EPISODE 174: WUSA, WPS & NWSL Soccer – With Beau Dure

As the National Women's Soccer League concludes its deftly assembled 2020 Challenge Cup tournament (with congrats to the Houston Dash on their first-ever major trophy), we enlist sportswriter/soccer insider Beau Dure ("2012: The Year That Saved Women's Soccer") to help us make sense of the confoundingly discontinuous history of the women's pro game in the US over the last 20 years - and the unwitting origin story of the NWSL.

Against the backdrop of an undeniably prolific US Women's National Team - a program that has produced four FIFA Women's World Cup titles, four Olympic gold medals and currently (and regularly) sits atop the FIFA Women's World Rankings - the path to building and sustaining a viable top-tier women's domestic pro league over that time has proven surprisingly quixotic.

While the reasons are myriad, Dure navigates us through:

• The Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA): the big-money, TV-backed, John Hendricks-boostered attempt to create a first-ever pro league in the wake of 1999's breakthrough USWNT's World Cup title - but quickly burned through over $100MM and flamed out after just three seasons;

• Women's Professional Soccer (WPS): the pragmatic but woefully under-funded attempt to resurrect a circuit - this time with momentum from a 2008 Olympic Gold Medal - but done in by a wobbly investor base, none more dubious than "magicJack" owner-operator Dan Borislow; AND

• Today's NWSL: which, through the backstopping efforts of the US Soccer Federation, kept the burning embers of the WPS alive to help reconstruct what is now a seemingly thriving seven-year-old loop that will add its 10th (Louisville) and 11th (LA) franchises in the next two seasons.

     

2012: The Year That Saved Women’s Soccer - buy book here

Enduring Spirit: Restoring Women’s Soccer to Washington - buy book here

EPISODE #67: Behind-the-Scenes Tales from the Front Office with Thom Meredith

Our World Cup fever has yet to break, and we spend this week reveling in some of the heretofore unexplored (at least on this podcast) nooks and crannies of modern-day American pro soccer history with one of its most unsung front office heroes. 

In a career spanning over four decades, sports PR and event management executive Thom Meredith has proverbially “seen it all” across some of US sports’ most remarkable leagues, franchises and governing bodies – including remarkable (and sometimes dubious) assignments like handling press for the woeful NFL expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers of 1976-77, managing communications for Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis circuit of the early 1980s, and directing a litany of events for the fast-growing (and World Cup USA-fueled) US Soccer Federation of the 1990s. 

But it’s Meredith’s work across some of the most exciting (and exasperating) teams of the late 1970s/early 1980s North American Soccer League – the Tampa Bay Rowdies, Washington Diplomats, Philadelphia Fury, and Dallas Tornado – as well as the enormously well-funded, but ultimately ill-fated Women’s United Soccer Association of the early 2000s, that really piques our obsessive interests.

In this episode, we journey back with Meredith – the consummate professional soccer management insider – as he recounts priceless moments shared in the trenches with a veritable Who’s Who of the modern American game’s most indelible personalities: Shep Messing, Francisco Marcos, Al Miller, Phil Woosnam, Jim Karvellas, Seamus Malin, Alec Papadakis, John Hendricks, Timo Liekoski, Dick Berg, Tony DiCicco, Pele – and, of course, the incomparable investor-patron Hunt.

We thank Podfly, SportsHistoryCollectibles.com, and Audible for their support of this week’s show!

EPISODE #66: Sports Broadcaster JP Dellacamera

Fox Sports soccer play-by-play broadcaster extraordinaire JP Dellacamera joins the podcast this week to discuss a pioneering career in sports announcing spanning over 30 years – including calling this year’s 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia – his ninth consecutive men’s quadrennial assignment since Mexico ’86.

Widely acknowledged as the original voice of US Soccer, Dellacamera’s calls have become synonymous with some of modern-day American soccer’s most indelible moments – including his accounts of the US Women’s National Team’s dramatic penalty kick shootout victory over China in the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, and Paul Caligiuri’s historic “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” against Trinidad & Tobago in the final game of 1989 CONCACAF qualifying that punched the US Men’s National Team’s ticket for Italy ’90 – ending a 40-year World Cup finals drought, and reorienting the sport’s trajectory in the ‘States for decades to come.

The road to broadcasting global soccer’s marquee events has by no means been a straight and narrow one, however, and we (of course) chat with Dellacamera about some of the more memorable “forgotten” stops made along the way, including:

• Talking his way into his professional debut calling local TV games for the 1978 NASL expansion Detroit Express;
• Handling radio play-by-play for the American Soccer League’s ALPO dog food-sponsored Pennsylvania Stoners;
• Parlaying years of minor league hockey broadcast experience into lead announcing duties for indoor soccer’s Pittsburgh Spirit of the fledgling MISL;
• Cementing his stature as the voice of US women’s soccer as the play-by-play lead for the 2001 launch of the WUSA; and   
• Returning to his first love of pro hockey – finally at the NHL level – with the short-lived Atlanta Thrashers.  

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