Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

I spent the weekend at the 2024 NWSL Championship in Kansas City! Considering my coverage of the Washington Spirit in the home stretch of this season and the fact that they were playing against the Orlando Pride in the championship game, I had to go.

And it was quite the historic occasion, as the championship capped the first season of Kansas City’s new stadium, the first to be purpose-built for a U.S. pro women’s sports team. Plus, Orlando coach Seb Hines became the first Black coach to win an NWSL Championship, just two years after becoming the league’s first-ever Black coach.

Here’s some of what I saw this weekend.

What's Inside

• The Most Curious Thing This Week: Game Recap

• My Reporting: Meet the Supporters

• Other Takes and Things of Note

  • Fanfest

  • Skills Challenge

  • Media Day

• Something Good I Ate: More KC BBQ

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s the championship final.

In a physical, tense game where defenses largely held firm, the Orlando Pride sealed their first ever NWSL Championship in a 1-0 win over the Washington Spirit.

Chances were fairly limited in the early going but a goal by Orlando striker Barbra Banda in the first half proved to be the decider. Banda had been double-teamed to that point but found a one-on-one with Washington defender Esme Morgan. The Zambian forward launched a ball from the right side that snuck into the near part of the net past Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury.

While Spirit fans and players flagged a potential foul on the buildup to the goal, action did not stop for a review and the officials held firm on the goal.

From that point, Orlando fought to survive. The Pride have ridden a defense that is, by most metrics, tops in the league, to their success. And they relied on it heavily to lock up the win.

Orlando absorbed pressure from Washington, who took 26 shots in the game and held onto possession for more than 57% of the game. But very few of those shots caused trouble for Pride goalkeeper Anna Moorhouse, whose five saves were mostly uneventful barring a header straight on goal by Washington’s Rosemonde Kouassi early in the second half.

Washington’s star forward Trinity Rodman was largely shut down during the game. She had been grabbing her back at points through the match and was less able to pull off some of her signature moves while holding the ball.

“I’m not hiding the fact that my back’s not feeling great but I decided to stay in the game,” Rodman told me postgame. “I could’ve pulled myself out, so that’s not an excuse. But I wasn’t the Trin I wanted to be today, so that’s a bummer.”

It’s been a journey of a season for the Spirit, who defied the expectations of nearly everyone outside their organization and nearly won a championship. Through injuries to several key players and dramatic playoff wins, they persevered. Falling just short clearly gutted them.

Several players were fighting back tears as they exited the field or had visibly red eyes in postgame media appearances.

Washington midfielder Hal Hershfelt was blunt when I asked her about how she was feeling postgame.

She took a brief pause.

“I mean, like shit,” she said, quickly laughing afterward.

“We created an overwhelming amount of chances. We just couldn’t finish.”

And in the latest edition of “the internet is undefeated,” it’s already been turned into a little bit of a meme among soccer fans on the upstart social media site Bluesky. One fan used it to react to goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher announcing her retirement from the U.S. women’s national team on Monday.

For the Pride, the centerpiece of their first championship was Marta. The 38-year-old Brazilian attacking midfielder is in her eighth season with the Pride and is generally regarded as the greatest women’s soccer player of all time. Yes, better than Megan Rapinoe. Better than Abby Wambach. Better than Mia Hamm. Better than any other player you have or haven’t heard of. 

We’ll have more about this tour de force of a player and person in a bit but as team captain, Marta was at the center of the postgame trophy presentation.

“Of course it means so much,” Marta said when interviewed by CBS ahead of the trophy presentation. “I fucking waited eight years for this moment.”

Barbra Banda, sharing the podium postgame with Marta, acknowledged how much she meant to both her and the team.

“I think this is the best gift she has had. And I’ve been looking up to her,” Banda said.

Banda added that Marta is more than just a teammate to her. 

“She’s more like my sister.”

My Reporting

NWSL Championship weekend is a bit of a “Comic-Con” for women’s soccer nerds. People can talk about a favorite subject without having to explain all the basics. People can wear their weirdest niche shirts and hats and get a compliment instead of a confused look. And people can see the people who they post back and forth with on social media in real life.

And seriously, no shortage of weird looks. Before Saturday’s game, I ran into Teal Man, the individual Kansas City Current fan who paints his entire bald head teal and dyes his entire long beard dark red for every game. 

Legal name Richard Harper, Teal Man has been embraced by the club for his enthusiasm and painted face. 

Taking questions while decked out in a Santa hat and suit, Teal Man explained why he chooses to do this, telling me he recently came to a realization about his women’s soccer fandom.

“I just realized that strong women raised me and strong women have supported me all my life, so if this is what I can do to help support them and just be a loud, rowdy character, then that’s what I’m going to do to the best of my ability,” Teal Man said.

One of my favorite parts of games and events like this is meeting the fans, especially fans who attend every game, rain or shine, to cheer on their favorite teams.

Both the Spirit Squadron, the Washington Spirit supporters group, and the Black Swans, the Orlando Pride supporters group, made it out to the game.

The 200 or so Spirit supporters who traveled and sat with the Squadron received free tickets and a $200 credit for transportation booking from the team, which is a big step forward for a sport that has until recently not had much money to pay to players, let alone fans.

I know the Spirit Squadron well and quite like them, so I took an opportunity this weekend to learn a bit more about the Black Swans. I showed up at an event meant for fans, press and others to mingle that was hosted by KC Current’s supporters group, the Blue Crew. About midway through the evening, I swung by the table of Orlando supporters.

They welcomed me with open arms. As a former Orlando resident (very briefly,) I at least knew the places they mentioned, which helped a lot.

Members of their core group quickly told me that they traveled to Kansas City without any financial subsidies from their team (although now they have a new standard to ask for going forward.)

I learned that some members went even further to travel with the team on their own time and own dime.

By her own calculations, Jennifer Brill has traveled over 40,000 miles to support the Pride this season.

“40,701 before this trip,” she told me during Saturday’s championship match. “Every home game, every away game, including the summer cup, all of them.”

She said she did it after meeting a few fans of the Los Angeles-based club Angel City, who said they hoped to travel to every home and away match the team had.

She also showed me a special version of Orlando’s orange kit that she has. On the back is the kit number 24 and on the nameplate it reads “Flock Off,” a pun tied to the supporters group’s use of swans as a symbol. (A little Orlando fun fact for you: Lake Eola, in the heart of downtown Orlando, is home not just to many swans, but to swan boats that comfortably fit two people and are shaped like swans.)

Players and staff are often quick to acknowledge how much fans mean to them (see: last week’s Edition 17 of this newsletter.)

At the Friday night event, Pride general manager Haley Carter swung by the table full of Black Swans and posed for pictures with them. As a photographer, I had to tell one fan to move his hand such that his scarf he was holding up would read “Orlando Pride” and not “Orlando Prid.”

Please forgive me if going forward, I occasionally call them the Orlando Prid. Them’s the rules.

After their championship win, Pride defender Emily Sams gave the team’s traveling fans a shoutout.

“Everything is for them,” she told me postgame. “We’re so happy to be able to bring back a trophy for them and to see them all out here tonight, too.” 

Other Weekend Takes and Things of Note

Fanfest

In recognition of the “Comic-Con”-style gathering of fans, the NWSL hosted a “Fanfest” event ahead of the championship. In the parking lot outside the stadium were stands, trailers and pavilions nearly drowning in branding.

You could create an AI design that would project onto a large soccer ball orb, presented by Adobe. You could roll on through the Google Pixel experience. Or maybe meeting women’s soccer legends Tobin Heath and Christen Press in the Ally tent after a live taping of their podcast The RE—Cap Show is more your speed.

As for me, I got early access with my press credential. And in addition to helping the Adobe people iron out some technical difficulties with their AI soccer ball generator, I had the chance to join a press gaggle over in the Google trailer with an icon of the game, Megan Rapinoe. Dressed to the nines in an outfit only she could pull off, Rapinoe and young phenom Gisele Thompson from Angel City took questions from a small gaggle of reporters.

Considering her advocacy for political issues and labor rights for her teammates, I asked about how much of a difference it makes for better infrastructure and commercial support to be in place for players.

“I feel really proud. Of course I wish that this was going on when I was playing, when other players were playing, but such is life,” Rapinoe said. 

“I think we’re still as female athletes are pushing a boulder uphill, so to speak, so if you let your hand off of it, it’s going to crush you, so continuing to build on that and keep that activism and keep that equality piece in mind in continuing to push the game forward is really important for this generation, because they’re in a much better spot to do that and, I think, make a lot bigger impact than we could make,” she added.

Another highlight came in a partnership between the website and media company Just Women’s Sports and Pitchside Coffee, a small coffee cart owned and operated by a group of Kansas City Current players. In a bittersweet twist, they were at their home stadium for championship weekend after falling one game short and losing last weekend to Orlando.

Instead of servicing balls into the box, they were serving cups of Joe to customers. And there were many of them. 15 minutes before it opened, there was already a 30-minute wait. On a banner day for Pitchside Coffee, I was able to snag an iced latte with vanilla and caramel. Not bad at all.

On the way into the stadium, one other familiar face chatted with me in a reflection of the high-profile investments flowing into women’s sports.

Basketball Hall of Famer Grant Hill joined the ownership group of the Pride ahead of this season, alongside the Wilf family, who are majority owners of the team. The hoops legend spent eight years playing for the NBA’s Orlando Magic and still lives in Central Florida.

Hill told me he was really excited to be part of it.

“It’s a league that has incredible momentum. We’re in a venue that was made exclusively for women. In primetime. It doesn’t get any better,” Hill said.

“We just had a magical season. I’d like to be able to take credit for it, but really it’s the culture the Wilfs established. It’s our front office, our coaching staff, our players—it’s been incredible.”

Skills Challenge

Old heads will remember that, in Edition 4 of this newsletter, I gave a shoutout to the utter chaos that was the original MLS penalty kick shootout. At this year’s NWSL Skills Challenge, held the day before the Championship game, some of the league’s stars brought a small version of it back to life.

The rules were simple: a shooter had a few seconds to get a shot off, running in from a distance toward the goal. The goalkeeper was also allowed to run in and try to block the shooter.

The NWSL’s version was a little less crazy. With a shrunken field, players started from much closer to the goal than their original counterparts.

“We thought we were supposed to start way back, but then they’re like, ‘no, you can come closer.’ And I’m like, ‘oh, that’s easier for us.’ It was harder for the goalies.” Racing Louisville’s Savannah DeMelo told me after the challenge.

It was one of several events the league organized as they brought one star player from each of the non-finalist teams and split them into two competing teams of their own. The scores were hardly being tracked. The events seemed more for bragging rights and entertaining the several hundred fans who drove out to a field in the Kansas City suburbs and showed up on a cold night.

And the event led to no shortage of laughs and some fun role reversals, too. Goalkeepers Kailen Sheridan of the San Diego Wave and Casey Murphy of the North Carolina Courage each stepped out of goal to take penalty kicks. Field players Kate del Fava of the Utah Royals and Lynn Williams of NJ / NY Gotham FC each stepped into net, donning keeper gloves. Both celebrated as they were able to stop the goalkeeper PK attempts.

Murphy told me afterward that she’s a fan of the format.

“It was my first time trying it out. It was different and, I mean, we had fun with it. And yeah, maybe we’ll try it out in practice a little bit more. It was fun,” Murphy said.

Players weren’t the only ones embracing some unusual roles during the challenge. ESPN analyst and retired U.S. women’s soccer great Ali Krieger did a stint inside the merchandise trailer, holding it down and holding court with fans. It may not surprise you by this point to learn that her appearance was also sponsored, this time by online financial services company Klarna.

The league does not have an All-Star Game, so an event like this fills the gap and is something that seems to have been well-received by fans and players alike.

DeMelo, from Racing Louisville, saw it as a big step forward for the league.

“I think the weekend, like this weekend leading up to the final, I think the stadiums, the way teams are kind of putting facilities together, it’s really professional and I think it’s the recognition we deserve.”

Media Day

Few events felt as peculiar to me as one of the first of the weekend. Two days before the game, the league held Media Day in a portion of Kansas City’s Union Station. Inside a small ballroom, a stage was set up for major announcements, while high-top chairs and cocktail hour tables dotted the room.

At a few points in the afternoon, the league and commissioner Jessica Berman honored players in attendance with awards. But the core of the event was a pair of media availabilities with players and staff from the two teams set to play in the final.

The NFL has something similar with Super Bowl Media Day, a chaotic affair where players are mobbed by massive collections of reporters and other eccentric characters. A Mexican reporter once asked Tom Brady to marry her. Kel Mitchell, of “Kenan and Kel” and “Good Burger” fame, once handed Matt Ryan a hamburger.

In the NWSL’s version was downright stoic by comparison, thanks to a generally more thoughtful press corps.

If anything, it was the players who pulled off the wacky antics, like when Orlando Pride forward Ally Watt commandeered the team’s camera and begged her coach Seb Hines to pose for a photo for her after he won the Coach of the Year award.

With any player available and audiences varying from large groups of reporters to none at all, it felt like a college activities fair or professors’ office hours.

Star players like Washington’s Trinity Rodman and Orlando’s Marta were consistently surrounded by a handful of reporters, with people rotating in and out.

It was here that I learned that Marta can make anything interesting. I swung by in the later part of her availability, when some of the lifestyle reporters took over. Marta was asked about her morning routine and if she shopped at Target.

Between her bombastic personality, frequent gestures, and expressive reactions, Marta made the mundane downright compelling.

Her wakeup routine? No matter how hard she tries, it’s somewhere in the 6-6:30 a.m. window.

“I know what time I need to wake up, every single day. And even in my days off, I feel like, ‘yeeaaaaaah! Tomorrow I can sleep a little bit more.’ And then, same time I’ll wake up and I’m like,” completing her description with an eye roll.

Breakfast? 

“I never travel with breakfast in the morning. I don’t feel hungry,” she said. She later pointed toward some of her younger teammates.

“But the young kids, please, eat breakfast in the morning.”

Somebody asked her if she shopped at Target and if she gets recognized in public. She gave a whole journey of an answer. I followed up by asking what it’s like for that to have changed recently.

“It’s nice, especially there in Orlando, because it’s hard to compete with Disney,” Marta said. “People go to Orlando to go to Disney, the parks, you know, and now they’re starting to talk about the Orlando Pride. Not only the men’s team but both. They’re starting to talk about soccer. And this makes me and of course, everybody so proud of it. Because it’s by, like, so much hard work.”

I’d watch her read the phone book.

It was a more laid-back conversation with other players. Washington Spirit defender Gabby Carle was telling me about everything from her position change in college (she used to be a forward) to the book she brought because she thought she “probably would have time during Media Day to keep reading it, in case I got bored.”

Orlando Pride’s goalkeepers Anna Moorhouse and McKinley Crone told me about their coffee-based practice challenges. 

“As goalkeepers, we have to shoot on the other goalkeepers. So if you miss three in a row, you have to buy the whole group coffee. It gives a little bit of competition,” Moorhouse said.

“I haven’t bought coffees this year,” Moorhouse told me with a bit of a wry smile and a knowing look over toward Crone. 

“No comment,” Crone said before the two burst out laughing.

An answer about the heat in Orlando also led Crone and I to figure out that we had a significant mutual overlap. She went to Edgewater High School, the same one my fiancée Abby attended. As it turns out, Crone graduated in the same year as Abby’s sister. I asked if she knew Abby’s sister and she said yes.

Crone looked pretty surprised when I mentioned her name and it was someone she actually knew. Moorhouse seemed genuinely stunned when Crone said yes. The camera was off by that point but I wish I had that reaction on camera.

I knew this world was small but not that small.

Something Good I Ate

Most of my trip to Kansas City was a culinary redux, as I ate another one of my beloved Z-Man sandwiches from Joe’s and realized that the pulled pork from Slap’s was, in fact, the best pulled pork I had ever had.

But I made time to sample one more BBQ joint I missed last time, Wolfepack BBQ. While trying (and failing) to get the wrestling theme song for the NWO Wolfpac out of my head, I sampled a massive tray’s worth of thickly-sliced brisket, pulled pork and burnt ends.

The brisket was tender and not fatty at all, a pleasant surprise for such thick brisket slices. The pulled pork was pretty good, especially with their sweet and spicy sauces.

But the burnt ends were the highlight and probably the best version I’ve had of the Kansas City staple. They truly lived up to the description of burnt ends as being like “meat candy” and, like M&M’s, they melted in your mouth, not in your hands.

With overflowing sides of a rich, tomato sauce-y order of baked beans and some decently seasoned potato salad, it was definitely a highlight.

It even came with what is, objectively, the best way to drink Coke: in an opaque red plastic tumbler. If your Coke comes in this, you know it’s about to be good.

My only regret is that I had to run. This was eaten in the time before Fanfest and a text from my contact at Google giving me the list of people I could interview at the start of the event. As soon as the list started with Megan Rapinoe, I frantically threw everything into a to-go box and raced to catch a ride.

But sometimes love grows the most after brief encounters. Wolfepack’s BBQ and especially their burnt ends will deserve a full, slow sit-down meal the next time I’m back in town.