Tag: nwsl

soccer

Washington Spirit vs. Virginia: Better than last year

Posted on by Beau Dure

Did we mention that it was raining hard? And yet, when we could actually catch a glimpse of the game through the water, it was a good one.

Don’t weep for Virginia’s graduation losses. The Cavaliers are still a terrific team. Morgan Brian is world-class. Danielle Colaprico is quality.

And the goal … my word. Get a good camera on it, and it’s a SportsCenter top 10. Rising sophomore Alexis Shaffer brought the ball down the right flank against Danish defender Cecilie Sandvej, saw a glimmer of space, and cracked one outside the box over Ashlyn Harris. Sandvej immediately showed a bit of frustration, but after the game, Harris had nothing but praise for the shot. So did Virginia coach Steve Swanson, who said he wants Shaffer to feel like she has the green light to take those shots. Sure enough, Shaffer created another chance for herself in the second half, forcing former Cavalier Chantel Jones to make the game’s biggest save. Be warned, ACC goalkeepers.

Harris has been fighting her way back to fitness and said she felt good tonight. Her distribution was clean, and she confidently came out of her box to direct the defense and comfortably take some back-passes. Harris isn’t one to hide how she felt about a game, and tonight, she felt very good.

The Spirit still had a few injury concerns. Tori Huster was out, but coach Mark Parsons said she should be fine. “A little knock” is the semi-official diagnosis.

Caroline Miller and Colleen Williams are out, and Parsons said the injury list was an option. Seems only fair — they’re coming off nasty injuries. I have no idea why some fans online keep writing off Miller, a prolific scorer in college who showed some flashes in her brief time with the Spirit last season. Williams had a catastrophic knee injury less than 10 months ago.

The Spirit formation is fluid. Parsons likes that. He loves the idea of confusing a right back who looks up one minute and sees Danesha Adams, then looks up another minute to see Sandvej, who looks sharp attacking up the left flank.

And the Spirit seem far more dangerous on set pieces than they were last season. That’s how they scored tonight, with Toni Pressley pouncing on a loose ball off a corner kick. Pressley couldn’t remember the last time she had scored a goal, but she expects to be in the mix on these plays this year.

The one area of concern for the Spirit might be that last pass in the final third. The team dominated possession tonight, and fans saw glimpses of the passing combinations that Diana Matheson and Tiffany Weimer make possible, but they didn’t trouble the Virginia keepers too often. Jodie Taylor had a lot of dangerous moments, but she hasn’t quite caught up to the speed of the U.S. game, often taking a touch or two too many before turning and attacking.

Parsons is still experimenting, as you’d expect in preseason. Yael Averbuch teamed with trialist Bianca Sierra at center back in the second half. Huster will likely take one of those spots when she returns. Robyn Gayle replaced Sandvej on the left in the second half.

The Spirit will have no shortage of options. Looking around at other preseason rosters, the Spirit won’t have the best starting XI in the league, but they stack up with most teams from player 1 to player 20.

Last but not least tonight — the Spirit had a moment of silence in honor of Shawn Kuykendall, a local soccer player from Madison High School (Vienna!) to American University to D.C. United. Shawn died earlier this month at age 32 from thymic cancer. Read about Shawn through the eyes of his good friend Mike Foss of USA TODAY, and check out Kuykenstrong.com.

1
soccer

Women’s soccer: Show me the money!

Posted on by Beau Dure

How much should soccer players be paid?

It’s a question that can’t be answered in a vacuum, at least not without a government that centrally plans every bit of the economy. “Should” (which philosophers would call a “normative” question because philosophers like inventing words) doesn’t make much sense in a context in which no one has demonstrated that soccer players can be paid any more than they are now. As an ethical question, you’d get much more mileage out of asking “How much should CEOs be paid, particularly after their business dumps a whole mess into a river and loses a lot of money for its stockholders along with some government handouts?”

In my idealized world, soccer players are paid enough to pursue their sport at a legitimately professional level. That means they’re either full-time players or have small part-time jobs (the Volkswagen/Wolfsburg model) that don’t impinge on their training time.

But my idealized world extends these part-time jobs (with benefits, either through the company or government) to anyone who has a talent and a passion. Violinists. Rock drummers. Curling teams. Even (ahem) freelance journalists.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in that idealized world. Nor can we look at Europe and project that vision of women’s soccer as an ideal. A month ago, Deadspin picked up one-time WPS player Alison McCann’s Howler magazine story singing the praises of Swedish powerhouse Tyresö and the stability of Swedish women’s soccer:

The women of the Damallsvenskan are thriving. And a little part of that, a small reason, might be the fact that in Sweden they don’t have to worry about how to sell more tickets or carve out more time for appearances. They don’t have to worry if they’ll have jobs come next season. The Damallsvenskan will still be there.

A couple of weeks later, Tyresö revealed it was near bankruptcy, and an emergency municipal loan request had been turned down. So much for not worrying about jobs.

Earlier in McCann’s piece is a stronger demonstration of stability, from an email exchange with Malmö coach Jonas Eidevall.

Damallsvenskan can never fold as a league. If one club would fold, another one would be promoted. Maybe not all clubs would be professional, but the league would always live on.

The harsh reality is that no one has managed to make fully professional women’s soccer work for an extended period of time. England has gone in fits and starts. Germany, Sweden and France have a couple of clubs who should be close to making it work, at least on a low level. In general, I think (or hope) we’re getting there.

In the NWSL model, everyone is “professional.” But “professional” is a technical FIFA distinction moreso than economic reality. It’s especially important in the USA because college-eligible players can’t play alongside “professional” players. (They can play against them, pursuant to a careful read of the NCAA’s labyrinthine rule books.)

So as we all know, NWSL salaries range from the good (for U.S. national team players) to the not-so good (Canadian national team players) to the so-so (for top players not on national teams) to the pittance (for everyone else). No one’s getting rich on professional salaries, and most people aren’t making a living wage.

FiveThirtyEight, the latest ramping-up of Nate Silver’s data-journalism revolution, takes a look today at one of the side effects of these salaries. Coincidentally, the writer is once again Alison McCann.

The point is that the salaries force the league to skew young and inexperienced. They don’t have specific data to show causation, but it’s a sensible if not obvious point — a 27-year-old tired of being subsidized by parents, second jobs or host families is less likely to be in the NWSL than a 22-year-old still hoping for a big future in the sport. Case in point: Kia McNeill’s decision to skip the 2014 Boston Breakers season.

McCann writes:

For most players, and people in general, there are only so many years you can do the thing you love on a $15,000 annual salary before you have to move on.

Longtime MLS fans can sympathize. Mike Fisher, the No. 2 pick in the 1997 MLS Draft, opted to go to medical school instead. Tampa Bay Mutiny defender R.T. Moore left the team in the middle of the 1999 season to go to dental school. Scott Garlick abruptly retired in 2007 to go into commercial real estate.

So it’s easy enough to demonstrate that older players are likely to move on if the money’s not there. Is this a bad thing? I asked on Twitter and got this:

http://twitter.com/WizzyProbs/status/448112462429454336

http://twitter.com/WizzyProbs/status/448112702460678144

And that’s a good point. If a league can afford to have a mix of younger and older players, it certainly should.

Over time, MLS has strengthened and is better able to offer players decent money. We can hope this happens with the NWSL as well.

The danger here is in moving back to that normative “should” question. Somewhere along the way, an editor at FiveThirtyEight has done just that, picking up McCann’s description of NWSL salaries as “preposterously low” and running with that as the home-page headline for the story — “The Preposterously Low Salaries of the National Women’s Soccer League.” The story-page headline, “Low Pay Limits Player Experience in National Women’s Soccer League,” is less misleading.

In calling the salaries “preposterously low,” we have to ask: “Compared to what?” Women’s hockey players in the CWHL also have “preposterously low” salaries — basically, nil. Same for most European soccer players who aren’t part of the fortunate few at Tyresö or Lyon.

The underlying question here is this: Who’s paying? If you’re talking about the Ultimate Fighting Championship, you’re talking about people who have made fortunes in the sport they’re promoting. In MLS and a lot of pro team sports, you’re talking about people who made fortunes elsewhere and may or may not be making any money on their team ownership.

In the WUSA, you were talking about companies who thought they were going to make immediate money and pulled out when they didn’t. In WPS, you were talking about some people who thought they’d make money and some who were willing to spend a lot on an affectation. In the NWSL, you’re talking about people who are willing to endure small losses or at least a small amount of risk.

The FiveThirtyEight piece shows us what we get for that amount of spending. What it can’t show us is whether the owners’ and players’ faith in the league will pay off in a league that can spend a little more or find other creative ways to fill in the gaps in the center of that chart.

2
soccer

Spirit preseason: Scrimmage between snowstorms

Posted on by Beau Dure

A couple of weeks ago, the D.C. metro area was buried in snow. The forecasters say it may happen again Sunday night.

So everyone was happy to be outside on a lovely spring day at the Soccerplex, where the Spirit had a festive intrasquad scrimmage and autograph sessions. (Yes, plural.)

They played on the main stadium field, unlike the open practices the Spirit held last season, but the lines on the field were roughly 75×50 for the 9v9 game. The smaller field and smaller numbers made a goalfest that much more likely. So did the presence of Tiffany Weimer, who scorched the defense for four goals and an assist in the Red team’s 5-2 win.

A couple of those goals were defensive miscues by people who won’t be on the roster in three or four days. But Weimer also beat a couple of veterans. Better yet, she combined well with Danesha Adams, who set up one of those goals with a nifty back heel.

The highlight for the White team was the midfield pairing of Yael Averbuch and Jordan Angeli. Averbuch had a few slick passes, and Angeli opened the scoring.

The postgame highlight was seeing Angeli, who has been out of competition for nearly three years, talking about her goal and the feeling of playing in front of a crowd. She was near tears. Though Mark Parsons says she’s still a couple of weeks away from full match fitness, Spirit fans have good reason to be optimistic she’ll contribute. Angeli fans have even better reason to be happy.

But Spirit fans might worry that too many players are coming back from major injuries. Caroline Miller, whom a few message board posters are abandoning all too quickly, played about 20 uneventful minutes. Candace Chapman looked solid on the back line in limited time. Colleen Williams didn’t play.

It’s too soon to tell whether anyone will emerge from the trialists. Honestly, we couldn’t really identify most of them — the jerseys had no numbers, leaving us all to sort one ponytail from another. And a couple of them haven’t learned the art of waving when they’re introduced as starters.

Gloria Douglas converted her big chance after Weimer cut into the box with the ball, drew the defense and centered. But she’s trying to crack into a forward group that includes Weimer, Adams, Miller, Renae Cuellar, Jodie Taylor and maybe Williams (pending health and positioning).

The curiosity was North Carolina’s Meg Morris, a 5-2 tank. If you met her randomly away from the field, you’d never guess someone of such stature played soccer. But she’s surprisingly athletic and showed a bit of tactical sense. As Chris Henderson’s analysis points out, she was a consistent starter at Carolina but didn’t play a ton of minutes, rotating in the Anson Dorrance hockey-style line changes. If someone starts a women’s indoor league, she’d be dominant.

The other player who stood out was Mexican center back Bianca Sierra, who impressed Parsons with her poise. With Marisa Abegg retired and Chapman’s fitness still a question mark, she could be a sound insurance policy.

But it’s one game. I remember seeing an early practice last season in which Miller and Tiffany McCarty were absolutely dominant. Miller was starting to show it in the games last season before she was injured. McCarty lost her confidence somewhere early in the season and surely needed the change of scenery she got in the offseason.

This Spirit squad has a few players who can string together passes in the opposing third. A few fans were clearly drooling over the idea of Diana Matheson joining the fun when she returns to the Plex.

The two-word summary: Cautious optimism. We’ll check in again after we dig out from more snow.

0
soccer

NWSL media guidelines: Is the door open?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s say you’re running a fledgling women’s soccer league. Do you let reporters run around all over the place or keep them at arm’s length?

Organizations on their way up are often eager about opening up as much as possible. When I covered mixed martial arts for USA TODAY in the late 2000s, the UFC made it really easy for me to chat with Dana White and anyone else they could gather at almost any time. Now that the UFC has grown, Dana can’t spend a free hour chatting with some dude from USA TODAY about the music they play when fighters walk to the cage.

And that’s typical. Call a league that isn’t swamped with media requests, and you’re more likely to get through than you are if you say, “Hey, NFL? I write a blog. Can I talk with the commissioner today?”

Generally, I’ve found that women’s soccer is more of a closed community than men’s soccer. Read Steve Sirk’s book Massive, about the Columbus Crew, and you’ll find he had much more open chats with the players than I did in Enduring Spirit. Part of that is the locker room — door’s open in MLS, closed in the NWSL. Part of it was Columbus player Frankie Hejduk, as outgoing an athlete as you’ll ever find. And part of it, from my experience, is that women’s soccer players are more protective of the inner workings of their team than men’s soccer players.

Note the weasel words in that paragraph. First, “generally.” Sure, women’s soccer has its exceptions. And then there’s “from my experience.” I couldn’t tell you if the Portland Thorns are more forthcoming than the Timbers. If anyone has different experiences, please share.

The Spirit organization worked well with me for the book, but we did set some boundaries along the way. I only went to one team meeting — the one with the entertaining game of charades. And after preseason, the team and I agreed that I would usually come out to midweek practices, not the Friday practices in which they went over the tactics for the next game. At those practices, I made an effort to keep a respectful distance, though they appreciated my efforts in chasing down loose balls that had rolled down the many hills at the Soccerplex.

All of these access decisions were easy to work out among reasonable people with good communication. If you just drove up to the Soccerplex and started watching the team practice without telling anyone, you were going to get someone walking up and asking who you are and what you’re doing there. (The family that was just taking a snack break before going to lacrosse camp on a neighboring field was OK; the guy who was intently watching from a distance drew a few more questions.)

And to be honest, I didn’t see a lot of reporters coming out to practices, and I’m sure the Spirit didn’t turn a busload of people away every day. Still, the league quite rightly saw a need for standardized media guidelines, published on its site.

Last week, those guidelines read in part:

Media Access to Practices: Clubs are encouraged to make all practices open to media. If a practice is closed, clubs must grant a 15-minute media access period at the start or end of practice, as well as making the coach and players available for interviews following the conclusion of practice. Clubs are strongly encouraged to ensure that ballwork is at least part of the 15-minutes access period. If practices are open to the media, as defined above, they must be open to all media; if practices are closed to the media, they must be closed to all media.

Seems reasonable, and it’s consistent with what I’ve seen in other leagues. (That said, we’ve always joked about what teams are doing in practice that they don’t want others to see. “Oh, wow — are they doing a possession drill? They must want to possess the ball!”)

That section now reads as follows:

Media Access to Training Sessions: Teams are highly encouraged to make every training session open or at least partially open (i.e., if a session is declared “closed,” teams are required to have a 15 minute period for b-roll and photos at the start and time for media interviews following the session).

The change isn’t related to any agitation in the preseason. The latter phrasing is in the 2014 operations manual, the league says. The site was updated this week to match what was said in the operations manual.

So is that enough to meet the limited but occasionally intense media demand?

From a practical point of view, journalists need to give NWSL teams a bit of leeway. The teams don’t have huge staffs to shepherd reporters and photographers around at practice. And players often need to know in advance if they’re doing interviews after practice — they have jobs, classes and other logistical realities of playing for something less than a six-figure salary.

But it’s discouraging to hear, as I have from several colleagues, that a couple of teams have put up a virtual curtain on the preseason.

0
soccer

‘Enduring Spirit’ and the NWSL preseason

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m planning to get my first peek at the 2014 Washington Spirit on Saturday, and I have no idea what to expect.

A few bits of news about Spirit-affiliated people have trickled through:

– Hayley Siegel, the Reserves’ voice of experience last season, tore her ACL last fall and won’t be back this season.

– Marisa Abegg, as you’ve probably heard, officially retired to focus on her medical career.

– Colleen Williams, whose season ended with a nasty knee injury last summer, is back on the field.

– Heather Cooke, who was in preseason camp with the Spirit but wound up spending the summer with the Philippines national team and MTV, is in camp with Chicago.

But news isn’t traveling fast. I heard today that a Spirit mainstay from last season, Julia Roberts, was waived and is already in camp elsewhere. (Yes, that explains why she says “new city” in this tweet with her colorful injury:)

https://twitter.com/TheReelJRoberts/status/443182548307279873/

I’ve got several emails out in an attempt to confirm this through official channels. Why player transactions are treated with such secrecy is something I’ll never understand.

(Clumsy segue to book plug here …)

The secrecy makes me that much more appreciative that the Spirit let me follow the team around last season for Enduring Spirit. I didn’t have unfettered access by any stretch of the imagination — I went to only one team meeting, and I have no idea what the Spirit’s locker room looks like — but I went to many practices and a couple of road trips.

A couple of months ago, I listed things you’ll learn from reading the book (mostly from the first two chapters). I also did some questions and answers, including my definitive take on the funniest person in the Spirit organization. If you want to try before you buy, check out these two excerpts on an early-season practice and a team-building exercise after Mark Parsons took over as coach.

The book is available in several formats: print (through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and possibly other retailers), Kindle, Nook, Apple and whatever you use to read books from Kobo. You’ve still got roughly a month before the regular season, and I can assure you it won’t take that long to read it. Enjoy.

One more note today relating to the book — one of the inspirations for Enduring Spirit was the Joe McGinniss book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. The Spirit’s story was less controversial than that of Castel di Sangro, where the mafia lurked in the background, but I often found myself thinking back to his approach as I went about reporting and writing. I’m sorry to hear McGinniss passed away yesterday, and I wish all the best to his family and his many fans.

2
soccer

An offbeat proposal for NWSL 2015

Posted on by Beau Dure

We can’t be too surprised by this report:

Equalizer Soccer – Documents: Canada to withhold players from NWSL before World Cup; Herdman stresses player health.

We can get a good laugh over John Herdman’s complaint about players getting too many games on artificial turf when they’ll be playing the Cup on the fake stuff (hopefully better fake stuff than in most NWSL facilities), but the fact is we’re looking at a difficult scheduling question here. The World Cup runs from June 6 to July 5. Women’s national teams are even more insistent than men’s national teams when it comes to getting their players together ahead of a major competition.

So are we looking at an NWSL season in which the national team players will miss half the games? Yes.

So what do we do about it?

Option 1: Just deal with it and play a season in which the best players aren’t around most of the time.

Option 2: Forget player loans, both incoming and outgoing. Extend the season into September and maybe October. Loans out to Australia or in from Europe won’t be practical any more, which will limit the player pool a bit, but the league could take a bit of a break for the Cup and still play a significant number of games.

Option 3: A split season. (I did say “offbeat,” didn’t I?) Here’s how it works:

First of all, with all apologies to the Algarve Cup, the league can’t put everything on hold so you get full representation from the USA in World Cup years. The NWSL season starts in early March. The first half of the season runs 8-9 weeks, with all the national team players on board. If the league is up to 10 teams in 2015, then that’s time to play each other team once.

The top team in the first half of the season is automatically seeded into the playoffs.

The second half, without the World Cup-bound players, is a new season of sorts. Once again, play 9-10 games over 8-9 weeks. And the top team in the second half is automatically seeded into the playoffs.

In mid-July, once everyone has taken a one-week breather from the Cup, we return to NWSL play. Two teams have qualified for the playoffs. The other eight try to qualify. Split into two four-team brackets — probably two-leg aggregate series, with the team with the best overall record hosting the second leg. (Even better: the Page playoff system I’ve long sought for MLS, giving significant advantages for top seeds while giving most teams at least one home game.)

The disadvantage for the top two teams is that they’ll be sitting idle while all this is going on. Why not spend that time having an international tournament? Invite the Champions League winner and Japanese champion for a four-team tournament.

So by August 10 or so, we would have four teams ready for the NWSL playoffs: The winner from each season, and the winner from each four-team bracket. Wrap it up by Sept. 1 so players can go out on offseason loans. And the USSF could still do its revenue-friendly “Victory Tour” from September to November in which they’ll examine the player pool for the Olym– … yeah, I nearly said that with a straight face. In reality, of course, they’ll send the Olympic players around to play easy friendlies and sign autographs. It’s easy for us to laugh, but it makes money from women’s soccer, and the sport can’t afford to pass that up.

Too complicated? Too whimsical? Too sensible to happen in real life? What do you think?

3
soccer

NWSL notebook: Time for German efficiency?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Apologies for writing about last week’s NWSL panel at the NSCAA convention nearly a week after it happened, but it’s tough to get any work done when the local schools decline to open and give your kids some place to go during the day.

In any case — the big issues have been covered. First: The coaches say it’s difficult for them to compete salary-wise with Champions League teams. That doesn’t apply to the players in the allocation pool, but it would apply to anyone on the outside. Players who pass up higher pay to come over here are doing so for the competition — tough games each week instead of 10-0 routs over the Sindelfingens and Toulouses of the world.

The other big issue is the schedule. Everyone’s dreading a five-month stretch with 24 games. The basic problem is international loans. The season can’t start too much earlier — the Algarve and Cyprus Cups already take away international players during preseason. And it can’t go later because teams would have to return their international loanees by early September. So as long as women’s soccer players are doing the WNBA thing and playing year-round in two different countries to make ends meet, this is reality.

But the discussion turned up another thread worth following: Is the league’s style of play too athletic, too frenetic, too fast?

Chicago’s Rory Dames was the one raising the question. “We need to slow the game down, make it about technique as well as athleticism,” Dames said.

Dames saw the clash in international styles first-hand through the German players on the Red Stars last season. They saw a lot of “pointless running” on the field in NWSL play, he said. That echoes a few comments Washington’s Conny Pohlers made in her too-brief time in the league.

Over the course of a 24-game, five-month season, teams would be well advised to work smarter, not harder. But how do you teach that to players who come out of college soccer, where they run hard and then get breaks to catch their breath?

One of many things to watch in the next season. Can’t wait.

Other quick notes from the NWSL panel:

– Washington coach Mark Parsons had a curious comment about challenges in coaching. He said a team might have an accomplished player who’ll do anything it takes in practice along side a player who has done nothing at this level but “demands the world.” Read into that what you will.

– Boston’s Tom Durkin said the Breakers are looking toward an ECNL (elite youth) presence as part of a full-fledged club with a consistent curriculum. Could be interesting.

– Yes, at least one other coach teased Seattle’s Laura Harvey about her active wheeling and dealing in the offseason. She smiled like the Cheshire cat.

2
soccer

NWSL expansion, MLS precedent and devious tactics

Posted on by Beau Dure

Want some irony?

The person at the epicenter of the biggest controversy in MLS expansion draft history is now the managing director of the Houston Dash, which will stock its roster in the first NWSL expansion draft Friday.

Brian Ching was (and still is) a Houston legend, a key figure in the Dynamo’s early MLS success. The Dynamo left him unprotected in the 2011 expansion draft, figuring no one would take him.

Naturally, the Montreal Impact took him. Brian Straus explained:

Houston officials had gambled that Ching’s age (33), salary ($412,500), recent injuries and public preference for retirement over Quebec would scare off Marsch. Instead, the coach called the Dynamo’s bluff and made an instant enemy in Texas. Now, the Dynamo will either have to trade for Ching or let the long-time face of the franchise go.

And it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Here’s Ives Galarcep:

In 2006, Real Salt Lake tried a similar move by leaving then-captain Jason Kreis exposed in Toronto FC’s expansion draft, never thinking that the Canadian club would be interested in a 33-year-old American striker on a relatively high salary. Toronto FC wasn’t interested in Kreis, but was fully aware that Real Salt Lake had made Kreis their poster boy heading into the 2007 season. TFC selected Kreis and ultimately forced RSL to pay a $125K allocation to give him back.

So Kreis made it back to RSL, where he went on to be their coach for several good years. And Ching made it back to Houston — for a surprisingly low price of one draft pick. Ching finished out his playing career in Houston, and now he’s the one who gets to turn the thumb screws in the expansion draft.

When you look at the protected/unprotected list that someone curiously leaked in the middle of the night, you’ll see some surprising names. Nicole Barnhart. Karina LeBlanc. Becky Edwards. Tiffany Weimer. Ashlyn Harris. Lori Lindsey. Sarah Huffman.

A couple of those players are goalkeepers, and they’re less likely to be taken now that we know Houston has Erin McLeod.

Some other players are simply value decisions — maybe Player X has more long-term potential than Player Y. Or maybe losing Player Y would give the team more flexibility under the salary cap.

Some of these players are gambles, like Ching and Kreis. The teams figure Houston will shy away, not wanting to use a lot of salary-cap space or not wanting to bring an angry player to camp.

But look at this from Houston’s perspective. Suppose you really want, say, a player on Western New York’s protected list like Samantha Kerr or Kat Reynolds. Maybe you pick Sarah Huffman and say, “OK, Flash — we’ll give you Huffman for Kerr.” Maybe toss in a draft pick to make sure it happens.

For that and for several other reasons, don’t expect the dealing to stop on draft day. In 2010, the Portland Timbers (sibling team of the NWSL’s Thorns) drafted 10 players in the expansion draft. A couple of their picks weren’t playing in the league; the Timbers merely stashed their rights. Others were immediately traded elsewhere.

So you’ll all forgive me if I don’t do a mock expansion draft. Too many moving parts. And unlike MLS players, NWSL players don’t even have their salaries released to the public.

A couple of side notes:

– Did some teams know about the McLeod deal while other teams did not? That would explain why Barnhart, Harris, LeBlanc and company are floating around. Why not just announce it ahead of time so the teams have all the same information before submitting their lists a few days ago?

– Can we drop the myth that the Spirit is trying to stock its roster cheaply? They overspent on some players last year, and they saved up money early to acquire Toni Pressley and Conny Pohlers. You can say they managed their cap space badly, but they weren’t fielding an Atlanta Beat team against the rest of the league’s magicJack.

– Another precedent for the NWSL: A lot of indoor soccer players in the 2000s were picked in expansion drafts but immediately traded back to their original teams for draft picks and whatnot. One factor: Some players had second jobs. And a low-budget league doesn’t want to pay to relocate families.

– So does Houston take Tasha Kai and deal her to Portland in hopes that she’ll want to reunite with Paul Riley? Boom bam, everybody.

0
soccer

A few questions and answers on ‘Enduring Spirit’

Posted on by Beau Dure

Stumbled into a few questions and comments on Enduring Spirit and figured I’d answer them here. Feel free to ask more — I’m easy to find. Also, check out my Q&A from earlier in the week with Caitlin Murray.

Will the book be available on (Nook, Apple, PDF, print, stone tablets)?

The Nook edition is up now. It’s on its way to the iBookstore and Kobo. I may look into Google Play as well. If I do anything in print, it’ll be a limited-edition thing. I could see trying to combine it with more photos so that it would have added value for people who already shelled out the $5.99 for the ebook, but that’ll cost more — photographers have every right to be paid for their work.

Speaking of photos, what’s your deal with that cover, anyway? Why pick on Alex Morgan?

I’m not. I don’t. Alex Morgan picked on me after I joked about U.S. women’s national team players expecting favorable calls from refs, which is her prerogative. As I said at the time she shot back at me on Twitter, I think she’s a great player and a future U.S. captain.

I picked this photo because (A) it’s the photo that drew the most attention during the course of the season and (B) it shows the defiant resilience of this team, standing up for itself against the best in the world.

When I designed the cover, I did so with the intent of drawing attention to Diana Matheson’s face. I wasn’t drawing attention to the name “Morgan” on the jersey — at one point in the process, it was obscured, and I didn’t even realize it was there in the final edit.

But you hate Portland!

No, I really don’t. If you read the book, you’ll find the Thorns draw a lot of flattery. They’re a class organization.

Why didn’t you do more analysis?

Interesting question, and perhaps I miscalculated. In reporting the book, I tried to take out the Heisenberg/Schrödinger/quantum physics observer effect and make myself part of the scenery. I dreaded the notion that people might act differently because I was on the field. (A few people have assured me that they were the same whether I was around or not.)

In writing the book, I figured people wanted less of me and more of the players. And I figured people might want to draw their own conclusions on what happened. It’s really not up to me to tell you whether Ashlyn Harris’ comments were fair to Mike Jorden. If I felt I had additional information that wasn’t readily available, I gave it.

But I might have been wrong. If you’ve read the book but still want my take on something, let me know.

Were you worried about losing credentials if you wrote something negative?

Not really. I have no idea what I’m doing in terms of coverage next season, but I think it’s fair to say I won’t be making serious money doing it.

Why didn’t you go into more detail on (Topic X, Y or Z)?

In most cases, that’s what I have. The Spirit kept some things in the locker room, like a lot of teams do. Women’s soccer teams are especially guarded in my experience. Hope Solo’s career of public statements is the exception that proves the rule.

I know there are plenty of people who think they know some behind-the-scenes information that wasn’t in the book. In some cases, I also heard that but couldn’t verify it. In other cases, it’s utter bunk. To give one example: A team that has an openly gay captain isn’t steering away from gay players. That’s nonsense. I can’t really go into more detail because we generally honor players’ rights to private lives (see the hand-wringing over whether to “report” the Abby Wambach-Sarah Huffman wedding when players were openly talking about it on public social media).

In some cases, I was able to press for more detail. Ken Krieger was willing to talk about players’ desire to bring him in to help out.

But in general, I wasn’t in investigative mode. The goal of the book was to capture the spirit (sorry) and sacrifice of soccer players trying to build a new team and a new league while being paid tiny salaries. I tried to get to know each player, and I’d like to think I was somewhat successful in doing that and getting across a little bit of their personalities. Controversies arose, of course, and I did what I could to explore them. In a lot of cases, there’s a lot less controversy than some fans think. I spent a lot of time talking with players and coaches on topics that didn’t make the book because there just wasn’t any substance to write about.

Not always, of course. Perhaps someone from a different vantage point can come in and get more dirt about the coaching change. That’s fine. A variety of voices is always better than one.

So why WAS Mike Jorden let go?

I think the players’ perception was that he wasn’t adequately preparing them for games. Was that reality? I don’t know. I didn’t look at his game plans, and a lot of elite-level game-planning is going to go over my head, anyway. But that’s the kind of perception that essentially becomes the reality. If players don’t think they’re being prepared, they’re not. That could be Jorden’s fault for not doing a great game plan, it could be Jorden’s fault for not communicating it well, or it could be that players were just tuning him out for whatever reason.

I wouldn’t judge Jorden too harshly. Even the best coaches in the world get fired sometimes. He hadn’t had much trouble in his previous coaching gigs, and people speak well of his integrity.

What about the other coaches?

I never got much of an answer on why Kris Ward was let go. Players seemed to like him — he was warmly greeted on a couple of returns to the SoccerPlex. I think they wanted a fresh start and felt it would be best if Mark Parsons came in without anyone left over from the previous regime other than Lloyd Yaxley, who was clearly well-liked as the goalkeeper coach and could also help out elsewhere.

I didn’t do much to find out the story on German Peri. He wasn’t around that often when I was there, and I didn’t see much interest in finding out why he was dismissed with Jorden and Ward.

One aside I’ll toss in: NCAA rules prevent someone from being a college assistant coach and a pro assistant coach. That’s ridiculous, and it’s affecting multiple people associated with the Spirit. Hayley Siegel is virtually a player/coach in the organization, but she can’t be officially recognized as such as long as she’s also at Georgetown. Add that to the list of Jay Bilas’ complaints with the NCAA.

Who was the funniest player on the team?

Emily Fortunato, the trainer. Closely followed by Conny Pohlers.

But why do you really hate Portland?

Because CPC stopped wearing her hats.

No, seriously — I don’t. Read the book and see for yourself.

Any other questions?

1
soccer

‘ENDURING SPIRIT’ IS OUT

Posted on by Beau Dure

kindle-spiritThe book is only at Amazon for now. But you don’t need a Kindle to read it! Amazon offers apps for every platform you might possibly have — tablets, phones, laptops.

Over the next few weeks, I will be working to make it available on other ebook platforms. I declined Amazon’s exclusivity offer, which includes a couple of incentives, so that I would reserve the rights to publish it elsewhere.

I might do a print version at some point, but it would be a limited run. If you have any thoughts on what might make a print version worthwhile, let me know.

The good news is that the ebook is only $5.99.

I thanked 91 people by name in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, but I could’ve gone on and on. Thanks to everyone who has taken an interest in this book along the way, and I hope you enjoy it.

2