Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

I have found my way out of San Jose after a jam-packed whirlwind of a weekend at the NWSL Championship. What may once have been just a game has become a full weekend that serves not just as the culmination of a season but an annual gathering for fans, players and all sorts of fellow travelers.

Last year’s edition led to me producing a newsletter that had chapters and subsections. This year I got so much that this edition is not so much a newsletter as a news magazine. It’s very, very long on its own but you can read it all in order, bounce around or flip straight to the things you think you’d be most interested in. 

To guide you, here’s a table of contents. If you read it all in one sitting, God bless you. But if you stop and want to come back or want specific deep-dives, click here to get where you want to go.

Table of Contents

• The Most Curious Thing This Week: The Game

  • The Defining People

    • Hal Hershfelt

    • Mandy Freeman

    • Trinity Rodman

  • MS NOW: My take on the Rodman cap situation (feat. Tobin Heath, Christen Press and Meghann Burke)

• Media Day

  • Ryan Campbell: Honoring Katie Meyer

  • Kate Wiesner: From the End of the Road to the USWNT

• Skills Challenge: Everybody Loves Rudy

  • A Film Followup (feat. Kelley O’Hara)

• The Corporate Bonanza: Brands Jump Into Women's Sports

• Something Good I Ate: San Jose's Garlic Bread Banh Mi

But first, here’s Peach!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s the actual game. Kinda has to be, doesn’t it?

For the second year in a row, the Washington Spirit made it to the NWSL Championship. And for the second year in a row, the Washington Spirit left the NWSL Championship empty handed. 

This year, Gotham FC took the honors, collecting their second championship in three seasons. Just like the last one, Gotham entered as the bottom seed in the playoff bracket but knocked off teams with better regular season records to take home the trophy.

In this one, it was a battle of wits between two well-coached sides, as both teams held each other to goose eggs through the first three-quarters of the match and prevented each other from earning strong chances.

At least until the 80th minute, when Gotham midfielder Rose Lavelle found open space right at the top of the 18-yard box and launched a ball that Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury had no chance of saving.

From there, it was a matter of running out the clock for Gotham, who put in a stifling defensive performance by limiting the Spirit to zero shots on target. The two teams have played each other four times now across all competitions this season and Gotham have been able to keep the Spirit from scoring a single goal in any of those matchups.

Gotham packed their ten outfield players in tight for most of the evening, able to settle in high up and limit an athletic Spirit team from breaking out on counterattacks.

When that did happen, Gotham’s defense was able to anticipate the Spirit’s efforts to move the ball toward goal. Spirit winger Rosemonde Kouassi had some breathtaking runs along the right wing, but Gotham was able to prevent her from connecting with any teammates over the middle.

Early in the second half, Spirit coach Adrián González brought on star winger Trinity Rodman, who has been eased back from a knee injury she suffered late in the regular season.

But Gotham coach Juan Carlos Amorós had a game plan and Gotham’s defenders stuck to it, with fullback Mandy Freeman able to largely keep Rodman from shaking off her injury rust.

Between that and Lavelle’s goal, it was enough to send Gotham home with this year’s NWSL Championship.

It was a wild moment of celebration for Gotham after the final whistle, as NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman presented Championship MVP Rose Lavelle and co-captains Mandy Freeman and injured defender Tierna Davidson with their trophies.

Players shared in the pandemonium and moved into an hours-long celebration. Through the postgame mixed zone and press conference, the blasting music from Gotham’s victory partying flooded over the interviews with a dejected Spirit team.

Gotham’s players showed up to their interviews with ski goggles and cigars, fully taking in the moment.

It has been a long road for both teams, with Gotham’s place in the playoffs not secured until the penultimate game of the season.

But while Gotham gets to fly their championship flag forever, the Spirit are left licking their wounds again, taking the long, cross-country trip home and hoping that in 2026, the third time will be the charm.

The Defining People

Now, as far as analyzing the story of this game in more depth, it’s helpful to zoom in on a few key players.

Hal Hershfelt

The Spirit matched Gotham every step of the way defensively for most of the match, and it was defensive midfielder Hal Hershfelt who led the way in locking things down by putting in a career performance. With U.S. national team coach Emma Hayes in attendance, Hershfelt, who was an alternate for last year’s Olympic team but has not been selected for any 2025 national team game rosters, put herself back on the national team radar.

She anticipated Gotham’s attack especially well, but in the 73rd minute, Hershfelt went down and something was clearly up. Her ankle had given way and she was toughing it out. In a make-or-break moment, the signs from her and training staff were that she could continue.

Adrián González kept her on, taking a risk and riding the hot hand, even if it meant playing down a player for a few minutes as Hershfelt received care.

“We were just receiving information that she wanted to continue and she was trying,” González said postgame. He added that “a player like her, she always wants to play and I can imagine that, in a final you always want to play and you don’t want to get subbed,” but conceded, “now we can say that maybe the sub was late.”

Hershfelt was hobbling and moving a lot slower than before. González prepared Deb Abiodun as a substitute.

But it was Hershfelt who no longer had the speed to keep up with Rose Lavelle on the play where the Gotham star was able to break free for her goal.

It’s hard to assign blame but one thing is certain: a shortcoming like that is not a player’s fault in a case like this. Hershfelt gave her all and went above and beyond while playing injured. But in the post-match scenes, as reporters, photographers and staff for the teams and league headed out onto the field, it was obvious that she was putting all the responsibility on herself.

In a pandemonium featuring a whole gallery of sad Spirit faces, Hershfelt, the player who regularly shows the most emotion on the pitch, looked the saddest of them all, deep into the kind of tears that only come from pushing to the limit to reach the end of the road and coming up just short. 

But in that moment, the team’s bonds shone through, with one player and staffer after another coming to embrace her. Teammates helped her up onto crutches and I could see Hershfelt take a long look around before limping out into the tunnel.

A year ago, after a game that felt like a carbon copy of Saturday night, I asked her how she was feeling and she paused to think for a sec before saying, “like shit.” In that moment, she quickly laughed it off in a way that suggested a disappointment offset by a sense of that they would lift the trophy soon enough.

This year, it was clear she was in no place to have her face the impossibly bright white lights, the hungry reporters and jostling phones and cameras of the post-match media scrum. I could see her at a distance walking by, with a boot on her foot and pain as raw as it was nearly an hour earlier at the final whistle.

This was how it felt giving it all, creating a masterpiece, and feeling it was all for naught as it gets scrapped at the last possible moment.

This pain was different.

Mandy Freeman

Gotham FC is a club working to shed a notorious past reputation. In its previous life as Sky Blue FC, it was the ultimate symbol of underinvestment in professional women’s sports.

The team played far from the dazzling lights of Broadway and the crowding of the concrete jungle, at a field deep in the New Jersey suburbs that was not up to par even for its usual occupants, the college soccer teams at Rutgers University.

Players who the country celebrated as heroes for winning the World Cup would come to Sky Blue and be stuck looking for running water and laundry. 

Stories emerged of players taking ice baths in garbage cans, peeing in the woods behind the stadium.

It was this club that Mandy Freeman joined in 2017.

Freeman missed two seasons in 2019 and 2020 with an injury and in 2023, she was on Gotham’s championship winning team but was not rostered.

Fast forward to Saturday and she was on the pitch, starting the game as a fullback and as team captain, and then shutting down star Spirit attacker Trinity Rodman after she was subbed on in the second half.

In the postgame celebration, it was Freeman who received the spotlight, who had CBS Sports’s Lori Lindsey sticking the mic in her face on the stage.

This time, it was Mandy Freeman who could unambiguously say she was a champion.

Trinity Rodman

Nobody was under a bigger microscope at NWSL Championship weekend than Washington Spirit winger Trinity Rodman.

Rodman’s contract expires at the end of the season and she has been the subject of a litany of speculation on her future. The Spirit seem to want to keep her but are bumping up against the league’s salary cap.

Because the NWSL values competitiveness between teams, it has been sacrificing the ability to let teams pay top dollar for players. In recent years, star players including Lindsey Heaps, Naomi Girma and Alyssa Thompson have decided to move abroad to play.

Reports indicate Rodman has at least three offers from teams in England alone. Even DC Power, the American team in the nominally first-division Gainbridge Super League, reportedly submitted an offer that outmatches what their crosstown counterparts the Spirit can pay. And they play in a league that often serves as an NWSL farm system, as a team with virtually zero marketing and an attendance that struggles to get out of the triple digits.

From the moment Rodman showed her face in San Jose, every move was a potential clue to the future of the player who has become the face of the league.

Her dress to the league’s award show incorporated a Spirit jersey, generating buzz online about whether it meant she was staying.

At media day, reporters and camera crews crowded her table for an hour straight, with people cycling in to, in many cases, ask the same question. Then, even as she was pulled from one media outlet’s booth to another to do one-on-one interviews for shows and podcasts, the same question popped up over and over again. And Rodman gave the same answer, namely that there isn’t an answer yet.

But on Saturday, in just her second game back from a knee injury after a brief appearance in last weekend’s semifinal, Rodman’s wear showed.

After about a month’s absence, Rodman looked slower and disconnected, acknowledging as much postgame. 

“Only having nine minutes going into a final is not ideal,” Rodman said. As much as I don’t want to admit it, I still don’t feel like I was my full self tonight, which sucks.”

With the rumors swirling and the prospect she has played her last game in the Spirit’s black and highlighter-yellow jerseys, I asked Rodman about what it means in a moment like this to have dedicated fans supporting her and the team. For context, hundreds of Spirit fans, led by their primary supporters group the Spirit Squadron, made the cross-country trek and took up considerable room filling up what is normally host Bay FC’s supporter section.

“I’ve always talked about how great the Spirit Squadron is, and DC as a whole. And we’re really bummed we couldn’t be having a parade now going back,” Rodman said. “Hopefully, they’re still proud and we can try again next year.”

When Rodman said “we can try again next year,” it did briefly make me wonder if she was inadvertently breaking some news, but in the broader context of her still in uniform for the team and repeatedly telling people the decision will come after the season, there’s not enough evidence there for me to tell you she’s back next year.

There’s some other work I’ve done that can give you more context in just a sec but as far as whether she stays in Washington… we’ll see.

MS NOW

The Rodman saga is shaping up to be an inflection point for the NWSL. The league is facing its toughest test yet of how it wants to handle player salaries and costs.

Even as wealthy ownership groups buy in and some pay nine-figure fees for expansion teams, the amount teams can spend on player salaries is capped. 

Teams are pouring money into every other resource—coaching, analytics, help staff, training facilities—but player spending faces a cap.

It lines the NWSL up with most American leagues, including the NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL and MLS. But unlike those leagues, it is still in an active competition to be the top league in the global ecosystem for its sport. 

Nobody’s questioning whether the NBA is the best basketball league in the world, and nobody thinks MLS is going to match the English Premier League anytime soon.

But the NWSL has its salary cap while its top competitors, including the English Women’s Super League, the French Ligue 1 and the Spanish Liga F, do not.

I took a look into the situation and offered my take for my newly renamed employer MS NOW. I reported it out and looked at the options.

The league wants to keep the salary cap, so getting rid of it does not seem to be an option.

MLS has a designated player rule, where teams are allowed a handful of exemptions to pay select players above the salary cap. NWSL could follow suit.

And then there’s the stipulation in the league’s collective bargaining agreement that allows the league to raise the cap on its own, because the league’s annual cap numbers are officially defined as minimum salary caps. 

Sure, the salary cap is slated to be $4.3 million next year because that is the listed minimum in the agreement. But there is no binding power stopping the league from making the cap $5 million, or $10 million. If they want to try to win over Gen Alpha by making the cap $67,676,767, nothing is stopping them.

My piece, published Saturday morning before the game, includes a quote I got from Rodman after the semifinal match, insights from a chat with U.S. national team legends, RE—Cap show co-hosts and spouses Tobin Heath and Christen Press (spoiler: they hate the designated player idea and want players to get paid way more. A years-long fight for equal pay will do that to you,) and a chat with Meghann Burke, president of the league’s players union, the NWSL Players Association.

Take a look here!

Media Day

Straight from the airport, I headed to NWSL Media Day, one of my favorite events of the year. Players from both championship teams sit at cocktail-style high-top tables and reporters can just kinda walk up to them and chat.

It opens the door to much looser conversations than the heavily structured press conferences or even the usual scrums at trainings or after games.

At Media Day, players get asked about everything from deeply personal experiences to nitty-gritty details about soccer tactics to the sorts of questions you’d see in a teen magazine. There are few places in life where anyone has to answer questions like “how did you feel when your mom died,” “what are the pros and cons of playing a back four versus a back three” and “what is your favorite snack” back-to-back-to-back in immediate succession, but this is the kind of place where stuff like that happens.

I want to pull out two stories for you, one from each team, of players where I was able to dig a little more into who they are.

Ryan Campbell: Honoring Katie Meyer

To start the year, we talked at this here newsletter about mental health in the women’s soccer space, including about former Stanford goalkeeper Katie Meyer.

Meyer died at age 22 by suicide in 2022 after dealing with a major mental health crisis stemming from an academic disciplinary proceeding initiated because Meyer stood up for a teammate who had been sexually assaulted.

Her legacy looms large, as now the state of California has a law with her name on it reforming the academic disciplinary process and her family runs a nonprofit, Katie’s Save, to push for additional reforms and advocate for mental health.

Imagine for a moment you’re her teammate. Now imagine some more, that you are her understudy and she is your mentor, the upperclassman “big man on campus” who puts an arm around you and takes you under her wing.

That’s exactly the spot that Gotham FC’s rookie backup goalkeeper Ryan Campbell was in. She was part of the same Stanford goalkeeper unit as Meyer, was on the team before and after her death, and then had to stand in the exact same spot where everybody, Campbell included, knew Meyer was supposed to be, all while holding the grief of losing her.

This year, Campbell was Gotham’s nominee for the Lauren Holiday Impact Award, given to the winner of a fan vote between each team’s nominee, and presented to honor humanitarian and charity work that players do off the field.

Campbell was the only rookie nominated, specifically for her work with Katie’s Save.

She told me that Katie is still a source of inspiration for her on a daily basis and that small details, like seeing butterflies that resemble the symbol they use to honor Katie or seeing the number 19, Katie’s jersey number, pop up, offer a regular connection to Katie’s memory.

“I think, inextricably, our souls are kind of braided together in this beautiful little, sad kind of way. And I think I always see, like, little signs of her in the world, and I definitely believe in that kind of stuff,” Campbell said.

After winning the championship, I saw Campbell come through the media line and followed up on our chat from Media Day. She told me that she felt that Katie was with her.

“I know she’s celebrating with me tonight. That’s just ‘Big Girl,’ ‘Big Girl’ Energy,” Campbell said, using the nickname Katie received from her Stanford teammates.

“She’s always with me and I know she’s looking down upon me with the utmost joy.”

Kate Wiesner: From the End of the Road to the National Team

So much of the Spirit’s success this season has depended on their depth and the ability of players to step up and fill the many gaps from an array of injuries this season.

In the playoffs, Kate Wiesner’s number has been called and she has stepped up. After starting fullback Gabby Carle went down in the first half of the quarterfinal against Racing Louisville, Wiesner came on and ended up playing more than 90 minutes after the game went into extra time.

She started the semifinal match against Portland and played the game of her life, with a game-high three interceptions, three tackles and an all-around stellar defensive performance. 

Wiesner has caught the eye of national team coach Emma Hayes, who selected her to the squad for an upcoming late-November/early-December pair of friendlies against Italy.

While Wiesner missed most of the first half of the season recovering from a hip injury, she is a long way down the road compared to many second-year pros. She navigated not one but two ACL tears to recover from in college. 

She said that in her sophomore year of college, she came close to quitting the sport entirely.

She credits Erica Dambach, her head coach in college at Penn State, for being a pillar of support who helped her grow into a pro.

“I wasn’t sure that I wanted to come back and keep playing, and credit to my coaching staff and teammates at Penn State. I owe so much to coach Dambach and her staff there. I think they are probably the biggest reason why I am sitting here today.”

Wiesner is one of several recent Penn State alums to make it to the NWSL and stick, including Chicago Stars’ stalwart forward Ally Schlegel and Portland Thorns captain and U.S. national team anchor Sam Coffey.

Wiesner mentioned that playing at Penn State prepared her for playing in cold weather. While the mercury hovered in the 50s and 60s during Saturday’s match in San Jose, I snapped pictures at a training before the semifinal match where the temperature was 40 and the wind chill was in the high 20s.

Many players worked out in heavy coats, including some from cold places. Wiesner’s back-line colleague Esme Morgan had to run in and get a coat and a face covering despite having grown up and spent most of her career in the cold, gray north of England.

Meanwhile, only Wiesner showed up in just her regular training tracksuit and I snapped a picture of her with a big smile on her face, completely unbothered.

Did I mention that she’s from Southern California?

Unsurprisingly, it’s Penn State that turned her into a lover of the cold.

“I am from Southern California, but I spent four-and-a-half years in State College, Pennsylvania,” Wiesner said. “And they billed us as, ‘as blue collar as they come.’ And so I absolutely love training in weather like that. And that’s just in my DNA now.”

Skills Challenge

On Friday evening, the NWSL held its Skills Challenge, the closest thing it has to the kinds of side games sports fans get from the Home Run Derby or Slam Dunk Contest at MLB and NBA All-Star festivities, respectively. 

Representatives from each of the non-finalist teams split up into a pair of squads to compete for bragging rights and a shared $30,000 prize, with two national team and NWSL legends, Sam Mewis and Kelley O’Hara, serving as coaches and hype women.

When it comes to who put on the best show and which team walked away with the prize, I am sworn to secrecy until it airs this coming Saturday.

But… I got some great pictures and had the chance to chat with a few participants.

Bay FC, the hometown club, was represented by their star Zambian forward Racheal Kundananji.

Fans gave particularly rousing rounds of applause for their beloved “Rudy,” who has become a fan favorite for her athleticism, passionate style of play and embrace of the community.

After the skills challenge, Kundananji told me a bit about the experience of being so embraced by the Bay Area and Bay FC fans.

“Having fans who love the team, who loves the women, the soccer, who support us and are always there for us, it makes me feel so special,” Kundananji said.

Kundananji also has some exciting plans to look forward to in the offseason far beyond the Bay Area, including charity work back home in Zambia.

“We are able to provide soccer shoes, even like training gear, training equipment for teams and also school books and just try to support even, like, educational-wise.”

Since the Skills Challenge has rotated in different soccer-related games and challenges through the last few years, I asked a few participants what event they would add to the festivities.

“I think I would add like, a technical ladder, where you kind of juggle back and forth, like ‘ok, I have to do two-touch, and then pass it to my teammate, they have to do two-touch and get it back, you catch it and then you go… that would be fun,” Chicago Stars forward Ally Schlegel told me.

Racing Louisville’s midfielder Taylor Flint had an idea that felt particularly well-suited for her.

“Probably something to do with headers. I feel like we miss out on that.”

I know exactly where she’s going with this.

“Obviously. I would have killed that,” Flint said.

Flint is known for her ability to win aerial duels and headers and ranked first in the league in both the number of aerial duels won and duel winning percentage this season.

And it makes sense! In a league where players’ listed heights can often stray an inch or two in either direction, Flint is listed at 6’1”, taller than any non-goalkeeper in the league, and is definitely not any shorter than that.

While Flint is also proficient at heading the ball in the right direction and with a degree of precision, at her size, it feels like a challenge that would be pretty hard for her to lose.

A Film Followup (feat. Kelley O’Hara)

I also had the chance to talk with Kelley O’Hara, one of the coaches in the skills challenge. As a former player for both the Spirit and Gotham and an analyst for CBS Sports, O’Hara’s allegiance has been a lingering question on the network’s pre-match coverage.

But I made sure to fit in a question about a different thing altogether—her Tribeca Film Festival award-winning film!

For newcomers to this here newsletter, I interviewed Olivia from the creative duo Tusk, who created Ripe!, a soccer-themed sapphic romance short film that O’Hara executive produced, back in Edition 32.

Olivia mentioned how O’Hara took a supportive and hands-on role in production, offering her thoughts on how to make the film’s soccer scenes realistic in between training for a World Cup with the U.S. national team.

O’Hara didn’t have any news to share about the efforts to turn it into a feature film but did expand a bit on what it meant to be part of the project.

“For me, I have a lot of passions and interests, and one of those is storytelling. And the executive producing came to my world and it was amazing to be able to work with Tusk and create Ripe!,” O’Hara said.

The Corporate Bonanza

If you read anything about women’s sports, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the story of how businesses and brands are investing in it. Celebrities own teams, stars get stuck on billboards and the cash is flowing right through the space.

In practice, that means that there are a ton of events, booths and sponsored features that all fit under what c-suite speak loves to refer to as “activations.”

You could go to any number of booths at Saturday’s Fan Fest, meeting legends of the game at the Carmax booth, maybe also meet a Bay FC player at the AT&T stand, or if you were daring, maybe sample some of influencer Alex Cooper’s drink Unwell. (I’ve heard a lot about it. It tastes fine. I was surprised it was just a clear-ish liquid rather than a thicker juice or smoothie-like drink. Not my cup of tea but not awful.)

Or you could make it to Ally House, a bit of an all-around space with coffee on the house from former player Melissa Ortiz’s Kickoff Coffee, plus a bar and seating space to watch various talks and podcast tapings.

Ally in particular has been early to the business potential here, now several years into their pledge to spend equally on marketing in women’s sports as they do in men’s sports. 

On Saturday when I stopped in, I saw Christen Press and Tobin Heath again, as they were taping a live version of their podcast, The RE—CAP Show.

There were some even more exclusive brand-related parties and it seemed like among the higher-profile folks, there was a bit of a whisper network about which brand was putting on the coolest shindig.

But I lucked into an invite to a semi-private affair meant to also accommodate reporters, a “VIP wellness brunch” put on by iHeartMedia. In a country-club-like setting with a ton of white and a beautiful courtyard, it felt more like a version of the Catalina Wine Mixer from the film Step Brothers than the site of a podcast taping.

And it did include a podcast taping, specifically an episode of Good Game with Sarah Spain. She is an ESPN alum and an Around the Horn regular (RIP, but as Edition 26 taught us, it is always in our hearts) and now helms a daily podcast that focuses exclusively on women’s sports. iHeart has also backed its branding with meaningful investment, as they now have a range of podcasts covering women’s sports under their banner.

(Also side note: shoutout to both Sarah and her producer Alex, who ended up being my neighbors high above PayPal Park in the spillover press box space at the very top of the stadium. They do great work, even when the pillars that literally hold up the roof over the grandstand were getting in their way.)

And it’s not just big corporations who could show off their work at Championship weekend. It’s small, independent writers and creators too. From nerdy analytics podcasts (like Expected Own Goals!), to blogs writing as many news stories and features as they can (shoutout to All for XI staying afloat even as SB Nation just keeps cutting back!), to podcasts featuring a former player and former referee patching things over (like the Soccerish podcast!), to the creators of custom women’s soccer patches to iron onto your jackets (hey, Odd Colored Sheep!), people are helping tell this community’s stories and bring people together.

(One more shoutout to Kevin, producer at Soccerish who was my other press box neighbor high up in the corner of the stadium and helped me expand my soccer brain. When you’re a young American like me still learning the nuances of the game, it definitely helps to have an older Englishman within earshot!)

Something Good I Ate

Last time I was in San Jose, I snuck in a trip to Duc Huong, a small but always-crowded sandwich shop in one of the many strip malls of mostly Vietnamese stores in Little Saigon.

A line regularly extends a few stores down, ending in a gaggle of people waiting outside the shop’s pickup window. It can regularly take 20 to 30 minutes or more just to get a sandwich.

When I went in June, I was pretty sure I had eaten the best banh mi I have ever had (which is saying something, since I live near Eden Center, the largest Vietnamese cultural hub on the entire East Coast.)

After a second trip this weekend, including an even longer wait despite showing up at 10 in the morning, I am now certain.

I ordered their grilled pork banh mi, which comes with the usual fillings of cucumber, pickled carrots and daikon, and cilantro.

But Duc Huong offers banh mi with a garlic bread baguette. It takes an already flavorful sandwich and gives it yet another gear and a taste that pairs perfectly with the slightly sour pickle and the slightly sweet, meaty grilled pork.

If you see the line out the door, don’t be discouraged. Just get waiting!

Just a note: Any work here or opinions I express are solely mine, and do not reflect the views of my employer, my coworkers, or anybody else affiliated with me. The newsletter is not monetized in any way and everything in here is written and reported with my own resources on my own time outside of my working hours unless specifically noted otherwise. “I’m Curious” is just for me, the author, and for you, the reader. Thank you for reading. I’m glad you’re here.