In a League of Their Own...

If you can’t beat ‘em, start a new league!
For those of you not from Seattle, let me fill you in:

The Seahawks have never seen a Super bowl (from the playing field). Ever. Not once. (yet).

The Mariners have never seen the all important World Series.

The Sonics have won the NBA finals… but I was 6 and that was a long time ago.

Now the WNBA’s Seattle Storm have a title, but for some reason Seattle just doesn’t seem as excited about this as you’d expect. Hey, a winning team is a winning team and these ladies are down right awesome. But million dollar contracts?
-- Nope.
Multi-continent mega-conglomerate endorsements?
-- None that lasted.
No, the sad truth is that every woman on the Seattle Storm could be 10 times the player Michael Jordan ever was and still they wouldn’t get the recognition they deserve from the majority of the Seattle Population.

So what do we do? Huge and copious amounts of money could buy any one of Seattle's Professional teams a significant bump in talent, but that doesn’t guarantee a title win (Can Texas say "A Rod"?) in any one of these sports.

What we need is a fresh start. There’s no hockey in Washington, but that’s not a fresh start. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a professional Hockey team here in Seattle, and we’re very close to some good Canadian and Alaskan talent, but there’s also a huge pool of talented teams in an existing league that wouldn’t want to give us their Stanley cup to some Johnny-Come-Lately.

So, what’s left? SOCCER!

Now this is a great idea because there’s no National competition and yet there’s a HUGE world following in the sport. Which team players to recruit is inconsequential since we don’t have any competition to try and beat. What is important is a good acronym for our association--like NFL (National Football League) or MLB (Major League Baseball) or NBA (National Basketball Association) or NHL (National Hockey League).

The League needs something that’s Catchy, and yet something that stands out from the crowd. For instance, you can’t call the league NSL (National Soccer League) because that would sound far to similar to NFL. And you can’t call it the USSL (United States Soccer League) because that would be too familiar to Ye old Communist Russia.

USL (United Soccer League) is good, but it’s vague in it’s origin and, well we’re American and gosh darn it, we’re patriotic! ASL (American Soccer League) is potentially a good choice so long as it dosen’t bring up remembrances of the AFL (American Football League), which for some is still a wince-worthy acronym. And the American Soccer Society is just NOT happening.

I propose we call this league the United Soccer League of America (USLA). Sure the acronym might sound like a Beef inspection agency, or the "American" side of Los Angeles, but both of those things are good wholesome American ideals and that’s fine by me!

So stay tuned; Seattle is about to have a winning team! I encourage each and every one of you to get [buy] your T-shirts (available from me via email for only $35.00!) and ball caps (on sale for $22.00!) now, in preparation of our inaugural title-wining season!

See you there, Seattle!