Story on Clive in Oregon

Purplegeezer wrote:

I think it hasn't been mentioned yet , but at least 5 players were being held out of practices last week because of illness. That may have had more than a little to do with how aggressive we were on Saturday.

That could explain a lot. The impression I had from the audio was that the team seemed a little lethargic, although any impression from the audio is definitely suspect.

Another factor that may (or may not) be important is the trajectory of our competition during the past few seasons. Because the WCC has been a bit weak the last few years, our toughest matches have come at the beginning of the season. The last four weeks before the tournament have been a relative breeze for us, whereas teams in the Pac-10 and ACC are facing top-level competition nearly every week.

I wonder if that makes it more difficult for us to turn our level of play up when we get to the quarterfinals and are suddenly faced with a battle-tough UCLA or Stanford.

This season and last, we closed the regular season against the two strongest WCC teams, Santa Clara and San Diego. In theory, this should have helped to prepare us for the playoffs.

It's interesting that in our 2002 championship season we limped into the playoffs after finishing an unspectacular regular season (13-4-2) by losing at home to Santa Clara 1-0 and tying San Diego 0-0. We caught fire after that, though, winning six straight playoff games which included avenging our regular season losses to Utah and to Santa Clara.

I think that Ms. Sinclair was missing on National Team duty for at least one of those last two games in 2002.

SoreKnees wrote:I think that Ms. Sinclair was missing on National Team duty for at least one of those last two games in 2002.

Christine was in the Gold Cup at the end of the year, and in the u19 Women's Worlds Cup at the start.

She missed the 0-1 regular season game against Santa Clara:
http://www.portlandpilots.com/news/2002/11/3/49642.aspx?path=wsoc

and the 0-0 tie with San Diego:
http://www.portlandpilots.com/news/2002/11/3/49642.aspx?path=wsoc

I had forgotten that Lauren Arase didn't have to make a save in that game.

Christine also missed the first two games of the season against BYU and Utah, and UP lost both of those games.
She was playing for Canada in the u19 Women's World Cup, where she was named the player of the tournament.

Geez, you made me look it up. You pointed out that Christine wasn't around for 3 of the 4 losses in '02. I had to see if she was there for our 2-0 home loss to Pepperdine in mid-October. Sure enough, she was. She had 4 of our 13 shots and both of our two shots on goal. This proves that we could still lose a game even with Super Sinclair on the field.

She was scrambling like heck at the end of that game trying to get shots. She was awesome.