Courtesy of Voyageur Elder, Mr. Victor Maitland.
For a year without a single qualifying event at any level, 2009 was a watershed moment in Canadian women's soccer. It marked the arrival of a new architect and her team with a four year contract to instill a contemporary sensibility to our tactics and bring long overdue freshness to the program.
Carolina Morace and her staff (Elisabetta Bavagnoli, Andrea Neil and part-timers Massimiliano Colucci and Mario Familari) are now a year embedded and performed extensive scouting of all Candian women and had an opportunity to evalua
te their selections in a number of camps and exhibition games with both the U20 and senior women. The year ahead is the most exciting in the history of women's soccer for a Canadian fan with non-stop action as the qualifying and competing phases of all our women's teams intersect giving everyone a chance to wave the flag.Before breaking down the national scene, to provide some context and background a quick roundup on the women's game around the planet.
The biggest story of the year and arguably the biggest in the history of the women's game was a pink-scarfed occupational therapy student with an impressive academic awards record (and a blank discipline rap sheet on the field) who flipped a switch in the final weekend of the season and thanks to the immediacy of youtube became a national icon. If you played soccer, odds are extremely high you watched Elizabeth Lambert.
In a preview of this Summer's World Cup, Germany and Brazil play to a 1-1 draw in front of 45,000 in Frankfurt in April. Demand of tickets for the Summer's World Cup has already outstripped supply. The slogan for the Summer Cup is "The Beautiful Side Of 20Eleven."The year 2009 also marked two very significant milestones in women's soccer: play began in the first-ever UEFA Women's Champions League and FIFA announced a Women's World Club Championship in the Spring of 2010.
Brazilian Marta Vieira da Silva is named World Player of the Year for the fourth straigh year, beating out three-time winner and four-time runner-up Birgit Prinz of Germany.
The new Tier 1 American professional women's league (WPS) completes it's birth season showcasing the talents of the finest collection of female players anywhere in the world. Canadians are considered internationals which are capped per team but are well-represented with nine players in the seven team league in 2009 (which will expand to nine teams in 2010). The Ottawa Fury make their fifth W League Final Four in seven years but go down on penalties to the Washington Freedom. The Freedom lose to L.A.'s Pali Blues in the final with a Canadian on each roster.The Tier 2 W League feels the WPS squeeze and drops almost a quarter of it's teams in 2010 while the Tier 3 WPSL expands 50%.
Canadians are well represented in the NCAA as well with a similar eight players in the Final Eight, as well as a First Team All-American (Sophie Schmidt) and Second Team All-American Scholar (Christina Julien).Closer to home Edmonton Victoria win their third gold and sixth medal of the millenium in the Jubilee hosted this year by Saskatoon. They tipped BC's Surrey United 5-4 in penalties in a 0-0 final.
The Trinity Western Spartans two-peat for the CIS title with a similar 0-0 penalty kicks win over the Université de Montréal Carabins with a combination of lady luck and some outstanding goalkeeping.
Canada makes the World University Games quarter-finals in Belgrade but goes down 1-4 to France.
Two more women enter the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame with Joan McEachern as a 2009 entrant and Sylvana Burtini a 2010.
CSA General Secretary Peter Montopoli announces his Christmas wish is a winning 2015 Women's World Cup bid.
Abigail Raymer (U17), Chelsea Stewart (U20), and Christine Sinclair (Senior) are the CSA Players of the Year.Barring a last-second act of God, Karina LeBlanc is a well-deserved inaugural winner of the Voyageurs Women's Player of the Year for 2009.Our U17 team coached by Ian Bridge with assistants Bryan Rosenfeld, Cindy Walsh and Owen Braun ran a preliminary September camp in Laval and will be back on the field early in the New Year continuing their preparation for the March CONCACAF World Cup qualifying tournament in Costa Rica and the September World Cup in Trinidad and Tobago.With a January qualifying tournament in Guatemala, the reigning CONCACAF champion U20 team coached by Carolina Morace and her staff is farther into the preparation cycle having encamped in Colorado in July, Texas in October and Florida in December.
The Senior Women's team met a number of times during the year with their new chief, who as promised mixed things up regularly in her search for talent. Scouting in Canada is probably more difficult than anywhere on the planet with national team players in professional leagues all over the world (England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Denamrk, Italy, USA, etc) and CIS and amateur club players spread 8,000 kilometers coast to coast. Twelve Canadian women are on the the Top 20 ranked pro teams in the world.Morace's hiring became official in early February and she got to work immediately with a California camp her first week, followed by a camp in Rome a few weeks later and then a week in the Mediterranean at the Cyprus Cup. We played consistently better in our group with a 1-1 tie against the #24 Kiwis, a 2-1 win over the #17 Dutch, and a 2-0 win over the #14 Russians, good enough for a ticket to the final where we went down 1-3 to the England squad which made the Euro finals this Summer.The next phase was a three game series against the Americans. The first game at BMO in May in Toronto was originally slated to be against the hot Japanese but they bailed on their tour due to the Swine Flu. We went down 0-4 at home followed by consecutive 0-1 losses in the Summer on late American goals in both games. Again, positive signs and results with time.After working on the defensive aspects of their play against the Americans, the final women's session was in Florida in November with friendlies against American college teams working on possession-based attacking with Morace again describing improvements as the week progressed.Preparation for next Fall's Gold Cup (World Cup qualifier) will continue throughout the year with the first major test being the Cyprus Cup in February with games against Ramona Bachmann's well-prepared Swiss side, South Africa's Bafana Bafana and a rematch with the English.
Off the field Kara Lang blew out her right knee a second time and Kristina Kiss retired.
We began the year with a world #11 ranking and carried it through to August where we dipped to #13 for a few months before regaining #12 in December. The women's game is evolving exponentially around the planet and despite our major strides in development and professionalization it is going to take a lot of hard work, talent, and commitment not just to climb the ladder but hold our place. After a year of transition and preparation the year 2010 is full of opportunity with all our teams in a competition phase. Hopefully we'll see the fruits of the positive changes and a little magic to put us back on the world map.