Paul Riley and the Western New York Flash needed to find each other to get back to the NWSL championship

HOUSTON -- The Western New York Flash play for the NWSL championship on Sunday, and they’ll be underdogs against the Washington Spirit. They weren’t expected to win their semifinal, with their mishmash of mostly forgotten players up against the Portland Thorns’ star-studded roster. Their head coach, Paul Riley, is used to this.

By the time WPS’s first season kicked off in 2009, Amy Rodriguez had already broken into the USWNT and was one of the program’s most promising young strikers. The success she had for country didn’t come quite as easily on the club level, though. After being selected by Boston as the first overall pick in the 2009 college draft, Rodriguez struggled though a dismal rookie season with the Breakers, scoring just one goal and quickly falling from starter to second-half sub. A year later Rodriguez was playing in Philadelphia, traded before the 2010 season to the then-expansion Independence in exchange for draft picks. Rodriguez began to flourish in her new home and under her new head coach. She scored 12 goals in 2010 and the Independence made it through WPS’s bizarre playoff format before losing to a stacked FC Gold Pride in the final.

There are stories similar to Rodriguez’s up and down those old Independence rosters. Cast-offs, spare parts, names that made you say “who?” Tasha Kai, fresh off two tough seasons in New Jersey, found new life in Philly. So did Leigh Ann Brown, who eventually landed in Philadelphia in 2011. Before that, she’d been let go by Gold Pride and shipped to Atlanta, where she’d spent a season as a relative bright spot on a bad team. Lianne Sanderson was a relative unknown stateside when Riley brought her to the Independence from Chelsea in 2010.

Sanderson is one of only a few players from Riley’s days in Philadelphia who’s still playing professionally in the U.S. After some time back in England, and then with Boston, Sanderson reunited with Riley last season in Portland. After a short stint in Orlando at the beginning of this season, she now plays for him in Western NY, though due to injury she won’t be on the field when the Flash plays in the championship game on Sunday.

Riley has been to championship games before, though without much success. In 2010 and 2011 he brought the Independence to WPS’s title game, and they lost both times. Now he’s at the helm of a Western NY team that feels in many ways similar to those old Philly sides. The Independence made a name for themselves -- and found immediate success -- using a combination of some of WPS’s all-time underrated players and a few former stars who’d fallen on hard times.

It’s a similar story, both in the Flash’s unlikely success and who they’ve done it with, to those Philly teams. Unlike many of the NWSL’s more prominent or perennially successful teams, Western NY has mostly flown under the radar. The Flash had once been one of women’s soccer’s great dynasties, winning three championships in three years in three different leagues. They started as a semi-pro team in the W-League, capturing the title there in 2010 before moving to WPS in 2011, where they won another championship. Then, following that league’s untimely demise, the Flash went on to play in the WPSL-Elite in 2012. They won a trophy there, too. Western NY almost made it a fourth trophy in four years in a fourth different league when, after winning the NWSL shield in 2013, they made it to the title game in the league’s inaugural year.

Western NY never got that fourth title, though, and the loss to Portland in the 2013 championship game set off a slow decline for the Flash. A year later, they finished seventh. By 2015, most of Western NY’s roster, including its entire offensive corps, had fled Rochester. The Flash again finished in seventh, failing to make the playoffs for the second consecutive season. The final blow came in December when long-time head coach Aaran Lines, who’d been at the helm through all those championship seasons, stepped down. At the draft in January, just four months ahead of opening day, Western NY was still without a coach.

It was February when the Flash announced Riley as the team’s new head coach, and the immediate reaction was underwhelming. Riley had been this great and well-respected entity in women’s soccer once upon a time, with all that stuff he’d done in Philly earning him tons of goodwill and a good reputation. But just like the team he was about to take over, his stock had fallen in recent years.

Post-WPS, Riley went back to Long Island, where his coaching career began some two decades before. He took over the newly formed WPSL-Elite team there before moving on to Portland when the Thorns came calling in 2014. Portland, fresh off that 2013 title run, was looking to build a dynasty of its own, and who better to guide them there than a guy who always ended his professional seasons with a trip to the championship game? Riley had so much success in Philadelphia with relatively little, imagine what he could do with everything -- and everyone -- at his disposal.

But the Paul Riley-Portland Thorns marriage was an immediately doomed one, and all the tinkering and too many egos eventually turned that tenuous relationship into an irreparable one. Two years removed from winning the NWSL title, Portland failed to even make the playoffs and soon, Riley was out of a job. Enter the Flash. A coach and team, both looking for a way back.

Even with Riley in charge in Rochester, it seemed like this season would be an uphill battle for the Flash. The exodus of players away from Western NY had never really stopped, and by the time this season started the Flash was a shell of its former self, made up mostly of rookies, small-time role players, fresh start seekers, and a few second-year players who’d somehow been convinced to stick around.

One of the new players in Western NY, and the Flash’s best hope for anything resembling an offensive threat, was Jessica McDonald. McDonald fit the Riley mold, at least sort of. McDonald, unlike Kai or Rodriguez, had in fact found success everywhere else she’d played. The problem was, there was a lot of everywhere. Western NY was McDonald’s fifth team in four seasons. In Rochester and again playing under Riley, whom she also played for and thrived under in Portland, McDonald has had a good campaign.

And if you ask McDonald -- or anyone on the Flash really -- about the sort of underdog success story their 2016 season has been, the answers are pretty similar across the board. “I definitely think, in comparison to all the teams I’ve been on, it comes from the friendship we have in the locker room,” McDonald said at the media day ahead of Sunday’s final. Abby Dahlkemper, who saved a Lindsey Horan header off the line in the dying minutes of last weekend’s semifinal to preserve the win for the Flash, echoed McDonald’s sentiments. “I think that we are a very close-knit team off the field and I think that’s helped translate to relationships on the field. And I think that’s helped us,” she said. Dahlkemper, who was selected by the Flash in the 2015 college draft, received her first USWNT call-up this week following a standout season in Western NY.

Both McDonald and Dahlkemper said this kind of closeness was essential with such a young team. And both players pointed to something -- or someone -- else as the architect of both the locker room culture in Western NY and the team’s unlikely success this season: Riley.

“We motivate each other, we push each other day in and day out at training and it also comes from Paul Riley as well,” McDonald said. “Him being able to push us to our limit is what helped us become successful up to this point.”

“This point” is, of course, on the verge of finally winning that fourth title and the team’s first in the NWSL. Western NY is not exactly the favorite for Sunday’s meeting with second seed Washington. But that place is also one the Flash has grown accustomed to playing from, or out of -- from the beginning of the season, when this team with a kind of random and hardly impressive roster seemed destined for a mid-table finish, to breaking the hearts of 20,000 plus at Providence Park as they knocked off shield winners Portland last weekend.

Another of the key pieces, beyond Sanderson, McDonald, Dahlkemper or Lynn Williams (who claimed this year’s MVP and Golden Boot awards) is McCall Zerboni. Perhaps more than any other player in Western NY, Zerboni has been the veteran presence on this year’s Flash team, despite not taking the field in a Western NY shirt until June. Zerboni’s history with Western NY goes back to 2011, when she landed there in the final season of WPS. After the league folded, Zerboni stuck around for WPSL-E, and then NWSL. Then, in 2014, the Flash traded her to Portland. That’s where Zerboni first played for Riley, though by the next season, both were gone from the Pacific Northwest; Riley back to Long Island, Zerboni to Boston. It was only via a midseason trade this year that the one-time Flash captain ended up back in Western NY. But the team she came back to was different from the one she left behind two years ago. That one was full of promise, presence, and big names. This one was ... not.

And yet, this version of the Flash -- this unlikely, cobbled together one -- has ended up in the same place that team from four years ago -- the one with Abby Wambach and Carli Lloyd -- did. For Zerboni, the reason -- the how and the why -- this young team full of players we’ve mostly never heard of made it from April predictions of a mid-table season to one of the two last teams standing in October is simple. “I think that we’ve continued to get better and better through every game throughout the season,” Zerboni said on Thursday as she and her teammates sat in a room overlooking the field at BBVA Compass Stadium in Houston. They will face Washington here on Sunday in a game no one picked them to be in. “That’s the mind of Paul Riley. He does that.”