Washington Spirit ‘motivated by love’

The NWSL Championship has arrived, and the Washington Spirit will face the Orlando Pride at CPKC Stadium in Kansas City as a particular sort of surprise package.

It’s not that this is some flash-in-the-pan, late-season turnaround. Anyone who watched the Spirit in recent months knew that the team could have enough in them to get this far. With a talented young roster full of strong personalities and confidence, and excellent work from the coaching staff, Washington has been among the contenders in terms of performance. The eye test and data will both tell you that the Spirit tend to outplay their opponent, create more and better chances, and end up deservedly winning more often than not.

Take a step back, though, and it’s shocking that a team that has undergone such a massive recent change could be capable of that. 2024 started with a new coach who had no NWSL experience, and has contained a series of major, potentially season-sinking developments. A planned coaching handoff from existing staff, to Adrián Gonzalez, to Jonatan Giráldez was — no matter how compelling Giráldez’s CV at Barcelona — a high-risk maneuver, while the team has over the last three months lost arguably its most crucial voice (Andi Sullivan), its next emerging superstar (Croix Bethune), and its leading goalscorer through September (Ouleymata Sarr) to injury.

Now, place all of that on top of the chaos that has engulfed the club over the last five years, and the scope of Washington’s achievement in 2024 starts to come into focus. Whether on more well-known fronts like Richie Burke’s firing (and eventual lifetime ban from the league) over accusations of verbal abuse or the extraordinary process by which Michele Kang — backed by a full squad of Spirit players — wrested ownership of the club away from former managing partner Steve Baldwin, or lesser-known issues like months without a permanent place to train, the Spirit have embodied the gargantuan, needed change seen across the NWSL as much as any club could.

Washington Spirit vs. Orlando Pride:How to watch the 2024 NWSL Championship

Three players have seen all of this change play out firsthand. Ashley Hatch was the first to arrive in what turned out to be one of the most consequential weeks in NWSL history. Hatch came to the club in a trade announced January 16, 2018, and within seven days was joined by Andi Sullivan and Aubrey Kingsbury.

In a lengthy interview with Pro Soccer Wire earlier in the 2024 season, the trio detailed just how different this year’s changes — for once, moves made out of thought, ambition, and strategic thinking — differ from the reactive, nearly always unpleasant jolts they’ve seen in the past.

“It’s just been this vision that’s taken time to enact. We got a lot of pieces right last year, and I think this year we’ve gotten even more right,” said Kingsbury. “It’s been a lot of waiting for a better coach, a better facility, a better stadium, things like that. But I do feel like this year, it’s not like we’re still waiting for some more things, and having to make do in the interim. We have all the resources, all the staff, everything is at our disposal.”

Hatch said being a part of unprecedented projects like Kynisca, the multi-club international conglomerate Kang has created to spur the women’s game into further growth, gives her a perspective that with the Spirit owner, the proof is always in the pudding.

“With Michele as our, you know, fearless leader, I do feel that her intentions are…well, I know that her intentions are to make the Washington Spirit the best club in the world,” said Hatch, shifting from a half-joke about how often Kang’s ambitions come up when players discuss the club’s broader moves to an organization-wide openness about being second to none. The Spirit have openly talked about being the best club on the planet. When Kang promises something to bolster performance, or marketing, or any other facet of club operation, she delivers.

“There’s been a lot of change still, [but] this offseason in particular, it feels like more of a progression, whereas in the past it’s felt like change,” added Sullivan before expounding on how, after this years-long whirlwind, she feels she can trust the club to make the soccer-side decisions correctly.

“I can’t speak for anyone else but myself. I think I’ve gotten better at knowing that things will come. I think in the past I’d be like, ‘why don’t we have this?’ Like, ‘why don’t we have a coach named yet?’ Or, ‘When does this happen?’ and feeling really stressed and anxious about it, or feeling somehow involved in that process, and feeling like I can influence things.

“I think this offseason, I wasn’t stressed about us finding the right coach. I didn’t know who was going to be, but I wasn’t like, ‘I need to take on this worry and this burden, to find the right coach,’ and to be searching for resources. I don’t know, in the past it’s felt more like panicky and stressful and uncertain, and so I don’t know if that’s me getting better handling the uncertainty and the nature [of] pro sports and offseasons and change, or also trusting the leadership more. I think it’s probably both.”

All three players, through no fault of their own, arrived as a consequence of ugly situations at the Spirit. Hatch, after a Rookie of the Year 2017 season, came to the club in what was a deeply unpopular trade that saw Crystal Dunn’s NWSL rights to the North Carolina Courage. The Dunn trade came about because the U.S. women’s national team star reportedly had interest in returning to NWSL after a stint at Chelsea, but would not do so if she had to go back to Washington after a mass exodus of players unhappy with the club’s direction and their treatment.

Sullivan was selected No. 1 overall in the 2018 NWSL College Draft, a position the Spirit were only in due to finishing dead last in 2017. The days leading up to that draft were full of chatter over whether Sullivan would even declare for the draft, or if the Stanford midfielder would seek a contract at a high-level European club instead; the unspoken implication was that the Spirit were too much of a mess for such a sought-after player.

The week ended with a club announcement that Aubrey Kingsbury had been acquired in a trade with the Orlando Pride. Once again, a new player arrived due to an ugly situation in Washington: Canada goalkeeper Stephanie Labbé’s stunning demotion and eventual departure during that offseason came after the eventual Olympic gold medalist took a medical leave of absence from the Spirit. In a 2019 interview with Olympic.ca, Labbé accused then-coach Jim Gabarra of “constant mental abuse,” citing that as the reason she left the club.

This is a team that has had three majority owners, with Michele Kang’s takeover in 2022 probably containing a coffee table book’s worth of material in and of itself. There have been three formally-named general managers (normally a long-tenured position), plus an offseason after a championship run informally by then-interim head coach Kris Ward and Ben Olsen, who was barely three months into a role as club president.

It just goes on and on. Washington was in 2021 forced to forfeit two matches over Covid-19 protocol violations, something no other club has experienced in league history. The Spirit have called three stadiums (the Maryland Soccerplex, Segra Field, and Audi Field) home in that time, while also playing preseason and NWSL x Liga MX Femenil Summer Cup games at various venues in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Most notoriously, the Spirit have a 1W-0D-0L record as the home team in Houston, after the NWSL required a May 2021 home match against the Houston Dash scheduled for Segra Field to be held at what was then called BBVA Stadium.

The list of training facilities has ranged from an initially awkward arrangement with MLS’s D.C. United, who wanted to link being a tenant at the Inova Performance Complex in Leesburg, Va. with playing at Segra Field, a stadium whose name hits like a curse word if you say it among Spirit supporters these days. Since this trio arrived, Washington has trained at the Maryland SoccerPlex, on some ancient auxiliary fields near the abandoned husk of RFK Stadium in the District, at a tony private high school in Alexandria, and for a time before Kang acquired the team were quietly hopscotching the Maryland and Virginia suburbs in search of an empty patch of grass.

Discussing this absurd era with Hatch, Kingsbury, and Sullivan has to be leavened with some humor. The players break into a laugh when the “home” game in Houston comes up, because what else can one do in such a ridiculous situation? As much as the group can have a chuckle about it now, Sullivan said that in the moment the stress was immense.

“It got to a point where, where if Aubrey called me at any point of the day, especially Aubrey and Tori [Huster] or Hatchy, if they called me? I would answer really quickly and they would say ‘everything’s okay,’ and then they would say what they needed to say,” said Sullivan, recalling the extraordinary stress and constant evolutions in a 2021 season that saw the club win a championship that for players in a preposterously unhealthy situation was fueled to some degree out of sheer spite. “Every time you answered the phone, it’s like, ‘oh s—.’ Sorry, excuse my language, but like, ‘what’s going on now?'”

Sullivan, describing that era as “energy depleting,” said that Krikorian does want to empower the leaders within the group rather than simply dictate from above. However, for the 28-year-old, the former Florida State Seminoles coach has shown them how to lead rather than “exploiting our willingness” to take on every role for the sake of the club.

Krikorian “wants to empower us all as leaders, but I think he’s doing that the most by showing us what that actually looks like: Building a team, and delegating, and empowering us in our area of expertise, and then pushing us to grow when we can.”

With all three players using the word “stability” throughout the discussion, 2024 is the fruit of all of that labor in creating a functioning, high-performance institution. Washington could have been derailed when Giráldez arrived in June simply from having a new personality in charge of what was a successful 10W-1D-4L start under González. The Olympic window could have thrown the team out of its groove. Losing Bethune, this year’s Rookie of the Year and Midfielder of the Year to possibly the most unusual injury in NWSL history, or Sullivan suffering a torn ACL in October, were both openings to let this season be simply a promising start to a new era.

Speaking to reporters at CPKC Stadium one day before her third professional final, Hatch said that navigating the coaching change came down to some of the hallmarks of a healthy institution in any field: clarity, communication, and consistency.

“I feel like the communication has been very clear from the beginning from our GM: when this change was happening, how it was going to happen, and what the progression was going to be,” said Hatch. “I also feel like Mike [Bristol, assistant coach], Adrián and Jona, they’ve all been speaking the same language and saying the same things from day one, and so I feel like that really helps.

“Once Jona got here, we’ve already been talking about the same things, we’ve already been training the same things. I think the buy-in from the team has been great. It’s never an easy thing to have to deal with different coaches or whatever, like mid-season, but everyone’s been bought in and has done their best to do what’s asked of them. And so I think with a combination of all those things, it’s been a smooth transition.”

On the other, less expected hurdles to clear, the resilience that used to define the Washington Spirit as a group of players and staffers who play soccer amid utter chaos off the field is now applicable to the entire organization. Key pieces of the puzzle can be removed or significantly changed without the structure collapsing. Incredibly successful people like Krikorian, Giráldez, or Dawn Scott (the club’s world-renowned head of medical and innovation) could be anywhere they want in this sport, and they want to be at the Washington Spirit, because they know the recipe for success is in place.

Sullivan said that brings a very different kind of pressure, one where she joked “we better frickin’ be successful.”

“I feel fired up by it,” said the USWNT midfielder. “I don’t expect it to be magically be, we’re the best club in the world overnight, but I am like ‘okay, we better be prepared.’ I think I said this to Aubrey in preseason, that if we want to be better, we have to be prepared to do things differently.”

“I think it’s really cool to see this pattern [from] Michele,” explained Hatch. “People said she couldn’t be the majority owner with the feud that she had with Steve [Baldwin] and then they said, ‘well, she probably won’t be able to make the changes that she wants to make.’ And then she hired Dawn, and now we have like, the most robust performance staff. And then people said, ‘she’s not going to be able to get the coaches she wants,’ and then she gets the number one coach on her list. So I think Michele has this tradition and pattern of, kind of proving everyone wrong and [overcoming] barriers and I feel very, very fortunate that we are on her team.”

Hatch moved on to link the wins at the top of the org chart and the sacrifices of the players who endured worse times to the Spirit’s success this year, with experienced players and newcomers alike being held to — and critically, given a pathway to meet — the highest standards.

“I think it’s already visible among the team, especially with new players,” explained the 29-year-old. “This [setting] is their standard. This is their rookie year, their first year in the league. It’s really, really cool that they’re starting here. I would have loved to started [in this circumstance]. It’s a shout out and a testament to all the players that did come before all the other events that aren’t here as well. They’ve played such a huge role in this, even though they may not be here to reap the rewards of it…

“I’m glad that we’re finally to the point where Andi and Aubrey can focus more on being players, because that’s what they deserve. But I think it’s also just a huge testament to the standard that they’ve also raised. I don’t think we would have been able to get here or we would have been able to get Michele [to want to take ownership of the club], if not for all those players as well.”

After a regular-season finale that saw Washington become the only team in 2024 to beat the Courage in North Carolina, Kingsbury reflected on just how different this run has been from 2021.

“Bringing in Adrián at the beginning of the season, not even having Jona till halfway through the season, I’ve just been so impressed by our staff [and] every player, how we’ve bought into this culture, this team, since day one, and it’s paying dividends. Everyone’s gotten so much better,” explained the goalkeeper. “I think back to 2021, and that was special because of all the extenuating circumstances.

“This is special in a different manner. It’s been really fun to be motivated by just, love for one another, and not motivated by all the chaos that’s going on around us. I think we really care for each other. We’ve created a strong family culture here, where everyone works hard. Everyone competes. We’re locked in, focused on the process and each day, each opportunity, whether it’s training, [a] game, whatever it is, and just keep continuing to challenge and push ourselves every day.”