The NWSL embarks on its 14th season with returning stars and 2 new teams

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The NWSL embarks on its 14th season with returning stars and 2 new teams

2026-03-13 07:07 Last Updated At：07:31

With two of its big stars back, two new teams joining the fold and an expanded broadcast presence, the National Women's Soccer League is embarking on its 14th season hoping to benefit from the surge in the popularity of women’s sports and from a summer focused on soccer.

The season begins Friday with the Portland Thorns playing at the Washington Spirit, which has been billed as a showdown between Sophia Wilson and Trinity Rodman.

The two players — two-thirds of the Triple Espresso trio with Mallory Swanson that helped the United States win the gold medal at the Paris Olympics — give the league a boost with their star power.

Wilson, who plays for Portland, was on leave all last season for the birth of her daughter. She signed a one-year contract extension with the Thorns for the 2026 season.

Swanson, who plays for the Chicago Stars, is still working her way back from maternity leave but is expected to rejoin the club at some point this season.

Rodman re-signed with the Spirit after drawn-out contract negotiations that called into question the league's salary cap and resulted in a new “High Impact Player” policy.

Rodman's return was a win for the league, which saw some of its high-profile players, including Naomi Girma, Alyssa Thompson and Sam Coffey, depart last year for European clubs.

There were fears that the salary cap would prevent teams from retaining top players. The HIP rule allows teams to go $1 million over the cap to sign certain players.

The league had the option of raising the salary cap, which stands at $3.7 million for 2026, instead of adopting the more complicated rule. Commissioner Jessica Berman stood by the decision in her preseason remarks this week.

“The mechanism of the High Impact Player rule actually rewards or creates an incentive for clubs to not only go out and sign elite players, but it creates space within the salary cap to surround that player with other top talent,” Berman said.

The league welcomes two new teams this season, the Denver Summit and the Boston Legacy, bringing the NWSL to 16 teams.

Denver opens the season Saturday at Bay FC. The Summit announced that it has sold over 50,000 tickets for the team's home opener against the Spirit on March 28 at Empower Field at Mile High, home of the NFL’s Denver Broncos.

The Legacy opens Saturday at Gillette Stadium against defending NWSL champion Gotham FC. Halftime will feature a performance by hometown group New Kids on the Block.

The league has awarded a 17th expansion team to Atlanta to begin play in 2028. Berman announced this week that another expansion club for 2028 will be awarded later this season.

The NWSL’s broadcast partners include CBS, ESPN, Prime Video and Scripps-owned ION. The league expanded its media rights agreements last year, adding a new deal with Victory+ to air 57 games for free this season.

The league will also feature in ESPN's “Women's Sports Sundays” this summer.

“We will be working together with the WNBA to make sure that women's sports, and the NWSL and WNBA in particular, are showing up front and center to the way people think about and plan their weekend of sports content,” Berman said.

Berman said the league's viewership on traditional broadcast channels was up 20% last season, and up 30% on digital services.

The United States, Mexico and Canada are hosting the men's World Cup, soccer's premier tournament, this summer. The NWSL, which will pause play during a part of the tournament, faces logistical challenges in that two of its teams, the Seattle Reign and the Legacy, will be pushed out of home stadiums or otherwise impacted by the tournament.

The Reign will play three matches in Spokane, Washington, while the Legacy will play seven games in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

But the league also hopes to capitalize on the inevitable attention on soccer.

“I hope, when we look back on the season, that the challenges it created will dwarf in comparison to the opportunities it created because of the benefit and halo effect of the men's World Cup more broadly,” Berman said. “Our strategy around the summer of soccer is going to be a key area of focus for us.”

The Kansas City Current finished atop the standings in 2025 with a historic season and won the NWSL Shield, setting regular-season records for points (65), wins (21), home wins (11), road wins (10), shutouts (16) and fewest goals conceded (13).

Gotham FC, the eighth seed in the playoffs, eliminated Kansas City with a 2-1 quarterfinal victory. Gotham went on to defeat the Orlando Pride in the semifinals before a 1-0 victory over the Spirit for the NWSL title.

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Snow geese take off for the Arctic in mesmerizing sunrise display

KLEINFELTERSVILLE, Pa. (AP) — A few dozen birdwatchers gathered in the predawn darkness to wait for the moment when thousands of migrating snow geese stopped honking and preening to suddenly take flight from a Pennsylvania reservoir.

The mesmerizing display, about an hour after sunrise, was over almost as soon as it began. The birds circled a few times and then headed out to neighboring farm fields, seeking unharvested grains and other sustenance on their epic annual spring flight northward into New York state and Quebec.

The Pennsylvania reservoir was built a half-century ago to attract waterfowl and over the years the gaggle has grown. Pennsylvania Game Commission environmental education specialist Payton Miller described it as a raucous bird tornado that lifts off the water.

“All it takes is for me to come out here on a really nice morning where there’s a huge morning flight and I’m kind of reminded how awesome it is to see such a large number of such a beautiful bird,” Miller said. “I never get sick of it.”

Among those taking it all in was Adrian Binns, a safari guide from Paoli, Pennsylvania, who went to the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area for “the whole enjoyment of seeing something you don't see every day.”

Snow geese have been arriving in growing numbers at the 6,300-acre (25 square kilometers) Middle Creek property since the late 1990s. At this time of year, they have just spent months along the Atlantic coast, from New Jersey south to the Carolinas, with many of them overwintering on the Delmarva Peninsula that forms the Chesapeake Bay.

See the full AP photo gallery by photographer Robert F. Bukaty of snow geese at Middle Creek here.

They don’t stay long at Middle Creek — it’s just a way station on their journey to summer breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic and western Greenland. But for a few short weeks they are the main attraction at Middle Creek, which draws about 150,000 visitors annually — including about a thousand hunters.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission, which owns Middle Creek, says about 100,000 snow geese were roosting there on the busiest day last year, on par with recent peak activity but below the single-day record of about 200,000 on Feb. 21, 2018.

Snow geese are doing well, but their large numbers have come with a cost. According to a 2017 study published by Springer Nature, greater snow geese grew in population from about 3,000 in the early 20th century to some 700,000 by the 1990s. By some estimates, there are about a million of the birds now — along with maybe 10 million of lesser snow geese, which are smaller — that also breed in the Arctic.

The number of migrating tundra swans at Middle Creek, while far lower, has also increased over time, from a dozen or so in the mid-1970s to 5,000 or more in recent years. Middle Creek birders have also identified more than 280 bird species on the site, among them bald eagles, northern harriers, ospreys and owls.

As snow geese numbers have boomed in recent decades, wildlife officials in the U.S. and Canada have navigated a balancing act involving hunting regulations, concerns about crop damage, shifts in snow geese migration and changes to overwintering patterns. Environmental damage from overgrazing in the Arctic has led experts to conclude the birds are overabundant.

David M. Bird, a McGill University wildlife biology professor, described the population as “probably one of the biggest conservation problems facing wildlife biologists in North America today.” Snow geese feed by pulling up plants by the roots, which damages habitats for themselves, various birds and other kinds of wildlife.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission reported recently that avian influenza viruses, present in the state since 2022, continue to circulate among the state’s wild birds. The game agency asked for the public’s help in reporting sick or dead wild birds and reported that about 2,000 wild bird carcasses — mostly snow geese — had to be removed from a quarry a few miles north of Bethlehem in December and January.

Bird said that for nature lovers, snow geese can be a delight but for farmers, they're a pest. For hunters, they're food but for animal rights advocates, they're a species that needs protection, he said.

“But if you are a paid professional wildlife manager at a municipal, state or federal level whose challenging job is to try to please all of the aforementioned parties, then you will undoubtedly experience many sleepless nights in the fall when the geese arrive,” Bird said.