Sunday, May 22, 2011

Ella Masar Fan Over Here

Last weekend my brother had given me a call to talk a bit of soccer. He had a trivia question for me. It was in regards to a league his young daughter was playing in. He asked me, in so many words, if you could create the perfect pre-teen soccer player in his daughters league where do you think there parents would be from. My mind raced around. I figured it wouldn't be two American born parents and that I would have had to have been two foreign born. Elsewise, he wouldn't have asked.

My brother has taken notice of this kid saying that he is playing on another level then the others. He gave me clues: Controlling the ball in ways the other kids in the Shenandoah Valley haven't seen before. The kid has smart spacing, good touches, whichever team he played on won even if he wasn't scoring goals.

Since our mother was English I immediately thought that this boy's parents must be has well. Another clue came in that his parents were from different countries. I figured that a Brit had to be one of them. It was not.

My brother pushed me on. I couldn't guess it. How could I ever as it turned out it was German and Welsh. I had to think on that combo for a minute. An American born player with parents from soccer rich countries. I told to keep an eye on that one. In 7 or so years a kid like that will be a star in this country.

In between that trivia question I asked how his daughter was enjoying soccer. He said, like thousands of other American girls in this country, she enjoyed it a lot. Later that evening I turned on the US Women's World Cup warm up game against Japan. It was being played right down the road from me at Crew stadium. I got excited about it. The women's team in this country is a powerhouse in the world and the Women's World Cup was coming up this summer.

I sent a text over to a friend of mine who played girls soccer most of her life and still loved the game.

"Womens world cup this year. USA is playing warm up on FSC right now. At Crew Stadium!"

I got an unexpected response:

"Womens soccer sucks"

I was taken back and sat there for a few moments later thinking about what in the world would make her say that. I was a little crushed to hear that. I got a text back a few moments later, apologizing, telling me that it wasn't from her. It was from her boyfriend who had her phone.

"buy him some extra ice cream for spelling all his words correctly." I responded back.

I'm not the smartest guy in the world and thus; am not the most easily offended. But I was by that guy's comments. Here we have a great national team. We even have a group of extremely dedicated people keeping a pro league going in the WPS. His comment got to me.

In doing so I decided to pull the stats from the young WPS season and put them into the same scoring system I have going for the MLS. Below are the top ten:

100 Ella Masar (magicjack)
93 Abby Wambach (magicjack)
82 Tina DiMartino (PHI)
79 Marian Dalmy (magicjack)
79 Lindsay Tarpley (magicjack)
74 Shannon Boxx (magicjack)
74 Becky Sauerbrunn (magicjack)
74 Christine Sinclair (NY)
73 Christen Press (magicjack)
71 Brittany Bock (magicjack)

Pulling stats from the official WPS site is shoddy right now as Sky Blue FC isn't available but I'm going to keep checking.

WPS True Table:

That dude who sent that text can suck it. Go USA this Summer and good fortune to all the folks in WPS this year.

The United States Women's Team has won two of the five World Cups and has never finished lower then third in any of them.

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