On Sunday and Monday of this week the PWHPA will have a Dream Gap Tour stop in St. Louis. Great news is that Sunday will be streamed, and Monday will be properly broadcast on NBCSN.
I'll watch Monday night's game for sure. I'm curious to see what the level of play is. The teams are USWNT heavy, and with World's less than a month away staying healthy needs to be of utmost priority for the players, but they still need to be ready to go and not picking up bad habits by holding back.
The teams are light on defenders, four on one roster and five on the other. Particularly in penalty killing scenarios (especially if defender is in the box), this is pretty light. I was curious if the rosters for D had changed at all compared to the last Secret Dream Gap Tour stop, since I had heard Kacey Bellamy was added to the Women's Sports Foundation team roster. However, when I looked at the rosters on the PWHPA site, they were the same as they'd been presented for previous showcases. So I'm sure Bellamy will be added, but not sure of any other changes.
So as far as defense, here's what we are looking at (4 and 6 now):
Women's Sports Foundation: Jincy Dunne, Megan Keller, Codie Cross, Jacquie Greco, Kali Flanagan, Kacey Bellamy
adidas: Demi Crossman, Savannah Harmon, Margo Lund, Lee Stecklein
...ha. Effing Covid, I just went to twitter to confirm Bellamy is on WSF team and there's a postponement notice posted just now on PW's twitter. I'm sure the mature response from me is platitudes about health and safety and YES, 100%. But also....this really sucks. What a brutal year it's been. Women's games are rare events at the highest level. Even rarer that they get on tv. Even rarer still in Covid times. Post graduate players have not played a tournament since 2019. I won't believe that Worlds is real until the Championship is handed out.
But in the spirit of holding onto optimism, I underlined the World Championship rostered defenders above. In addition to the underlined above, the US will take Caroline Harvey, Cayla Barnes, Megan Bozek and Natalie Buchbinder, for a total of 8 defenders. Fingers crossed the tourney happens.
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