THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Thursday, July 9, 2015

Bekah Brendis said she could empathize with a defender who scored an own goal.

Meg Lowery got to see her favorite player play in person - and even got to see her score the winning goal.

Aitana Vernon remembered watching the girls who played the same position she does, thinking she could do some of those things - and wishing she could do others.

Dan Hogan watched the action as a fan as well as a coach - he got excited over a goal, a good save or a nice play in the field, but also made mental notes of potential strategies he could use in his coaching.

Hogan, coach of the Coeur d'Alene Sting under-18 girls select soccer team and the North Idaho College women's team, and three players he coaches on the Sting team (Brendis, Lowery and Vernon) were among many locals who made the trek into Canada to watch games in the Women's World Cup.

Most of them saw early round games. Brendis was also at BC Place in Vancouver, British Columbia, last Sunday to watch the U.S. whip Japan 5-2 in the finals for the Americans' first World Cup title since 1999.

"It was like unreal; it was so crazy," said Brendis, who watched the U.S. jump out to a 4-0 lead after just 16 minutes.

HOGAN LOOKED behind him from his seat in the corner of BC Place in mid-June, where he was watching the U.S. play Nigeria in its second group-play game of the Women's World Cup.

One of the fans behind him was a familiar face - Lowery, who plays forward on Hogan's Sting team, and will play for Hogan this fall at North Idaho College.

Imagine the odds of that - a coach and his player, purchasing tickets separately, winding up a row or so from each other at a game hundreds of miles from home.

Hogan took note of the U.S. women's strategy of sending its outside backs wide and up the field, rather than keeping them back on defense.

"If the best teams in the world are playing their back four where they're all spread out offensively, why wouldn't we want to do that?" he thought.

So he did.

"Something that we have started is getting our center backs, when we have possession of the ball, to be wider apart from each other," Hogan said. "And that allows the outside backs to push further up the field. The outside backs for the USA, (Meghan) Klingenberg and (Ali) Krieger, would get way upfield and cross balls in, and part of why they're able to do that is the central backs get a little wider in the possession of the ball. That allows the outside backs more freedom to get forward, because it's harder for the defenders to defend against players when they're that wide."

Couldn't that be susceptible to a counter attack?

"It can, but teams are playing more midfielders than they used to," Hogan said, "so one of the central midfielders will drop back and be a little closer to the back line, and help defend against counter attacks."

He had his Sting team try to play that way, and plans to implement the strategy with his NIC squad this fall.

"Most of the high school and club teams have backs play a lot more compact throughout the game," Hogan said. "My club team starting doing better at it by the end of the season, but it was a whole season long from January to June before we started doing it well."

Vernon, a center back and recent graduate from Lake City High, also watched the U.S.-Nigeria game.

"This year Dan was trying to work with our club team on spreading the outside backs more, and putting a center mid back to fill the space," said Vernon, who will also play for Hogan at NIC this fall. "It was really cool to see it from a way higher level team, and see if we could try to incorporate that into our team."

LOWERY, A forward from Coeur d'Alene High, said she was inspired by watching her "idols," including Abby Wambach, who she said is her favorite player. Better, Lowery was able to watch live as her favorite player scored the game's only goal.

Lowery paid attention to the types of runs the forwards made - or didn't make, such as when the situation called for holding back and waiting.

She said Wambach is a model for how she'd like to play.

"She's kind of like me, she has a tall build, she heads the ball a lot, she plays a target forward like I play, so she checks to the ball," Lowery said. "She's really more of a playmaker, but she can turn and run back into the box and finish.

"I want to play like she plays."

BRENDIS FACED a little bit of a quandary while with her Sting team at the US Youth Soccer Far West Regionals in Boise the fourth week in June. The Sting surprised many by winning their group earlier in the week and advancing to a quarterfinal game on Friday.

However, Brendis and her dad had good seats to a World Cup quarterfinal game Saturday in Edmonton. Had the Sting won Friday, their semifinal game would have been on Saturday.

Hogan said he would have understood if his player had taken advantage of a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to see a World Cup game live. However ...

"I would have stayed with my team, and my mom probably would have went (to Edmonton) with my dad," Brendis said.

But the Sting lost on Friday morning, making that decision for Brendis. They drove home right after the game, and as soon as they got home, Brendis and her dad took off Friday night for the 10-hour drive to Edmonton, in time to see the Japan-Australia quarterfinal game on Saturday.

"It was a long week for me," Brendis said.

Four days later, also in Edmonton, Brendis and dad watched Japan beat England 2-1 in a semifinal game - the one where a defender from England scored an own goal in stoppage time, helping Japan win.

"I thought, 'wow, I know exactly how she feels,'" Brendis said. "I did it a couple of times (in high school ball) - it sucks."

Brendis, a left center back, plans to try out for the club soccer team at Boise State this fall - she might even consider trying to walk on to the Bronco varsity women's soccer team.

"Every time they touched the ball," she said of the U.S. team, "they knew what they were going to do with it. They were just a step ahead every single time."

SO, WILL there be a trickle-down effect from the U.S. winning the Women's World Cup?

Hogan said the women's game is already popular - perhaps now to a new group of soccer lovers.

"In '99, what that did was open up the eyes of a lot more parents of little girls, how big a sport that soccer could become," Hogan said. "Now, 16 years later, a lot of those kids that have grown playing, that are now in their 20s, are really soccer people."

While he can't just tell his players to "play like Mia Hamm," or "play like Abby Wambach," he can talk about the rewards of hard work, which any player can do.

He used Carli Lloyd, who scored a hat trick in the World Cup final, as an example. She was a good national team player when she came onto the team, he said, but put in the extra effort to become physically fit enough to play 90 minutes at the highest level of women's soccer.

"It might actually teach the girls to have a goal to shoot for," said Hogan, applying the "Be like Mike" analogy to soccer, "and say, 'I want to be like Carli.' It might help some be willing to do a little extra on their own."

"They're my idols and I could almost touch them," Lowery said of her experience watching the Women's World Cup in person. "They won the World Cup and that's just ridiculous. It makes me want to be an inspiration just like them."

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.