Story on Clive in Oregon

My opinion of Abby is improved by her agreeing with me!!!!

fozziewozzie wrote:i like abby a lot, but i agree that christine is the much better all around player! this was posted at some other time in another thread, but its worth another view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKdJ37yPfHU&feature=channel

This video makes me appreciate Christine so much more, she is such a genuine and amazing player. I wish she could have stayed at UP and played for us... forever. But so excited for Sophie to be joining her (even if they play for Canada...)

remember, sophie came to us as a defensive player. through injuries she gradually got moved up, first to attacking mid then to forward. it was after that the canadian national team put her in those positions where she truly shined on an international level.

letsgopilots11 wrote:

fozziewozzie wrote:i like abby a lot, but i agree that christine is the much better all around player! this was posted at some other time in another thread, but its worth another view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKdJ37yPfHU&feature=channel

This video makes me appreciate Christine so much more, she is such a genuine and amazing player. I wish she could have stayed at UP and played for us... forever. But so excited for Sophie to be joining her (even if they play for Canada...)

If Christine were still a Pilot, we certainly wouldn't now be 0-4 in the quarterfinals. We'll never see another Sinclair.

Sinclair Fan wrote:
If Christine were still a Pilot, we certainly wouldn't now be 0-4 in the quarterfinals. We'll never see another Sinclair.

whether we see another Sinclair may or may not be true. It's certainly true that no team in NCAA history has had a production from a player equal to Chistine's Senior year 39 goals. That's an NCAA record and judging from What it has taken to be a scoring leader since then, is likely not to be broken in my lifetime.

But we did have an NCAA scoring leader this year. and the team was among UP leaders for both scoring and defense.

Christine lead the UP team to a championship in 2002 with about the same number of goals Danielle had this year. You could argue that we played harder teams in 2002, but Chistine didn't necessarily score against those teams at a rate that made much difference. She didn't for example, score a goal against UNC in 2002, nor against SCU in the regular season, nor, for that matter, against Stanford (ranked #1 ) during the run of play. She did score against ND in 2002, but Danielle scored several game winners this year, so I think any comparison of superiority is a stretch.


What was the real difference? well, I think you could point to 2002 and 2005 seasons that were injury free, especially to star players. That hasn't happened to UP since the 2005 season. This year, for example, we had a season ending injury to perhaps our most dangerous player, and to 5 central defenders (2 of them season ending) during the course of the season. Through that all we still had the best defense of any contender. In head to head comparison against UCLA, for example, we did better against common opponents.

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.

I think sometimes you just have to have your horoscope right, and be lucky enough that you can have a strong enough team at the end of a long season.

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.