We'll be dropping into Goal - The New York Times Soccer Blog from time to time to provide some perspective on the women's game. Check out our latest post on Women's Professional Soccer and be sure to give us a hand combating the soccer cavemen that show up on occassion just to bash our game.

A standing room only crowd attended the Women’s Professional Soccer’s Town Hall Meeting at the 2008 NSCAA Convention to get the scoop on the new league. The meeting was moderated by USA Today columnist Christine Brennan and had six panelists representing the league including President and General Manager of the Boston Breakers, Joe Cummings, Boston Breakers Head Coach Tony DiCicco, Chicago Owner Gary Weaver, Chicago General Manager Marcia McDermott, Sky Blue Soccer (NJ/NY) Marketing/Public Relations Manager Gloria Averbuch and former NY Power player Emily Janss. Unfortunately, League Commissioner, Tonya Antonucci was under the weather and was unable to participate.

Two attendees that were especially eager for some news were Christie Welsh and Lori Lindsey. Both played in the WUSA and are among the dwindling number of former players that have been hanging and keeping themselves ready for when and if the league ever came back. Both currently play on the Washington Freedom’s W-League team.

I chatted with them for a few minutes after the meeting to get their take.

FG: What did you guys think? Was this new information or have you been hearing things through the Washington Freedom organization?

CW: I haven’t heard much to be honest. We’ve been pretty much out of the picture and training on our own and trying to get ourselves ready for the eventual launch. Today I was hoping to hear a little bit more about what’s going to happen with players and how they are going to be allocated. Obviously, that’s going to take some time to figure out, but that’s the stuff that we’re really interested in. We want the smart people to figure out the business plan and to get that organized and then as soon as we can, to help in anyway that we can. The t-shirts they handed out, I’ll be wearing this around as much as I can to get the logo out and the name. We’re just wondering what we can do to help and what we can do to prepare.

FG: Both of you were around last time and you stuck it out and kept yourself fit, obviously hoping this was coming and then it always seemed to be “next year”. Does it seem real?

LL: I think finally it seems real. Since 2003 when the league suspended everyone’s been saying “the league’s going to be back next year, the league’s going to be back next year,” and finally I think they’re just taking their time and getting it right. I think we heard some of that today about the front office and there’s going to be more information coming about the other side of things about what we need to do to get ready to come for combines or however they’re going to select players.

FG: How many of you guys are out there that have been waiting and just trying to stay ready for the league to come back?

CW: We were just talking about that amongst ourselves on the way here. We were wondering ourselves, how many people are out there. We play in indoor leagues at night and we just ran into a couple girls the other day that still have it and are playing, but they don’t play on W-League teams and we were wondering if they were going to decide to quit the jobs that they now have and are secure financially and jump into something like this again.

LL: I think there are only like five of us.

CW: We’ve just been focused on playing in the league, whenever it is, it might be ten years from now but that’s what I’m going to do. 20 at most, maybe that are like us. We play in the league, the tournaments.

LL. We play with the National Team whenever we can.

Both Welsh and Lindsey will continue to play with the Washington Freedom this year to bridge the gap and expect that they will see more familiar faces dusting off their cleats to try and get themselves back in the mix.

* Photo - Boston Breakers President and General Manager Joe Cummings and Chicago General Manager Marcia McDermott represented Women's Professional Soccer well at their Town Hall Meeting at the 2008 NSCAA Convention. (Andy Mead/YCJ)

Heather Mitts, who is still rehabbing from an ACL injury, has been busy at the NSCAA Convention signing autographs for Under Armour and Women’s Professional Soccer. She took a short break to catch up with Fair Game readers.

Give us an update on the injury. You were in the mini-camp in December. Did you do any contact drills then?

I wasn’t supposed to, but I did. It’s so hard not to when you get out there. That’s the thing that I talked about with Pia. I’m not ready for China because I’m not ready to go out there and be 100%, so we thought maybe February coming into camp which I’m going to do on the 1st and hopefully make the Algarve Cup, without the brace, being 100% and going forward from there.
How are you feeling now?

Great. I’m in Philly right now doing double days. It feels like it did before, Now I know it’s just a matter of me getting out there and getting used to playing with the new players and the old players and getting game fit again.

Have you been following the Four Nations Tournament?

As well as I can. It’s hard when you’re not over there, but I know they’ve won both their games so far. Pia is going to do a great job. I know the players, I’ve talked to a lot of them, are really excited about going forward and obviously the Olympics.

What were your impressions of Pia from the four-day camp in December?

Luckily for me, she was my coach in Philly, so I knew her a little bit before hand. It was so much fun because I knew what to expect and it’s the same old Pia. It’s a completely different philosophy and I think it will be great for this US team to be able to go out there with a new coach and play a new style of soccer.

You’re here signing autographs at the Women’s Professional Soccer booth. What do you think now that it’s really official?

I’m so excited that it’s coming back. We need it. Not only for those kids looking forward to coming out of college and playing and little girls growing up, but also the fact that it’s going to help our Women’s National Team with the pool. We saw that when it went away, we didn’t have as many players that were training single everyday. I think it’s so important to the growth of women’s soccer here in the states.

The WUSA was critical to your development as a player.

I wouldn’t have been on the National Team if it weren’t for the league. It’s just so important for so many of those girls coming out of college that don’t have the means to be able to play every single day with the Women’s National Team. I’ve gotten so lucky from it and I know Shannon Boxx and Abby Wambach are the same story. You look at them and they are two of the best players on the team. It was detrimental not to have a league and I know we are all looking forward to it being back.

I am in Baltimore reporting from the 2008 NSCAA Convention. This post will be brief because I have been up for a very long time.

The big buzz coming out of the convention today is the official launch of Women's Professional Soccer, the new league that will begin play in the spring of next year. They've rolled out the name, logo and launched the website today - enough evidence for even the most skeptical that they are for real and that women's pro soccer will indeed return to the US in 2009.

League Commissioner, Tonya Antonucci gave an informal talk to attendees at the Social for Coaches of Female Athletes and is on the agenda for the Women's Committee Breakfast on Saturday morning.

Everyone seems to be talking about Arsenal Ladies Assistant Head Coach, Emma Hayes', presentation Diagonal Lines; Getting Between to Get Behind. Maybe it's the English accent, but her session definitely impressed the coaches in attendance. The word on the street is if you want a seat at her presentation tomorrow on the Global Growth of the Women's Game and Reflections of the Women's World Cup, you'd better get there early.

More tomorrow from the convention after I've had some sleep!

WSII made the official announcement that a women’s professional soccer league was set to launch in 2009 on September 4th. I played telephone tag with WSII CEO (and new league commissioner) Tonya Antonucci for a few days before leaving for China and the World Cup on the 8th. I continued my quest to get the scoop on the new league while I was in China and after several more rounds of tag we finally connected a couple weeks into my trip. Of course about that time, the U.S. lost to Brazil, all hell broke loose and this informative interview with Antonucci got shelved.

So, better late than never, I bring you this league update. The interview was long (I have the phone bill from China to prove it), so I will break it up into a few pieces and post it over the next week. Today’s section focuses on the initial funding of the league and what played into the decision to postpone until 2009.

Can you give me the status of where things stand with the launch?

The good news is that the league has now been physically formed and the investors have put in a sizeable financial contribution; sizable six figures each as of the time of the announcement and there’s another capital infusion coming at the end of the year that’s even larger, which all goes toward standing up the league and preparing the league for the launch in 2009.

In addition, the owners are also spending on their own markets what they need to spend to prepare their own front office staff, ticketing, facilities and preparations to be ready in 2009.

In reality, moving to 2009 actually cost the owners a little bit more because there’s a longer ramp up time and that’s just a function of the reality of our decision to go to 2009.

To reinforce, the good news is that we evolved from having a goal to launch and having a group of investors that were committed to the process, to actually having real funding in, more funding being staged in and we are actually starting the league at this point, making hires and preparing marketing budgets, etc. It’s pretty exciting.

From WSII’s perspective, we’ve had to have a lot of patience over the last two and a half years to keep these owners involved in the process and convince them of the viability of the business plan. The reality was that it took a while to get them to understand that whereas WUSA has some missteps from a business standpoint, that this business model is sound and they should invest in it and that they should commit to it. That took some time and it took getting the right group of people together on the investment side and now they’ve not only said they’re going to do it but they’ve actually put their money in, in a sizeable way to do it.

So, the ball is rolling. With respect to the timing of 2009 versus our goal of 2008, certainly from a player and fan standpoint, and even from WSII’s standpoint, it was a disappointment that we couldn’t be ready for 2008. However, the reality we were faced with was, can we get this league ready in six months or do we go to the alternative which was 18 months. When starting a sports league and you’ve picked your season there’s not anything in between as an option. We felt it was more important to do it right that to do it fast. We had a situation where at least half of our owners were on a path where they could be ready for April of 2008, but we had some markets that weren’t on a path to be ready. That’s just really a crucial issue when you’ve got seven teams.

These guys are in business together now. Again, they’ve made a sizable financial contribution each to the business. They want to make sure that all the franchises can be successful, so they made a decision together that what was best for the entirety of the league, even though some were ready to go in 2008, what was best for the entirety of the league for the sustainable, long term viability of the league was 2009.

From a marketing standpoint, the other issue that came into play, and we discussed this for over five hours with the owners, was the Olympics calendar. What we concluded was that there were three alternatives for dealing with the Olympics and none of them were attractive to the owners. Those three alternatives were:

• Run the season in two parts. Run the season, take a break and all the international stars and domestic stars get called into camp and then go play in the Olympics and then we’d start the league again. That’s not attractive because not unlike what we are seeing with the World Cup, there is a lot of sports competition in the fall in the states that make it a crowded landscape. So, that wasn’t attractive from a timing standpoint. It just wasn’t a smart choice.
• The second alterative was playing through the Olympics without our international and domestic stars. That did not make sense to us, particularly in our launch year. An astute person would say that there are Olympics and World Cups ever few years, you’re going to have to deal with that and that’s a fair point. But, there’s a difference between you having your stride as a league. While fans may be attracted to the stars at first, they build a connection to their team. It goes beyond specific players. Players come and go but people are passionate about the Green Bay Packers. People are passionate about the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, etc. That’s part of the process that goes on with the evolution of a team and the league as well.
• The third option that was again, not very attractive to the owners, was the notion that we play a compacted season, that we try to force 21 games per team into 13 weeks. Part of the challenge with us and our model is that we’re going to be sharing facilities with MLS teams, in some case universities, in some cases in the future, we’re looking at potential USL markets as possibilities, so in that sense, trying to force the schedule, we may not get desirable dates. We would have been forced to make decisions about scheduling that could really impact the marketing and the business negatively.

So those were all considerations, when in combination with the operational readiness question, gave the owners a clear decision, which was 2009.

Check back over the next few days for how the owners are going about selecting a name, on whether to expect other markets before the 2009 launch and more.