Tuesday, July 29, 2008

 W-League Championship Media Kit [+]                   W-League Playoff Bracket [+]

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA – While the semifinal between Pali and Washington features numerous players with a W-League Championship on their resume, the other semifinal between the FC Indiana Lionesses and Seattle Sounders features far more who may be frustrated from years of coming so close. Between the two clubs, 15 players have made a total of 30 trips to the W-League final four without a championship.

While FC Indiana may be new to the W-League and have won championships in their previous league, the club brought in several standout players to bolster their squad for the increased competition in the form of three veteran stars from the Ottawa Fury and one from the Chicago Gaels.

The Fury trio of Annie Hamel, Marie-Eve Nault and 2004 W-League MVP Kelly Parker brought vast W-League experience to Indianapolis in exchange for a shot at finally claiming a long-coveted league title. Parker joined the Fury in 2003 and helped lead the club to the first of four consecutive trips to the W-League Championship event.

The first saw the playoff debutants Parker and Nault finish fourth. While Nault spent the following year in Montreal, Parker and new addition Hamel led the side to a Third Place prize. With Nault returning in 2005, the trio guided the team to the final in 2005 and 2006, only to be left as runners-up in a pair of heart-breaking 3-0 losses. Last year, they were eliminated in the Eastern Conference Final 1-0 by the eventual champion Freedom.

FC Indiana midfielder Julianne Sitch, on the other hand, helped lead the famed Chicago Cobras back to the championship after a two-year absence since winning the title in the second of back-to-back finals in 2000. Her experiences with the Cobras were vastly different, however, and she will be looking to change her fortunes in Virginia Beach, where her side fell 1-0 in overtime to the Piranhas in the 2003 championship game. In 2004, Sitch and the Cobras were unable to get past the eventual champions again, falling 2-1 to Vancouver in Ottawa in the semifinals and finishing fourth with a 1-0 loss to the previously discussed Fury.

If there is one other team in the W-League that can commiserate with the Fury, it is the Seattle Sounders, who are in the W-League Championship tournament for the fourth time, but have never finished better than third. It took three years after their initial third place finish in 2003 to return to the final four, but trips to the semifinals the past two years only netted two more third place finishes.

Eleven players on the Seattle roster have experienced at least one trip to the semifinals with seven having also played on the squad both years, including the top four leading scorers Chalise Baysa, Dani Bridges, Michelle French and Kelli Smith. Fifth-year Sounder Erin Gamble is the lone player from the 2003 squad, having returned for the final three games of the season this year after a two-year absence, helping guide the team to its two highest scoring matches of the campaign.

Baysa, French and Smith also come into the final four in their fifth year as well with Seattle, but it is the four-time W-League All-Conference selection French that has narrowly missed the championship the most. The former US international with 14 caps from 1997-2001 was a member of the Washington Freedom in the inaugural season of the WUSA in 2001. After her first professional season, she crossed the country to join the defending league champion San Jose CyberRays, who failed to return to the Founder’s Cup championship game while her former Freedom side finished runners-up the second year and claimed the title in 2003.

French was the third leading scorer on the team with two goals and two assists on the year. Dani Bridges, in her fourth year with the team, notched three goals and an assist with Baysa, the Western Conference playoff hero, leading the team with four goals and three assists during the regular season. It was the Sounders defense led by Smith, Shannon Lovejoy and Beth Drollinger, however, that earned the side the trip to the final four, allowing just 11 goals in 12 games.

Their opponent in the semifinal is the opposite story with eight players having registered more points than Baysa on the year. The two leading scorers, Laura Del Rio with 13 and Sitch with 10, have 23 combined of FC Indiana’s 67 goals to Seattle’s total of 19 for the year, leaving former US international goalkeeper Kristin Luckenbill largely untested in her 11 games, posting six shutouts and a .205 goals against average for a record of 10-0-1.

At the W-League Championship tournament this week, the regular season champion Pali Blues will face the defending champion Washington Freedom and the Seattle Sounders will take on the FC Indiana Lionesses in the semifinals Thursday, July 31. The winners will meet Saturday, August 2 in the championship, which will air on Fox Soccer Channel at 11:00 pm ET.