What do you see in this picture? Most likely, you see a new scoreboard with video that you wouldn’t have seen at the Maryland SoccerPlex last season at a Washington Freedom game.

Cat Whitehill sees something more specific.

“The most exciting thing – look at all the sponsors around it,” the Freedom defender said Thursday. “The money that it took to go in there – we have it.”

That’s one of the storylines of Women’s Professional Soccer, Season 2. Your buddies or your favorite news outlet (or possibly the ownership group of the now-dormant Los Angeles Sol) might not have much interest in WPS, but plenty of people with money do.

“The teams coming back, on average, are up just over double where they were last year in terms of team sponsorship dollars,” says WPS commissioner Tonya Antonucci.

At the national level, the corporate money is flowing as well. Puma was already on board. During last season, WPS added presenting sponsors of the championship game (MedImmune) and the All-Star Game (U.S. Coast Guard). This season, look for Citi logos on everything — backdrops for interviews, uniforms, etc.

Dive down to the grass-roots level, and everything’s also trending upward.

“For five of the six teams that are returning, they’re above where they were this time last year in season-ticket sales,” Antonucci said in March. “On average, they’re up 17% across the league. That’s a substantial number.”

WPS will keep the goals reasonable.

“We’re shooting for a 5-10% increase from 2009 into 2010,” Antonucci says. “Our average attendance was just over 4,600 when you include the playoffs. That will push us into 5,000 per game.”

That would be quite an accomplishment, given the sophomore slumps that usually strike sports teams and leagues. MLS dropped from a 17,406 average in its 1996 debut year to 14,619 in 1997. The Washington Nationals no longer pack ’em in.

The good news for most organizations in Year 2 is that the start-up hiccups are gone. Christie Welsh, who is returning to her W-League roots in Washington after stints with Los Angeles and St. Louis last year, recalls that one game in St. Louis was played at noon because the venue was reserved for a wedding later that day.

“We were moving practice fields,” Welsh says. “Every day was like a new adventure in a way.”

Now that the old Anheuser-Busch Center or Soccer Park has spent a full year in the hands of St. Louis Soccer United, Athletica’s parent company under the leadership of Jeff Cooper, such scheduling conflicts are less likely.

Most teams put a lot of effort into reshuffling their rosters in the offseason — Soccer America has a simple yet thorough examination — with an influx of foreign players from European powers such as Umea and Arsenal. That’s another sign of a confident league.

The exception to the reshuffling is Washington. Welsh is technically new but says Washington feels like home after her time there in the W-League. “Importing players every year from all over isn’t our philosophy,” Abby Wambach says.

Yet with Wambach, Whitehill and goalkeeper Erin McLeod healthy in preseason, the team should have a smoother start compared with last season.

As a whole, though, the league isn’t easy to predict.

“My husband asked me the other day who I thought would be 1 through 8 in the standings, and I said it’s really hard because the talent is there,” Whitehill says. “Last year, the talent was there, but there were spots where you could pick on a team and say, ‘Hey, let’s exploit that.'”

So we’ll let Scott French do the predicting instead. Wait a minute … St. Louis first? Atlanta last?

If you want coverage of WPS, you’ll have to scrounge. The TV deal with Fox Soccer Channel and Fox Sports Net is still in place, but mainstream media have been cutting back. Look for a good online source like the new women’s soccer blog All White Kit or some random multisport blog you might be reading right now.