It’s that time of year again.

The NPL Finals is the premier event for US Club Soccer’s number of affiliate leagues across the nation, and the July date on the calendar it occupies is drawing nearer. The Greensboro, North Carolina-based event will bring together a collection of some of the best club teams in the country, and a handful of leagues have already wrapped up their qualifying processes.

The most recent finisher was the Gulf States Premier League, which just crowed winners for its six age groups ranging from U13 to U18. The Mississippi Fire asserted their regional dominance by qualifying a whopping seven teams for the NPL Finals. That includes sweeps on the U13 and U14 levels in addition to the U16 girls and U15 and U17 boys.

The GSPL isn’t the only league to wrap up its qualifying, though. Six other leagues have completed qualifying action: the Florida Premier League, the Midwest Developmental League, the NorCal Premier League, the South Central Premier League, the Southern California NPL and Washington State Premier League. Within that bevy of qualifiers is a hearty list of NPL title challengers across every age bracket.   

Washington punches its tickets

One of those leagues to have its full complement of teams in the clubhouse for North Carolina is Washington state, which recently pushed through 12 to join the NPL Finals in July. Washington is notorious for its quality depth on the US Club Soccer level, and so the 84 teams vying for 12 spots over the course of 12 home-and-away matches per team were particularly hard-fought in this corner of the country. 

The premier team in Washington based on its NPL Finals qualifiers ended up as Northwest United, which calls the tulip-rich Skagit Valley Area home. NUSC managed to scythe through three different age groups to procure spots in Greensboro - the U14 boys and U15 and U16 girls will all appear at the finals. ISC Gunners A managed to book two trips with the U13 boys and U14 girls, while the competitive balance on offer here was remarkable. Of the 12 spots on offer, nine different clubs snapped up spots for this summer.

New England Premiership joins US Club Soccer

A huge domino fell in US Club Soccer’s favor late last week when it was announced the 21-club New England Premiership will join the expansive club network in time for the 2014 fall season. The biggest benefit is that the league already has U9 to U18 age groups in place, so in that sense it can hit the ground running once the fall season kicks off. A few clubs overlap both the NEP and the New England Premier League, a preexisting NPL branch with longstanding ties to US Club Soccer. That means that several clubs are already eligible for the NPL Finals.

In that sense, the NEP as a unit will largely create winners from its own ranks for now. Winners of various area state tournaments will advance to next summer’s National Cup XIV Finals, while a selection of winners from the NEPL will continue to advance to the NPL Finals during the summer. As the NEP evolves, the door to ever larger platforms will likely continue to crack further and further open.

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