• Road Trips! The NCAA Women’s College Cup is in College Station this weekend, featuring the same four teams as last year. Semifinals are Friday, Dec. 4: Stanford vs. UCLA, 4:30pm; North Carolina vs. Notre Dame, 7pm. Championship final: noon, Sunday, Dec. 6. All games will be shown live on ESPN2 and ESPNU. Meanwhile, the NCAA Division III Men’s & Women’s final fours are in San Antonio Dec. 4-5 at Blossom Soccer Stadium. Tickets are on sale at www.sanantoniosports.org. Friday: women’s semifinals, 11am & 1:30pm; men’s semifinals, 5pm & 7:30pm. Saturday: women’s championship, 1pm; men’s championship, 5pm.
• Also on TV: The World Cup 2010 draw is this Friday, Dec. 4, live on ESPN2 from 11am to 1pm… Arsenal-Stoke is 9am Saturday, and the Roma-Lazio derby is Sunday at 1:30pm, both on FSC. And the final games in the European Champions League group stage are Tuesday-Wednesday, Dec. 8-9. The Fox networks will show five games live, both days at 1:30pm.
• Djorn Buchholz, new CEO of the Austin Aztex, will be on Fútbol en Vivo Tuesday, Dec. 8, 1:30-2pm. KOOP Radio 91.7FM.
USL/NASL Follies
The Rochester Rhinos announced Monday that they’re leaving the United Soccer Leagues for the new North American Soccer League, leaving just Puerto Rico, Portland, and the Austin Aztex in the USL First Division (and Portland leaving for MLS after one more season). The NASL is now at 10 teams; however, it remains unsanctioned by the U.S. Soccer Federation, and several of its clubs are still under contract to USL-1. In short, this is still going to get uglier before it gets better.
But get better it will, surely. In the end, the club owners want to play soccer and want to play against all the other established top-level teams. That means they want a solution that keeps all the teams together – under whichever banner survives. As Aztex owner Phil Rawlins put it when I asked him: “I continue to believe that common sense will prevail between the two parties and that the 2010 season will see the majority of the teams on both sides of this divide playing against each other on the field. … However the situation resolves itself, the Aztex will do what we believe is right for the franchise and the game. … In the meantime we continue to prepare for our second season with increased scouting activity and open tryouts scheduled for February. We are particularly excited about our move Downtown to House Park in 2010.”
In fact, a real cockeyed optimist would even see a silver lining to the whole mess: The shake-up seems to have revived or accelerated a number of expansion plans around the country – including in San Antonio, where on-again-off-again plans for a team had been dormant of late, until the NASL option came up. An Austin-San Antonio derby rivalry – how cool would that be?
This article appears in December 4 • 2009.