U.S. Soccer: Leone names U-19 roster for Canada games

U.S. under-19 women’s national team coach Tracey Leone named her 18-player roster for two matches vs. the Canadian U-19 national Team. The two youth national teams will meet on June 30 in Toronto at 4:30 p.m. ET in a preliminary to the Independence Day Series clash between the full national teams of the USA and Canada which kicks off at 7 p.m. ET. The two U-19s teams will meet again at Birchmount Stadium in Scarborough on July 2 with a kickoff at 1 p.m. ET. The full national teams travel to Minnesota to play their second match on July 3 at the National Sports Center in Blaine. The U-19 matches mark a major step towards the first-ever FIFA Under-19 Women’s World Championship to be held from Aug. 17-Sept. 2, 2002, in Canada as the U-19s will get some important seasoning on Canadian soil. Canada has already qualified for the tournament as the host, but the USA must qualify at a date and venue to be determined. Leone’s team recently ran over the competition at the U.S. Youth Soccer annual international tournament in Spring, Texas, defeating a U.S. Youth Soccer All-Star Team, 3-0, in the championship game of the competition that also featured China, Finland, Canada and Japan. The U.S. U-19s got two goals from Lindsay Tarpley and one from Leslie Osborne in the championship game. Leone has a talented squad which features four players that earned caps with the full U.S. national team at the Algarve Cup in Portugal last March in defender Amy Steadman, midfielders Sara Randolph and Lori Chalupny and forward Kristen Weiss. Randolph was the youngest member of the USA’s 2000 Olympic Residency Camp. Two players, midfielder Jill Oaks and defender Keeley Dowling, trained with the U.S. under-21 national team last week in San Diego at head coach Jerry’s Smith’s pre-Nordic Cup camp. Dowling, who is representative of an extremely athletic U-19 team, has a vertical jump of 29 inches, putting her in the top percentile of full national team players. The U-19s also have a remarkably talented goalkeeper in the acrobatic Ashlyn Harris, the youngest member of the team at 15-years-old. U.S. Under-19 Girls National Team Roster