WUSA SOCCER Standouts meet for league supremacy

Washington's Mia Hamm and Atlanta's Briana Scurry go head to head.
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Mia Hamm and Briana Scurry have won the Women's World Cup together and had Olympic gold medals draped around their necks.
Today, one of them will win the Women's United Soccer Association championship for the first time. The other will be disappointed, again.
Hamm's Washington Freedom and Scurry's Atlanta Beat will play at the University of San Diego's Torero Stadium in Founders Cup III to determine the championship of the league that formed in the afterglow of the United States' thrilling victory in the 1999 Women's World Cup.
Atlanta lost the first Founders Cup to San Jose on penalty kicks in 2001 and the Freedom lost last year to Carolina.
Meaningful trophy
Hamm, the world's most-recognized women's soccer player, and Scurry, a star goaltender, say that in its own way, winning the Founders Cup would be as prestigious as winning the big international tournaments.
"Each one is special and unique, and this would be right up there," said Hamm, who's done everything else in her brilliant career except win the WUSA title. "It's definitely a big deal. This is a league that we all feel a huge part of.
"To be able to win a trophy that as a founding member is named after us, would be a tremendous honor."
The WUSA is a five-month grind of 21 games per team, with four of the eight teams reaching the playoffs.
"Winning a World Cup obviously is incredibly difficult, but every week in the WUSA is a very hard game to play," Scurry said. "With the national team, sometimes you play teams that aren't so good and you win 6-0, but that doesn't happen in this league."
Beat coach Tom Stone said there's a growing cachet to winning the Founders Cup, because "then you're the best among all of the best players in the world, all fighting for the same title.
"There's an element of accomplishment to that that the other two-week tournaments can't get," Stone said. "So much so that I have told our elite players that this is the truest test of your competitive nature."
Offensive output
There wasn't a lack of scoring in the previous two Founders Cups -- six goals in 2001 before the match went to a shootout, and five last year -- and this will be an interesting matchup.
Although Washington was the fourth-seeded playoff team and Atlanta No. 2, the WUSA's statistical leaders have ended up in the title game.
Hamm and teammate Abby Wambach tied for the scoring lead with 33 points apiece (Wambach had 13 goals and Hamm 11), and Scurry guarded her net with gusto for a league-leading 0.95 goals-against average.
"That'll be a handful," Scurry said of facing Hamm and Wambach. "Mia and Abby are incredible forwards. They're different forwards, though. Abby is very good in the air and Mia is more of a slasher and can do just about anything with the ball.
"It'll be important for me to position my defenders and keep them in the right positions at all times so neither of them gets loose. It'll be a good battle for my back four, but we've been up to it so far this season, so hopefully one more time."
Beat leads
The Beat won the season series 2-0-1. The highest-scoring match in the series was Atlanta's 2-1 win over July 12.
Stone thinks this final could be as high-scoring as the others.
"I just think that the battle to get here is so intense that both teams are so excited and there's a real sense that we're still in the balance of whether we're going to convince America that this is the greatest thing for women," Stone said.
"Because of that, there's a real freedom to the way we play. WUSA is not a conservative league. You see teams attacking and counterattacking. When you put the two best teams on the field with that mentality, something's got to give, no matter how good the defenses are."