PHOENIX – Juan Agudelo didn’t hesitate when asked about the hardest part of this month’s national team camp.

The 30-minute run that opens each day’s work? Long weight room sessions? Field training out in the Arizona sun?

Well, not quite.

“The hardest part is just waking up,” Agudelo said after training Saturday. “Waking up, and…yeah, that’s the hardest part.”

The young forward is roused each morning for the aforementioned run – completed before breakfast to coax the body into looking for extra energy sources when it doesn’t find a protein bar or some breakfast cereal to burn – before 8 a.m. That’s the same hour that most of Agudelo’s fellow 19-year-olds in the United States are avoiding as though they were Lil Wayne at a sushi bar while crafting their schedule for the spring semester.

Agudelo himself has probably been able to catch a few Z’s before camp started on Jan. 3 (although perhaps only to sleep off the jet lag from his training stops with Stuttgart and Liverpool). The USMNT’s January camp typically features mostly MLS-based players entrenched in their offseason while their counterparts at European clubs continue to play games.

It results in the opportunity for players who might not be mainstays on the team sheet to make an impression with the national team staff. It also forces players who might have been enjoying the offseason or the holidays to quickly get back to being fully fit.“There’s a lot of things to learn” from the January camp, Agudelo said. “Definitely fitness because we’ve had an offseason. We’ve had a holiday break. Fitness comes out of that, but most importantly I think the learning aspect of playing with your teammates and understanding more and more and more each and every day of what the coaches want out of you, and just building from that.”

This marks the first January camp for head coach Jurgen Klinsmann and his coaching staff, so Agudelo isn’t the only player still getting a read on the coaching staff. In fact, despite his youth, the Red Bulls player’s double-digit cap tally makes him seem like a hardened veteran with more than a fourth of the 20 players in camp still searching for their first.

Another young player familiar with Klinsmann camps said while the January camp is different, the same intent permeates every group, whether it’s a nearly full squad preparing for a match with rival Mexico or this camp looking toward friendlies against Venezuela and Panama.

“I think when you get called in to the U.S., it’s U.S. camp,” said Brek Shea, FC Dallas midfielder “You’re under Jurgen no matter what. Obviously the guys are different, but we want to win.”

Venezuela is not a weak squad, ranked 39th in the FIFA rankings and coming off a fourth-place finish in the summer’s Copa America. Still, Shea said Klinsmann will have high expectations.

“I think he wants to win. Obviously he loves getting difficult games for us, but we want to win no matter what. I think the goal of this camp is to play good soccer and win,” he said.

Both Shea and Agudelo should have no shortage of opportunities to live up to those goals this season. This camp kicks off what could be a grueling season for them, goalkeepers Bill Hamid and Sean Johnson, and forward Teal Bunbury. These five in the current camp are all eligible for Caleb Porter’s Olympic team, which could mean the December holiday was the last break they’ll see for some time. That’s especially true since a move overseas wouldn’t be out of the question for any of the group. They all made offseason training stops in Europe.

“2012 is looking good,” Agudelo tweeted on the first day of the year. How good remains to be seen, but in the Valley of the Sun there’s certainly the feeling there might be a monumental season on the horizon for the young players in the American camp.

by Jon Arnold