MAKING HISTORY: IT’S A PROCESS

There’s a fair amount of rigor that goes into producing content at our online museum. While it would’ve been great to publish our entire history of Washington soccer when this platform first launched in 2018, the fact was our vast history, dating to around 1890, had not been written at length. Or researched. Or vetted

We are projecting that the WA Legends online museum will be fully launched during the first half of 2022. Yet before the switches are flipped on the 15 remaining years, here’s a little bit about what’s happening behind the curtain. First, we take the known history and explore the context. There have been summaries from several sources over the past few decades, so we are not flying blind. For the past 50-60 years, it’s been fairly well documented by media. For instance, we know that in 1981 the Sounders were victorious in a major NASL tournament; a Seattle women’s amateur club (Ramlosa) won a second straight national championship; Highline claimed the WIAA boys’ state tournament; and the U.S. Soccer Federation held its annual meetings in Seattle. There’s much more to those stories, however.

We dive into newspaper and periodical archives, college record books, high school annuals, media guides and personal keepsakes to find supporting facts. We solicit photos from schools and photographers. We search for video or audio recordings. We scour online sources, and we have interviewed many of the newsmakers themselves.

Once we pull together the facts, the curating, writing and editing phase begins. Photos and videos are prepared, and all that is uploaded to the online museum’s back end. That’s an exhaustive process followed by copyediting and tagging, to make the artifacts and stories searchable. Finally, there is feature-length story to research and write about significant milestones achieved in a given year. And then we do it all again for the next year and the next.

We know there’s more stories, more facts, more context that our community can provide. And that’s the great thing about this platform: It’s always a work in progress. So, if you reach out and contact us with further information and resources, they can be added to the museum. 

This is not glamorous or sexy work. It’s laborious – but it’s also a labor of love. We want to tell Washington’s story, the story of a state that has always punched above its weight in the world of soccer. We want people, here and around the world, to remember that. And we truly hope it will drive others to dare to dream, to seize opportunities and give back to this great game, because that’s our nature in Washington. More than anything, we love this game.

WA Legends makes this content available for free to all. We would really appreciate your continued financial support, to expand the online museum and make it even more inviting and accessible. Many of you have been generously giving, and we stretch those dollars to the utmost. So, keep telling us your stories. Share this great resource with others. And please consider making a donation.

Best wishes to you all in 2022, when we promise to reach the finish line – and keep going.