Gearing Up For the Olympics

Hard to think the World Cup is old news, but yesterday's announcement of the Women's National Team roster for Olympic qualifying matches reminded us it's time to look forward to Brazil.

As Paul Kennedy points out in Soccer America, there is a big turnover from the World Cup team of just six months ago.  Six players have retired and two are pregnant.  Coach Jill Ellis did not select Whitney Engen or Heather O'Reilly.  That amounts to a 50 percent change. 

The biggest surprise seems to be O'Reilly, a veteran with 228 caps, number 7 on the all-time list for U.S. women.  She saw little time in the World Cup and perhaps is just not valued by Ellis.  I'll be interested to see if we read more on this in the coming weeks.

NFL Runs Over Kids Soccer

Fifteen hundred youth soccer players in California will be looking for a new place to play, unless a court blocks the National Football League's plans to convert the 11-acre Santa Clara Soccer Park into a media center for Super Bowl 50.

Seems when the City of Santa Clara bid to host the February 2016 Super Bowl it agreed to the condition of making the city-owned soccer park available to the NFL.  Now, as the soccer league battles the 49ers and the NFL in court, work has begun on covering the fields and building the mediae center on top of them.

As the San Jose Mercury News reported today, a court will hold a hearing next Monday on whether to issue a permanent injunction banning the NFL from taking over the soccer fields.  The judge who will hear the case has already turned down two requests for a temporary injunction.