Women's Soccer Void

Rival Women’s Soccer Leagues Each Strive to Replace the WUSA

By Michael Jones

May 10, 2004 - When the WUSA closed its doors in September of last year, few fans of women’s soccer were in the mood for celebrating. Yet amid the sense of loss and the hand-wringing that accompanied the league’s demise, there were at least a few interested parties who saw an opportunity to capitalize on the sudden void that was left in the women’s game. And a small handful of people were barely able to conceal their sense of satisfaction that an organization that had made few attempts to unite the soccer community had, in some way, got its just desserts.

“I think there will be some people who will be happy to see them go,” admitted Boston Renegades GM Joe Bradley at the time. “There was a certain amount of arrogance associated with the management of the league. They certainly didn’t engender a lot of good will with MLS. They certainly didn’t engender a lot of good will with regard to the W-League.”

Perhaps Bradley had hopes of seeing his own team return to the 2,000-plus crowds they used to enjoy in the late 1990s before the WUSA came along and stole their thunder. And he was surely looking forward to being able to market his team once again as the highest level of play in Massachusetts. They have, after all, twice won the W-League National Championship.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this year’s season opener, and new rivals for the Renegades’ bragging rights have emerged, first in the form of a new W-League power, and secondly in form of a rival league that has based its East Coast operations right in the Renegades’ back yard.

First, the new W-League power. As former WUSA players have scrambled for playing opportunities in the post-professional era, it seems that a disproportionate number of them have ended up on one or two teams. One of the main beneficiaries seems to have been the New Jersey Wildcats, who have picked up a number of players from the old Philadelphia Charge. Kelly Smith arrived from England just one day before the season opener, and Smith’s former Charge teammate Anne Makinen was also on the opening day roster, along with US National teamer Heather O’Reilly, Monmouth University’s Kate Sands and UNC Greensboro’s Cara Hammond. The net result of all that talent was a whopping 6-1 victory over the Renegades on opening day on May 8. And considering the Wildcats out-shot the Renegades 27-2, it could have been even worse.

This is the same Renegades team that went undefeated last season until bowing out in the opening round of the playoffs, so there has clearly been a shift of power.

“We played very, very poorly,” concedes Renegades coach Rob Risley. “They’re a good side, they’ve got a very strong nucleus and they deserved to win on the day. The positive thing that comes out of that game is that it was the first game of the season, and we now know what we’re up against. The standard’s been set now. It’s been set by New Jersey, and it’s up to us to go back and hopefully meet them in the playoffs and take care of business then.”

While the Renegades do have their own former WUSA player in the form of Bekah Splaine, who has returned to the team this year after spending 2003 with the Boston Breakers, they have, for the most part, resisted the temptation to load up their roster with newly available former pros. Instead, in keeping with the player development philosophy of their parent company Massachusetts Premier Soccer, they have promoted a number of young players from their junior teams to the first team.

“What we’re looking to do is get girls involved in the program and get girls involved with the team at a very young age” says Risley. “(It’s important that) the youngsters coming through the system can see that we do have young players in the first team. We’re not going to go out and try and sign the big name stars and rejuvenate our squad every year. We’re looking to build a system and build from within the club.”

Three players who have come up through the Renegades system are Sarah Rahko, Liza Barber and Caitlin Fisher, who have been with the club for several years and now form the core of the Renegades first team. That is not to say, however, that the Renegades are without international credentials. Irish internationals Laura Hislop and Sonya Hughes of Franklin Pierce, are joined by French international Zoe Avner and a pair of Australian U19 internationals in Stacey Stocco and Caitlin Munoz. Whether these, plus the home-grown talent will enable the Renegades to keep up with the “Jones” of New Jersey remains to be seen, but Risley cautions that a team’s roster does not always reflect the true quality of the team they put out on the field.

Mary Frances Monroe

Mary Frances Monroe is one of several high-leel former college players who has joined te New England Mutiny this season

“It’ll be interesting to see how things play out,” he says. “You can always look at rosters, but in this league you never quite know who’s actually going to be there until you get there on the day. Players have international commitments, players have college commitments, players have work commitments so it’s very difficult to plan for who you are actually going to come up against.”

Three top players the Renegades know they will not be coming up against anytime soon are Mary-Frances Monroe, Erin O’Grady and Naomi Stone. That is because all three have signed for the New England Mutiny of the rival Women’s Premier Soccer League.

The WPSL was formed in the fall 1997 when Jerry Zanelli, owner and coach of the Sacramento Storm, decided that he had had enough of the W-League and its commissioner Francisco Marcos. Just as the W-League was considering the formation of a Division 1 that might have forestalled the birth of the WUSA, Zenelli took his team, plus a handful of other West Coast franchises and formed his own league.

“You can not run a women’s league as part of a men’s league,” he reasons, “otherwise you’ll end up spending 99% of your time on the men and 1% of you time on the women.”

Zenelli also had serious disagreements with Marcos about the location of National Championhips (all on the East Coast) and what he considered to be exorbitant league fees. The W-League never recovered west of the Mississippi, and the WPSL chugged along merrily for the next five years. But it was always a purely Western phenomenon, seldom garnering the national attention of its Tampa-based rival.

Enter Joe Ferrara of the New England Mutiny. Like Zenelli, Ferrara had started his involvement in top-flight women’s soccer in the W-League and, like Zenelli, he had fallen out with the top brass at the USL. He had been one of the partners that launched the highly successful Springfield Sirens in 1999. When a dispute between Ferrara and his partner, Diane Kopec caused the Sirens to be ejected from the W-League, Ferrara turned to the WPSL to find a home for his new team. He admits that his departure from the W-League had left him with a somewhat bitter taste in his mouth.

“My issue first started off as an ownership dispute,” he recalls. “Then as things progressed, the W-League got involved and it became more and more apparent that they were just looking to stalemate the situation and re-sell a territory.”

That is, in fact, just what the W-League did, transferring the Sirens’ rights to the Western Mass. Pioneers. Meanwhile, Ferrara soon discovered that, not only did the WPSL provide a viable alternative to the W-League, but in many ways it provided a preferable one.

“I finally started looking into the WPSL and started comparing leagues, and then I said, this is a no-brainer. From a League perspective, we are a stand-alone women’s league. Now we are the only stand-alone national women’s league, and our only focus is women’s soccer.”

Ferrara also cites the fact that the WPSL is run by the owners, rather than by a self-professed “benevolent dictator” like Francisco Marcos, as a primary advantage. And the WPSL is considerably less expensive in terms of league fees, he claims, which enables owners to reinvest more funds back into their clubs.

Ferrara has been elected as the Eastern Commissioner of the WPSL, and is charged with expanding the league’s East Coast presence. Moreover, he is not the only former W-League owner who saw the WPSL as a preferable alternative. Soon after the Mutiny joined, the Maryland Pride made the switch after nine years in the W-League, then the Rhode Island Rays. This year, the addition of three new teams, the Steele City Sparks, the Massachusetts Stingers and the Rochester Reign has given the WPSL a substantial Eastern Division. And one of those teams in particular points to a potentially worrying trend for the W-League.

Remember that dispute between Jerry Zenelli and Francisco Marcos about the location of the W-League National Championships? Well, Zenelli claims he had been promised the chance to host the 1997 finals in California, while Marcos insisted on holding them on the East Coast. The location of that event ended up being Rochester, NY, where Jill McCabe has long run one of the W-League’s top franchises. It is something which still rankles Zenelli to this day, so it was an act of sweet revenge for him to put a team right on top of the Rochester Ravens as soon as he got the chance. Zenelli insists there will be others, including, possibly, a WPSL team in Boston.

“We’re going to give everyone (of the W-League owners) a chance to join the WPSL,” he says, “and if they don’t we’ll put a team right on top of them.”

Ferrara may be less combative than Zenelli, but he is equally ambitious in his expansion plans. He expects to double the number of the East Coast teams within the next twelve months, and is already fielding inquiries from a number of clubs, including other W-League teams looking to make the switch.

And the rivalry could get even uglier than the current spate of territorial turf wars. Zenelli accuses some W-League teams of playing fast and loose with NCAA rules in ways that can affect the college eligibility of players. He claims that the close ties that exist between professional men’s teams and certain W-League teams muddy the distinction between the professional and amateur status of players, and he has urged the NCAA to investigate.

On the field, the New England Mutiny have been the main beneficiaries of the WUSA’s demise and the Renegades reliance on home-grown talent. Ferrara contends that the current team is the strongest he has ever put on the field in the five years that he has been involved with women’s soccer. He credits Mutiny Coach Austin Daniels with creating the kind of playing environment that has acted as a magnet for top talent. The club’s location close to the women’s soccer hotbeds of Western Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut surely hasn’t hurt either.

In addition to Monroe, O’Grady and Stone, the Mutiny roster includes Alexa Borisjuk and several notable college players, including Erin Duffy of Wheaton and Rachel LeDuc of UMass. The reigning W-League scoring champion Jeanette Ackerlund has also joined the team from the Ottawa Fury club that she led to the W-League Final Fours last year.

The Mutiny also made its own Final Four last year, trekking all the way to California to compete in the WPSL’s version of a National Championship. This year, Ferrara no doubt hopes to go one better and lead his team all the way to the national crown, just as the Renegades have twice done in the W-League.

Whether the two teams will ever compete against each other on the field seems unlikely at this time, given that bad blood that obviously exists between the top brass of the respective league. But what does seem certain is that New England’s top two women’s teams will continue to compete off the field for many years to come.