Well, international club football is coming to Calgary, or at least
Spruce Meadows, which is not technically in Calgary. The regular season
first placed team in the 8 team Canadian Premier League gets one of the
two CPL places in the revamped CONCACAF champions' cup. The other goes
to the champion as determined by the playoffs.

Cavalry FC ended up taking first place easily enough (one round left to
play) by winning 5 of their last six games.

The oddities:

This year 5 teams make the playoffs, instead of the 4 you might expect.
The playoffs used what I discovered is called a Page system, which some Australian sports use, along with the wild card round in the NBA, and a
few others.

There is a preliminary round where # 4 plays number 5. The winner of
that plays # 3 in a quarterfinal (yes you read that right), with the
winner of that playing a semifinal vs. the loser of the match between 1
and 2, and then the final (what the Aussies would call a grand final)
is between the winner of the 1-2 match, and the winner of the match
between the loser of 1-2 and the winner of 3-4(or 5). Clear as mud ?

But that is not all.....Second oddity is that in order to qualify for
the playoffs at all, teams have to have a minimum of 2000 minutes played
by U21 players. Cavalry just passed that mark on the weekend. Two
teams in playoff contention (Halifax Wanderers and York United) are
still short on that count (with York needing 123 more minutes from the
last match, and Wanderers 195. Presumably both will make it, but if
things go wrong for both of them (injuries etc.) it is possibly that
Vancouver (7th on 29 points) or Winnipeg (Valour) (8th on 26) could
qualify instead. Atletico Ottawa in 6th are good on the U21 minutes.

Current standings:

Cavalry 27 15 7 5 43 27 +16 52
Forge 27 11 9 7 39 31 +8 42
Pacific 27 11 7 9 42 32 +10 40
HFX 27 10 9 8 38 32 +6 39
York 27 10 5 12 33 43 −10 35
Ottawa 27 9 6 12 37 34 +3 33
Vancou 27 8 5 14 27 48 −21 29
Valour 27 6 8 13 25 37 −12 26

Last round:

Cavalry - Pacific

Valour - HFX Wanderers (I suspect a Valour win due to the travel and
U21 bit)

Vancouver - York (Again, good chance of a home win)

Forge (Hamilton)- Atletico Ottawa

Anyway, none of the playoff pairings are set yet, with second and third
places still up for grabs, and no guarantee that either of the current
4th and 5th will make it.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)