) on Thursday night. We are taking the youth development, the youth academy system, and putting it on steroids for the intermountain west."

Carmen Freeman, Herriman, Utah mayor, said on Facebook that an announcement involving Herriman City and Real Salt Lake was set for Saturday.

I am excited to report that their will be a major announcement involving Herriman City and REAL Salt Lake at this Saturday's soccer game. This will be an historic moment for our city. I invite you to attend the game or watch on TV for the announcement.

Our natural assumption? The two have to be related — the proper assumption would likely be that the club is set to expand the academy setup to Utah via Herriman. Obviously, that's speculative at this point, but it seems a safe bet.

Brian Dunseth, RSL commentator and American soccer expert, talked about the importance of the efforts coming through.

For RSL to be able to compete with the New Yorks, the Chicagos, the Los Angeleses — the big-name cities ... there are certain cities that teams are going to have trouble competing with. You have to be ... prepared, you have to be proactive in ways of creating the revenue, generating the revenue, generating environments for kids to play in. ... There's never been a true environment to compete with some of the places we're seeing. ... But what's going to start to happen, it's going to happen sooner than people realize, but there will be these pipelines into the first team.