Chris Watkins, the BYU Coach was kind enough to comment on a couple of aspects of last night's game. I got his answers too late to include in my game write-up, but I wanted to include them here where everyone could read them.

On BYU's looking flat:

We were proud that we could win in a game where we were a bit off our game.

Last night we headed out to BYU's South Field along with 800+ other folks. It turs out that BYU passed out some kind of flyer at the July 4th parade earlier in the day and pulled in a huge crowd in comparison to the others I've watched. There was even a significant Ogden contigent there I guess since they're only about 2 hours away that shouldn't surprise me.

BYU has had their fourth player named to PDL Team of the Week honors, with Zach DeFrancis (M) being named Player of the Week for week 12 of the PDL season. Zach joins Doug Clark, Hugh Van Wagenen, and Richie Bindrup as Team of the Week honorees.

The PDL announcement detailed DeFrancis' efforts in wins over Ogden and Spokane:

"The BYU Cougars, along with the unbeaten Hampton Roads Piranhas, became the first to clinch a playoff berth in the Premier Development League, picking up a pair of victories over Ogden and Spokane to move to 10-1-1 on the year.

BYU has had their fourth player named to PDL Team of the Week honors, with Zach DeFrancis (M) being named Player of the Week for week 12 of the PDL season. Zach joins Doug Clark, Hugh Van Wagenen, and Richie Bindrup as Team of the Week honorees.

The PDL announcement detailed DeFrancis' efforts in wins over Ogden and Spokane:

"The BYU Cougars, along with the unbeaten Hampton Roads Piranhas, became the first to clinch a playoff berth in the Premier Development League, picking up a pair of victories over Ogden and Spokane to move to 10-1-1 on the year.

The simple recap:

It wasn't a pretty game, but we came away with three points.

The longer story:

For the first two-thirds of the game, neither side really looked like they wanted the win. Ogden played a very tightly packed, defensive game while BYU spend a long time playing around the wings and probing for an exploitable weakness.

My son and I tried to go to the UVSC @ BYU friendly tonight. Instead of the game, we got some lessons in the realities of PDL soccer.

The game itself was cancelled. I had a chance to talk to a couple of team representatives about the reasons. It turned out that there were two big reasons:

1. To protect the field: BYU is hosting a tournament on the field and with the bad weather they were concerned about it's condition with an extra game
2. Finances: The soccer team needs to pay for their use of the field, and with the poor weather, they didn't expect to draw a large enough crowd to cover their costs.

Dan Rasmussen, over at the Deseret Morning news has written a piece on the BYU-Ogden game tonight. It includes some background on the two teams (more on BYU than Ogden), as well as notice that it will be on BYU-TV a channel that appears on a lot of cable/dish line-ups. So if you're interested in watching a USL game tonight, it just might be possible (July 11th, 7PM MDT).

While the season didn't end the way BYU wanted it to, a 0-3 shutout in the Western Conference finals at the hands of the Fresno Fuego, the team certainly has some things to feel good about after the 2007 season:

• The Cougars 13-1-2 season marks their best PDL campaign to-date.
• Two of their players were named to the all-conference team; Brock Trejo (M) and Hugh Van Wagenen (D)
• They had six Team of the Week honors (including a Player of the Week) during the sixteen week season.

RSL has announced that the Sep 19th game against the visiting LA Galaxy will be followed by a 30 minute friendly with 'Team South America' facing 'Team Utah'. Some of the gate receipts from the double header will be donated to Peruvian earthquake relief.

Two BYU Cougars will be involved in the game, Coach Watkins and Steve Magleby (who's played with RSL's reserves several times over the last couple of years) will be playing on 'Team Utah'.

I've gotten a little bit of information back from Coach Watkins about the relief game being played after the LA Galaxy RSL game on the 19th. One gem is that another BYU player has been invited to participate.

Chad Sackett invited Steve [Magleby], Hugh [Van Wagonen], and I to play in the game. We are looking forward to the game.

For the third time this season, BYU has had a player selected to the PDL team of the week for week 10. This time around, Doug Clark (M) was picked based on his play in Yakima on Friday, June 22nd. He came on in the 73rd minute as a late substitution for James Bindrup (who'd picked up a yellow card), and proceeded to score a goal and get an assist during his 17 minutes on the field.

BYU took a one game trip to Washington on Saturday, and came home with three points. It looks like Saturday's game against Spokane was a good one. (Although, I'm pretty glad I didn't have to go sit through another game in the 100+ degree heat these summer games are brutal.)

BYU continued exchanging starts between Benjamin Walunas (tonight's starter) and Brandon Gilliam in goal.

I winced when they introduced Brett Stevens as the ref tonight. It seems like he's really called a bad game every time I've seen him. Tonight was no exception, with a number of missed calls. He also tends to call the scoreboard, and when Colorado went down a man that really hurt BYU.

Colorado scored first and controlled the run of play even when they went down a man early in the first half.

There's something I've been thinking about for a while, and it's finally percolated long enough that I wanted to get it out in front of everyone to see what you think. We've got two solid PDL teams here in Utah (and could probably support a third in Salt Lake City if it came to that). They play a pretty fierce rivalry (even if it's been a bit one-sided so far), but I think there's a way to get the clubs, and their fans, a bit more involved.

"We're on the march with Watkin's army ...", 850 BYU and RSL fans showed up to cheer for the two teams in last night's friendly. A lot of the fans were faced with the tough choice of which team to root for. A small pocket of RCB fans were there with RSL flags, but were on their best behavior noting that "We don't want to get kicked out of the game in the first ten minutes.

This time of year, it's hard to get a good picture without better equipment than my son was using, but I did like this picture of RSL taking the field at the beginning of the game. Hopefully we'll get some better pictures at next week's game against UVSC.