BY SCOTT FRENCH, Senior Editor It’s never too early to be thinking about next season, so here goes. It is too early to guess what each WUSA team’s roster will look like in 2002, what with drafts, potential trades, potential coaching changes, decisions on and by foreign players, and the second-year tinkering with personnel one might expect. That said, the team other teams likely will be gunning for next season won’t be the Bay Area CyberRays, who last month captured the inaugural WUSA championship. Expect the ‘Rays to again contend, but it will be difficult for them to duplicate their Year 1 accomplishments. The CyberRays got more from their talent this season than any of their competitors did. After slow starts, their critical players — defender Brandi Chastain, midfielders Sissi and Tisha Venturini, forward Julie Murray and goalkeeper LaKeysia Beene — enjoyed remarkable campaigns. Katia, whose skills often were diminished by inconsistency, caught the spark late in the season. The emergence of defender Kelly Lindsey aided a back line that easily absorbed constantly changing personnel at the other center-back position. Bay Area will have to deal with an aging leadership corps. Chastain will turn 34 next season, Sissi 35 and Murray 32. A close eye should be kept on Sissi, who appeared in decline during the Sydney Olympics but was rejuvenated by her WUSA adventure. The team to beat? The Beat. Hardly news. Atlanta has always been the favorite — Coach Tom Stone called it a conspiracy led by Boston coach Jay Hoffman; we think he was kidding — in large part because of the presence of Sun Wen. She’s the chief, but hardly only, reason the Beat will again be favored next spring. The Chinese striker is the world’s premier player when healthy, but we haven’t seen her healthy since the 1999 Women’s World Cup. The knee injury that hindered her at the Olympics was dealt with before the initial WUSA drafts, but rehab meant she wasn’t at full strength at season’s start. By June, she’d grabbed a starting job and was working toward 90 minutes. Then, against Carolina — that first Atlanta loss — a confrontation with goalkeeper Bente Nordby left Sun with a badly sprained ankle. Her season totals: 13 games, five starts, one goal, two assists, plus goals in both playoff games. “Nordby crushed her,” Stone says. “It was awful. [Sun] was out five weeks after that. That was the injury that hurt her. When Bente Nordby ran over her, that’s what cost us Sunny for the year. And the only blessing, if there is one, is Sunny told me her knee got so much stronger while she was sitting out rehabbing her high ankle sprain.” Sun, weary of being injured, was thinking hard about returning to the WUSA, but the Beat — and the league — expect she’ll be in an Atlanta jersey next year. There’s no reason to believe she won’t be at full strength. “A lot of the girls haven’t seen her play at full potential,” Beat midfielder Nikki Serlenga noted before the title game. “Some of us who have played with the U.S., we were, like, we’ve seen it. I keep telling people, she’s soooooo good, you don’t understand. And people’re like, really? Really? Really? And you’ll see it — she’ll do one thing, and people will be just like, whoa, oh my God!” So, add a whoa-oh-my-God talent to an attack that features Charmaine Hooper, Cindy Parlow, Homare Sawa and several part-timers — Emily Burt, Kelly Cagle, Kerry Gragg — who blended well up front with Hooper before Parlow moved up from midfield for the playoffs. Hooper plays — this is a compliment — like a man; she and the towering Parlow provide a physical dimension few other WUSA forwards can match; they cause defenses havoc. Sawa — her teammates (and more than one WUSA coach) testify — is the most technically gifted player in the league, the player with the silkiest skills and the highest ceiling. She turned 23 two weeks ago tomorrow. Behind them, there’s Serlenga and Kylie Bivens (or Amy Walsh). Serlenga had an exceptional second half of the season; Bivens’ play earned a call-up to U.S. coach April Heinrichs’ pre-U.S. Cup camp. Behind them, a stalwart defensive unit led by Sharolta Nonen and goalkeeper Briana Scurry. Hooper will be 34 next year, although she’s shown no signs of slowing down. Scurry will be 30, prime territory for keepers. Sun will be 29. The foundation is young. Parlow, Serlenga and Nonen will be 24 next season, Bivens and the Augustyniak twins — Nancy and Julie — will be 23. “I do think a lot of people’s estimation of our team went on Sun Wen,” says Stone. “I think, in all fairness, [it was] ‘Good, solid team, good draft, but Sun Wen is the best player in the world, you’re going to win for sure.’ “One of our rallying points was that we had very little of Sun Wen. It’s been the players you haven’t heard of, players the media didn’t bank on, those are the ones who helped us get to [the final]. The Sharolta Nonens and Kylie Bivenses and Kerry Cagles and Emily Burts. Those players had great seasons for us, and I think that’s why” Atlanta won the regular-season title and made it to the title game. They ought to be there again next season. No foe plays better team defense, none has better talent all over the field, none has a better balance of stars and role players, queens and worker bees. CHIP ON THE SHOULDER: And none has the motivation Atlanta possesses. There’s the way things ended, of course: seven minutes from the trophy, but falling on penalty kicks. Hooper and Sun, whose PK misses made the difference, are burning to make right. Justice, the Beat believes, was not served. Stone loves that attitude. When he began assembling the Beat last fall, he was looking for players with chips on their shoulders. “I liked the idea of finding players who looked like they had something to prove in their career,” he says. “You get that with Charmaine Hooper, you get that with Cindy Parlow. Cindy, Nikki [Serlenga] and Bri [Scurry] played a total of what? Fifty minutes in the Olympics? Tell me they weren’t ripe to step up and say, ‘Hey, don’t forget about us.’ ” [Note — Parlow played 115 minutes at the Olympics, Serlenga played 56 and Scurry not at all.] “I love that about our allocated players,” Stone adds. “because they felt like they still have something to prove. Hooper, you get that. Sawa, you get that. Kylie [Bivens] and Nikki [Serlenga] went to Santa Clara — four final fours, no final game. They’ve got something to prove. “A lot of people questioned our coaching staff: How can you come out of youth soccer and coach a pro team? [Stone had been director of coaching for the Colorado Rush.] I got something to prove. My assistants have something to prove. [Atlanta GM-turned-WUSA president] Lynn Morgan at Cox, she had something to prove. She wanted to be the best front office in the league. “We had all these people. Kerry Cagle, ACC Player of the Year [at Duke], but then kind of relative obscurity. No national team camps. She’s got something to prove. Emily Burt — you just run down our roster. It’s a common trait.” CHARMAINE’S INSPIRATION: Hooper had plenty of motivation. Because she’s toiled most of her life for a weak national team — that is no longer true; Canada under Even Pellerud is a burgeoning power — she’s never received the acclaim her talents deserve. The former North Carolina State star, a U.S. resident for 15 years, would likely have starred for the U.S. team the past decade (and reaped the resulting rewards) had she been American. Sawa, likewise, had played within the obscurity of Japan’s national team. She could display magical powers, and the Japanese still lose, 5-0. In the foreign player allocation draft last October, four teams — Carolina, Philadelphia, Bay Area and New York — passed them over before Stone nabbed them. Stone had coached Sawa two seasons with the W-League’s Denver Diamonds, and he had a better idea of her talents than the other coaches. Hooper’s reputation for being divisive within teams, fair or not, left some leery. “Some coaches were scared of Charmaine,” Stone says. “How outspoken she is, the reputation she brings to the team, and some people misunderstood Charmaine. I didn’t understand Charmaine when I first started coaching her. “What I did understand is that she is a goalscorer at the world-class level, and that she seems to be around teams who are winning. She’s helped Canada get to the point they’re at now, her N.C. State team was a winner, her W-League team [Chicago Cobras] was a winner. So if she’s so destructive, why are the teams she’s playing on doing well? “I misdiagnosed her a little at the beginning. I admit that.” One way in which it was manifested was Stone’s penchant for substituting Hooper out of games. She played the full 90 only three times in the first 15 games, with six goals and three assists. She went the distance four of the final six matches, scoring six goals. “We had a lot of discussions,” Stone says. “She told me, ‘You’re taking me out at the end of the game, and that’s when I score a lot of goals.’ I said, ‘I’ll make you a deal: You try to be more productive throughout the game, and I’ll have more confidence to leave you in at the end of the game.’ Because my feeling was that she was running out of gas at the end of games. She wasn’t. I was mistaken, but that’s the way it looked. “She clearly picked up her work rate in the first half of games, which gave me the confidence to leave her in. She rewarded that confidence almost every time.” Only four off Hooper’s 12 regular-season goals — plus her 14th-minute tally in the final — were scored in the first half. Her final six goals were scored in the 73rd, 81st, 85th, 24th, 35th and 83rd minutes. Stone said he never expected an opportunity to draft Hooper and Sawa. “We’d come down to [planning to take] Doris Fitschen and Kelly Smith or the two Germans [Bettina Wiegmann and Maren Meinert],” he said. “We never fathomed that Sawa and Charmaine would still be there.” Hooper was a little irked. She thought she and Sawa were the best duo available. “Sawa is, I’d say, the best player that I’ve ever seen,” Hooper says, “as far as skill work, technical work, everything. But because she’s from Japan, and Japan is not seen as a powerhouse, she’s not put up there with these players who aren’t even half as good as she is. “If anything, me and her getting drafted fifth — you know what? If you’re looking for players who are supposedly marketable or high-profile players, and you bypass Sawa and myself because maybe you think we’re not [marketable and high-profile], well you have made yourself a huge mistake. “If anything, I’d rather have played with Sawa than any other foreign player in the draft. I think she was the best foreign player in the draft, one of the best players in this league.” SAWA SAYS: Sawa’s worth is echoed around the league. Everybody — coaches, opponents, teammates — seemed awed by her abilities. As she matures, anything seems possible. Is she, indeed, the most talented player in the league? “No, I don’t think,” Sawa said when told of the collective praise. “My teammates are much better than me.” CAUSE FOR CAUTION: If we use MLS as a model — and we must be wary of doing so — the Beat was the WUSA’s Los Angeles Galaxy: quickest out of the gate, tremendous defense, minutes away from the inaugural title before falling in a Foxboro final. It took the Galaxy three more seasons to get back to the championship game. It is still without an MLS trophy.