The Colorado Rapids have acquired Canadian national team star Jason Bent as a 1998 discovery player. Bent is a defensive midfielder with the ability to also play an outside defensive position. The Canadian citizen will fill one of the Rapids’ five foreign player slots. Colorado now has four of those allotted slots filled, including Bent, Wolde Harris (Jamaica), Adrian Paz (Uruguay) and Waldir Saenz (Peru). Bent, 21, played in 1997 with FSV Zwickau of the German second division. Most recently he has trained with the Canadian national team and Olympic squad. He has appeared three times for Canada, including his October, 1997 debut — a 2-2 draw in a CONCACAF World Cup qualifying match against Mexico in which he marked Alberto Garcia Aspe out of the match. Rapids coach Glenn Myernick said that role is exactly why he made the effort to pursue Bent for Colorado. “He has shown the ability at several levels to mark an opponent’s player out of the game. If we are facing an (Marco) Etcheverry or a (Piotr) Nowak, I would feel very confident having Jason on a player like that for the entire game,” he explained. Bent, who played with the University of Maryland in 1996, has also played with the Canadian Under-17 and Under-20 teams., and led the latter to a surprise second-round berth at the 1997 U-20 World Cup in Malaysia.