COMMERCE CITY — Still in uniform, dreads pulled back in a half-up, half-down bun and a bottle of congratulatory Korbel champagne tucked in his right hand, Marlon Hairston exhaled a sigh of relief.
Saturday night was a long time coming.
“My last goal was my first season here,” Hairston said, the corner of his mouth twisting into a smile. “Since then I’ve had enormous chances and plenty of opportunity to score.”
The midfielder had chances, but couldn’t convert. Until Saturday night, when Hairston scored his first goal since 2014 and led the Rapids to a 1-0 victory over Sporting Kansas City at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park.
Hairston, 22, said seeing that ball go into the net was fulfilling and “great,” but in the dim hallway outside the Rapids’ locker room, with only a few media members lingering, his initial smile faded, if only for a second, as he thought back on the road that brought him to being named man of the match.
It hasn’t been easy.
Last year, Hairston spent most of the season on loan with Charlotte of the USL. Before that, the Rapids tried him as a defender, not knowing exactly what role they needed him to serve.
“We have a team full of starters,” Hairston said. “Right now I have a lot of great players that are playing in front of me, so the best thing I can do is try to make the coach’s job tougher and continue at practice to let them know I’m not going to make the other guy’s job easier to be playing in front of me.”
Hairston is known for his speed and has had to improve other parts of his game. He has spent a lot of time in the gym. He has developed good technique and understanding of the game, but still sat and watched the first hour of play Saturday night as his teammates went back and forth, unable to penetrate the back line.
During the last month of practices, assistant coach John Spencer told Hairston that if he continued to get chances, he would make good things happen. Head coach Pablo Mastroeni told Hairston not to focus on whether he was in the starting 11. Instead, focus on what kind of player he wanted to become.
“I keep telling him, ‘Where do you want to be in five years? What do you want to achieve with your life (and) with your career in five years? And every day work toward that,’ ” Mastroeni said of his conversations with Hairston. “Itap been a long body of work. Like all of us, you have your ups and your downs, but I think nights like tonight for Marlon validate all the hard work that he does.”
On another night, if he’d had less confidence, Hairston said he would have passed instead of taking the decisive shot. He is the third-youngest player on the Rapids’ roster and their youngest active player, so his experience in clutch situations is limited.
After coming off the bench for Marco Pappa in the 62nd minute, Hairston hammered a right-footed shot from just outside the box into the top-right corner of the net.
“Itap unbelievable, really,” Mastroeni said. “Relying on a kid with very limited professional experience to come and win games, but thatap the kind of culture we build here.”
Scoring late isn’t unusual for the Rapids. Hairston’s goal was the Rapids’ ninth in the final 15 minutes of a game this year. They are the only MLS team that hasn’t scored in the first 15 minutes of a game.
After the Rapids won Saturday, Hairston did TV interviews, received a postgame massage and accepted fist bumps and high-fives from security guards as he made his way down the hallway to the locker room.
Then he went home to try the champagne.
