On Sunday night, Seattle Reign met the USA Women’s Under-20 National Team in a friendly at Starfire Sports complex in Tukwila, WA. After a scoreless first half, the U-20s scored 2 goals. But in the 81st minute Christine Nairn curled in a beautiful free kick to get the Reign on the score sheet. But in the end, the U-20s held strong and came away with the 2-1 victory.
After the match, owner Bill Predmore and coach Laura Harvey fielded questions from the fans. Topics varied greatly, from their inept website – Predmore admitting that given his background in digital marketing it should really be better (and will be in the future) – to how US Soccer plans to deal with the national team players going forward. The basic gist of that discussion was that it’s unclear, but hopefully those players that are established with a team already won’t be reallocated. But Predmore did mention a possibility of redistributing talent in order to “re-balance” the teams. What that means, exactly, was not clear. There was an emphasis repeatedly on this being a new team in a new league and that they are in it for the long term.
The general sense from the fans seemed positive, although there were definitely some people holding Predmore’s feet to the flames around the apparent lack of marketing and cooperation with the Sounders and Sounders Women organisations.
Anyway, enough of that, here are some photos from the match…
