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  1. Wow. So I found this page when you linked my website, FunWhileItLasted.net, and our article on the Renegades. This is a trip because I WORKED for the Renegades during the 2000 season as the team’s PR director and I remember these tickets well. I would have worked that game against Laval on July 7th (though I don’t recall it). Anyway, I can confirm the Renegades were formed in the late 1990’s. They were an amateur team but considered the highest level of women’s soccer in the U.S. at the time. The Renegades were fairly popular and often drew up to 2,000 fans per game at Bowditch Field outside Boston in the late 1990’s and up through 2000.

    In 2001, the fully professional Women’s United Soccer Association formed and Boston got a team called the Breakers that featured some of the biggest stars in the world. The Renegades were rendered instantly irrelevant and the crowds dwindled down to a couple hundred friends and family and soccer camp attendees per game. The team soldiered on for a few more years but eventually the organization just turned into a full-fledged camp and youth academy with no adult pro or semi-pro teams anymore. The former Renegades organization is now called Global Premier Soccer and is one of the biggest private youth clubs in the Eastern U.S.

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    • Thanks for being in touch. I was going to email you the site / page once I cleaned things up a bit and organized things a bit more. And there will be some more lower level / older soccer tickets going up, one of which is a Worcester Wildfire ticket (which it sounds like turned into the Boston Bulldogs?); a friend of mine played on that Wildfire team. (And I don’t think I have my Worcester Hydra ticket, a much later team, as I’m sure you know.) This is the (related) project that kicked off this larger project: http://smilesfc.org/about/womens-soccer-in-worcester-virtual-museum/ (can’t seem to live link that). I’m an assistant coach for the Worcester Smiles and am redoing the website, part of which is contextualizing them in terms of women’s soccer in Worcester in a broader sense. I worked for / know Carla Overbeck, the captain of the USWNT in the late ’90s, so every time she / they came to Worcester, I made sure to attend, which is where the stubs on that page are from. Thanks again for being in touch and confirming the Renegades info.

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