Women's Soccer

Sometimes things just start with a friend. 

“My really good friend in school when I was about 7 started playing soccer, so I signed up, just to take part and really soon after just started to enjoy it.”

It’s a little frustrating to hear that a professional soccer player started playing the game so, well, randomly. Here is someone ostensibly living a dream, and it all started off with an “I guess I’ll do that.”

“If it had, by default, been an instrument or a different sport I think I kind of just would have gone with it.”

The Seattle Reign and FC Kansas City are about to face off in the final of the National Women’s Soccer League playoffs tonight at 9:30 PM EST on Fox Sports 1. If you didn’t know that, you are not only not alone, but you have come to the right place. 

Screaming fans, a sold-out stadium, waving banners and chants from the crowd that reach the players in the locker room before they take the field. This will be the spectacle awaiting Kansas City FC and Seattle Reign FC when they arrive in Portland for this week's 2015 NWSL Final. It will be played in front of a crowd at Providence Park, home of both the Portland Timbers and Portland Thorns FC and, coincidentally, one of the most rabid fan bases in all of soccer.

So it turns out Robert Lewandowski isn’t the only Lewandowski capable of prolific scoring achievements. It might be a long time before we see someone actually top Mr. Lewandowski's ridiculous 5 goals in 9 minutes, but a certain Ms. Lewandowski – Anja Lewandowski, to be precise – came close much sooner than expected. And no, Anja is no relation to Robert. She is, however, the proud owner of a new goal scoring achievement that is pretty ridiculous in and of itself.

According to the Associated Press, 13 soccer players who took part in this summer's Women's World Cup have been dropped from the FIFA 16 video game because of concerns from the NCAA.

This is the first year FIFA 16 has featured women's teams, with 12 women's national teams from the World Cup included in the game..

The dropped players hail from three coutries: six from Mexico, six from Canada and six from Spain.

Debates are fun. Iran women's national team captain Niloufar Ardalan sparked a debate when it was revealed she would not participate for Iran in the Asian Cup because her husband had confiscated her passport.

Her passport was confiscated (yes, husbands are really allowed to do that in Iran) because of a domestic dispute, allegedly because the tournament would interfere with the couple's son's first day of school.

What a day it was to be a Seattle reign substitute.

After a scoreless first half that saw Seattle putting all kinds of pressure on the Washington Spirit, Seattle kept pressing. When Beverly Yanez entered the game as a sub, that pressing paid off. Yanez's first touch on the end of a Megan Rapinoe cross broke the deadlock and it was all Seattle from there. 

A few minutes after Yanez's goal, Rapinoe got behind the defense and scored a goal of her own. 

The Chicago Red Stars just didn't have an anwer for Kansas City's Amy Rodriguez Sunday.

Kansas City scored three goals in the first 25 minutes of Sunday's NWSL semifinal and coasted 3-0 into the final. 

Two of those three were via Rodriguez, the first coming in the 12th minute, Rodriguez capitalizing on a goalkeeper blunder, and the second coming in the 12th minute after Rodriguez used a nifty move to spring herself for a breakaway.

Kansas City's other goalscorer  was Erika Tymrak, who knew just what to do with an excellent Heather O'Reilly ball in the 21st minute.

Entire lifetimes have been spent hashing out what qualities give people worth. Those qualities change as often as they are discovered; they can vary as widely as the names of the people they belong to.

In the world of sports, however, society teaches us what to value in a very specific kind of human, an athlete. It teaches us to value only one thing: whether or not an athlete wins. It seems like the ultimate meritocracy: if an athlete deserves to win then they will win, and we will applaud them for doing so. Sometimes it works just like that, but not always.

Fun fact: WashingtonSpirit.com lists Crystal Dunn, who as mentioned in the sub-head won the 2015 NWSL Golden Boot, as a defender. Granted, Crystal Dunn has played her fair share of defense (she won ACC Defensive Player of the Year while at the University of North Carolina), but this seems curious to us. Just an interesting thing we noticed. On to the preview.