Elinor Priest Oregonian's Mt. Hood Conference POW

From the Oregonian/OregonLive.com 10/15/08 Athletes of the Week:
Mt. Hood Conference

Elinor Priest, St. Mary's Academy soccer: The senior midfielder had two goals and two assists last week in the Blues' victories over Hood River Valley and Reynolds.

Oregonian's 10/15/08 Athletes of the Week

Congratulations to 2009 Pilots Recruit Elinor Priest!

(Perhaps a year from now it will be "WCC Player of the Week"!)

fan,
with the way this season has gone with our 'unknowns', is there any question that elinor will be a wcc player of the week?! i noticed that as well in the oregonian. i love having oregonians on our team...no disrespect to our lovely ladies from outside this state. they represent us well an i for one am proud to claim them as our own.

Very well put, foz.

It's nice to have a balance of Oregon players and out of state players. We get the best of both worlds.

Usually we bring in more out of state than in state players. The 2009 group breaks that mold with 3 of 5 recruits from right here in this state. Matter of fact, all three are from the PDX Metro area: Elinor, Taylor Brooke and Kendall Johnson.

Perhaps this is a result of having higher level players coming out of the Oregon youth clubs. I notice all three of these players play for FC Portland. I know a lot of UP related folks coach for FC Portland. Perhaps UP is building their own local farm system?

As a Californian, I can honestly say that 10 years ago most of us here thought there was no competitive Soccer in Oregon. And as far as we could see there wasn't. I was following youth teams at the time (ODP Surf CUP) and Washington and Oregon simply were not competitive.

THEN... along came FC Portland founded by? Who else Clive Charles! I think the talent has always been around in Oregon but they needed a magnet organization where raw talent could be honed. FC Portland has provided that environment. So I expect to see UP's local players coming in as Freshmen ready to play in the competitive Division I. BTW lets keep this a secret lest the Pacific Northwest's best start getting whisked off to the East Coast/Texas/Florida and dare I say it? California schools.

FC Portland was actually founded about 20 years ago (in 1987), and has been a very dominant program since its' inception, winning a boys' national title in '94, I believe.

However, Taylor Brooke did not "grow up" in the FC Portland system, but migrated there at U17...she played the bulk of her club soccer for Southside SC, based in Tigard; her team, which included Courtney Verloo (Stanford), Taylor Thompson (Boise State), Anna Kennedy (Oregon), Amanda Dutra (PSU), and Mo Fitzgerald (Boise State) split after U16, with those players heading for either FC Portland or Lake Oswego SC. The Southside Strikerz were the long dominant team of the age group, winning 3 or 4 consecutive state titles and competing well on the regional level before splitting up. FC's owes a large part of their success at this age group this last year to the Strikerz break-up...

KFTC Clive's Bio on Wiki says he founded FC Portland in 1986 so the timing would be about right. If he wasn't the founder you should probably let Wiki know the error. Don't want any mis-information about such a great man hanging around. There is already that book that references his home in Portland, MAINE.

Clive Charles Bio

No no, you are right about Clive founding FC Portland...just the timeline was off (I thought '88, but FC Portland's website says 1987, so that's what I went with). It was initially started as FC Portland Academy, and was obviously based on English football youth academies, as at its' inception it wasn't a formal club team but a training academy; area players attended try outs, they had training blocks during the summer and winter, and they traveled to compete against other academies (FC Seattle comes to mind), but it was meant to supplement training with other club teams. I think by '90 or '91 it had formally organized into state-recognized club with OYSA and has long been a feeder into UP on both the men's and women's sides. The mid-90's rosters were stocked with Oregon product out the academy program, and a handful of kids from Washington; it wasn't until around '97 or '98 that both programs started to heavily pull players out of California.