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POSTED May 14, 4:31 PM

Story on deck in tomorrow's paper about the Washington Freedom, who are favorites to roll through the W-League again this year after a 12-1-1 championship showing last summer. Made we wonder if they could actually stockpile players ahead of the 2009 launch of Women's Pro Soccer. Maybe, just maybe.

Here's Freedom coach Jim Gabarra, first on the talent pool for 2009 compared to good ol' days in the WUSA:
"The pool’s probably deeper, but the real top talent, I don’t know how many of the international players will come the first year."

My conspiracy theory: the Freedom ignores certain players this year in order to scoop them up after all the drafts and allocations are done for 2009.
Gabarra's response:
"It’s a tricky game because you want to win and you want to put out the best possible team this year. I’ve found that everybody probably sees players a little bit differently. Some people think different players are better. In drafts, there’d be players that I’d never even invite to a tryout. Everybody’s different, and there’s always a couple that everybody wants. You can’t have all of them. You've just got to find out what the mechanism is and just deal with it the best that you can.
For us, having a player here and play with us this summer and maybe another coach sees her and likes her, and we lose her, is more important to us than saying 'Well, we’re not going to show any interest in you because we are interested in you for next year.' We can really tell what a player is like on day-to-day basis if we have them for 3-4 months rather than just watching them play in college or for some other team."

Looking forward to updates from the Women's Soccer Celebration this weekend in Colorado. Allocation process decisions, perhaps?