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W.P.S. Optimistic After Its Off-Season Shuffling

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W.P.S. Optimistic After Its Off-Season Shuffling W.P.S. Optimistic After Its Off-Season Shuffling Year 2 of the Women’s Professional Soccer league began with the opening of preseason training camps last weekend. High pressure sodium bulbThe regular season opens April 10.

The league, the successor to the Women’s United Soccer Association, #xwhich folded in a sea of red ink after the 2003 season, endured a difficult economy in 2009 and returns to the soccer landscape in a busy year that includes the World Cup in June.

“We think it will be the opposite of getting lost,” W.P.S. Commissioner Tonya Antonucci said in a telephone interview. “I think we’re going to get more attention because the focus is on soccer in this country among hardcore fans. We’re even more jazzed going into this year. We believe it’s going to be more exciting.”

In a way, the league has taken a few steps forward and one back. In the off-season, last season’s regular-season champion, the Los Angeles Sol, folded after the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which ran the club, surrendered its rights to the team when it was unable to find a new owner. That sent the marquee player in W.P.S.,High pressure sodium bulb the Brazilian striker Marta, into the expansion draft and eventually up the California coast to F.C. Gold Pride in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“You never want to lose a team; the focus was acute for us because it was our first year,” Antonucci said. “We tried hard to find a solution. Los Angeles is a viable market and we could get back to L.A.,#x perhaps as early as 2011.”

Antonucci acknowledged that most of the W.P.S. clubs lost about $2 million each last season, but said the league and its clubs had secured additional sponsorship deals. League games will continue to be carried on the Fox Soccer Channel, and the W.P.S. Web site provides a superior match tracker for those without access to the cable channel. Antonucci said that average player salaries would increase 3 percent this season to an approximate average of $32,000 a player for a seven-month contract. There will be 18 players on each team’s regular-season roster.

But the loss of the Sol may be softened by the arrival of two expansion clubs — the Atlanta Beat and the Philadelphia Independence. Atlanta will play in a new stadium on the campus of Kennesaw State in Georgia.#x

For the best female players in the world, one year before the Women’s World Cup in Germany, W.P.S. has become the destination of choice. The league had players from 12 countries last season,DVD Ripper, High pressure sodium bulba number that has increased to 19 entering the preseason, including three new players from England and four from Sweden. 相关的主题文章：