BEAVERTON, Ore. – If you placed bets at season’s onset on who would be Timbers 2’s most-used player, Todd Wharton would have gotten you pretty good odds. The fourth-year professional out of the University of Virginia was brought to the Rose City to play a stabilizing role in midfield, but aside from those who remember his 2015 spell with the team’s U-23s, the 25-year-old was relatively anonymous to fans in Portland.
Twenty-one games into the 2019 season, though, Wharton leads the team in playing time by a long shot. After three years with Rio Grande Valley FC, Wharton’s stepped into head coach Cameron Knowles side to log 1,758 minutes – 338 more than anybody else in the squad.