Question about W-League

[Elias]

Basically, since this is the top women's league in NA since the demise of WUSL, I was wondering, it's basically a 3 month season (May-Aug), what do all the players do the rest of the year?

Obviously the NCAA players play for their schools from what Sep-Nov or whatever.

But how about the rest?

[Richard]

They go to school or they continue to work at their regular day jobs. If the Whitecaps women's team is representative of most of the teams in the W-League, the women are not paid anything to play, just their travel expenses are covered so they must needs have another real job in order to survive.

This of course does restrict selection to those players who can spare the time off from their jobs. Same applies to the men's team except for the few that may receive close to a living wage from the club. I know of some instances where selected players for the men's team have had to withdraw because they could not afford all the time off work. Must certainly happen with the women too.

[Elias]

I was wondering more about actually playing soccer. Playing 3 months is not enough.

Granted there are camps and national team matches here and there.

And not just Canada but also the US players.

[Richard]

Well I can't speak for everywhere but many of the Whitecaps women and even national team members who are not university students play on local amateur premier league teams during their W-League off-season. In British Columbia our main season occurs during the winter, unlike most of the rest of Canada so it fits well. My local amateur club, Surrey United (www.surreyunitedsoccer.com) includes on their premier women's team roster: Diana Artuso, Randee Hermus, Sadie McLure and Sara Maglio. Other Whitecaps women's names show up on other local premier league team rosters, not all of them of course but plenty. I suspect much the same happens elsewhere, they find somewhere to play.

[Elaine]

As Richard mentioned, most players do have "other teams" that they play for during the "off season". If not, they still train consistently during the offseason (whether it be alone or with other nat'l team players near by) and play games whenever they can. Some also train with their respective NTC (eventhough they aren't hypothetically part of the NTC teams because they're over age, they can still train/scrimmage with them etc.)