2017 Player Profiles: Omar Holness

Throughout 2016 Omar’s career started out with his time split between the Real Monarchs and Real Salt Lake. He was regularly playing soccer, but he wasn’t consistently with one team or the other. With an injury early in 2016 that kept him out of the games for a few weeks, he came back with an impressive showing. Doing incredibly well in his time with the Monarchs and getting some good minutes with RSL, Omar was proving to be a great signing from North Carolina. As 2017 began, a lot of Real Salt Lake fans had high hopes for where Omar could fit into this team. He was young, and had a lot of talent, his future seemed to be pretty bright.

At the beginning of the 2017 season, Omar was regularly on the bench and available for games. In the first half of 2017 he had 9 appearances and 3 of them were starts. He wasn’t getting a ton of chances due to the high competition for midfield positions. However, he did get sporadic playing time. Although the results of his games, weren’t the most desirable, with one being a 6-2 loss to Dallas, there was still some hope for Holness to prove himself to Mike Petke and the training staff to get more first team minutes.

It was just as Real Salt Lake was starting to hit their stride that Holness was losing his. He suffered an ultimately season-ending injury on June 29. The injury was initially perceived to be minor; but it resulted in Omar needing surgery that would keep him out of play for the rest of 2017, and potentially much of 2018. It is unknown currently what the future will hold for Omar Holness, since we lack an up-to-date status on his injury, but hopefully he has a speedy recovery and will come back stronger and better than ever.