Pilar Khoury broke her own school record, scoring her 13th and 14th goals of the season, as the Ottawa Gee-Gees, ranked No. 1 on the CIS women’s chart, finished the OUA regular season with a 3-0 triumph over Ryerson.

And even though the late autumn/early winter conditions in Edmonton won’t be anything close to the July conditions we’ll see at the 2015 Women’s World Cup, Herdman said that getting a friendly in at the stadium where Canada will open the tournament will be vital to the team’s preparations. And, he said the cold can be a coaching tool, to see “if the players can focus on the task at hand.”

But Gloucester Celtic, from the Ottawa area, can boast it’s the best senior amateur men’s team in the country. A 3-0 win over the Surrey United Firefighters in Halifax Monday was all the proof needed. The win gave Celtic the Challenge Trophy, emblematic of men’s senior soccer supremacy.

“I was talking to my mom last week, and she told me that John might not be coming back,” said national-team keeper Erin McLeod, who was in Calgary Thursday for the launch of the elite women’s team. “I almost had a heart attack. He’s been so phenomenal for this group. For me, especially, I can’t imagine playing for anyone else.”

But, coming out of her Portland Thorns’ 2-0 win in this past weekend’s NWSL championship, in which Sinclair scored the stoppage-time icing-on-the-cake goal, the question: Is it enough to keep her in the lead for the 2013 award? Sure, there’s still a lot of soccer to be played. Sinclair could score three or four vs. South Korea on a late October night and make this column moot.

The Alberta Soccer Association and FC Edmonton will host a press conference next week at Calgary’s Foothills Athletic Club to announce further details of women’s and youth development teams.

Last season, at the age of 31, she was at the Vancouver Whitecaps’ W-League camp, The coaching staff offered her the chance to come back for the 2013 season before they found out that the W-League team was going to be folded.

Meanwhile, even though Alex Morgan — who scored the U.S. winner in that Olympic semifinal — plays for Portland, the Timbers are clearly Canada’s team. Christine Sinclair didn’t score in the Timbers come-from-behind 3-2 extra-time semifinal win over FC Kansas City, but Canada’s all-time leading scorer netted eight times for Timbers this season.

But Canadian Soccer Association General Secretary Peter Montopoli, who is with the FIFA contingent as they tour the Women’s World Cup 2015 sites, said that the expectation is that the training grounds used by the world’s top national sides will be up to the same quality as the artificial surfaces in the stadiums.

And, the Spirit has scored just 15 goals as a team this season. Matheson has eight goals and three assists. Work out the math: Matheson has been involved in 73 per cent of her team’s goals so far this season.