Inside the Orlando Pride’s rebirth: From counted out to never in doubt

The Orlando Pride’s training facility is low-key: a squat concrete building facing a series of fields that host youth soccer games on the weekend. Inside, the mazy hallways meander past offices, a weight room, a boot room, then medical. The place feels like it leans towards function over form; this is a building where work is done but it also feels like a place where people have fun.

The player lounge is divided between comfort and practicality: one side has a series of deep, squashy couches facing a projector with a giant board showing league standings next to it; behind that, a ping-pong table and then a seating area for team meals. A random life-sized cardboard cutout of a player leans humorously behind the couches.

The tranquility room is a small repurposed office with a mat for napping on the floor surrounded by twinkle lights and pink salt rock lamps. On one shelf sits a tiny zen garden dotted with leftover plastic babies from Mardi Gras king cakes. There are all sorts of homey touches, with rugs and decorations just down the hall from the distinct funk of cleats and sweaty bibs by the back exit to the fields.

Amidst this sense of good-natured purpose lie two of the weightiest words a team can carry: “undefeated season”.

That’s the Orlando Pride’s burden this year, but also their joy. After so many seasons as a struggling team, they now have the enviable task of doing something unprecedented.

The Orlando Pride joined NWSL as an expansion team in 2016, initially landing with a splash. They hired former USWNT head coach Tom Sermanni and signed superstar Alex Morgan, but finished ninth out of 10 teams that year.

Initially, it wasn’t a cause for total alarm; expansion teams are hard to launch regardless of the sport and NWSL is notoriously difficult on first-year clubs. In 2017, the team made the ultimate signing in bringing in Marta and they swung into third place, only to get knocked out of playoffs by that year’s eventual champion, the Portland Thorns.

“Up and down, up and down,” Marta said, ruefully describing her history with the Pride. She and several other players and staff sat down with in the days before they locked down the NWSL Shield to describe the team’s journey from count-them-out to never-in-doubt.

Since Marta’s first year with the Pride, the club has never finished higher than seventh while going through an ownership change and shuffling in and out a further five interim and full-time head coaches after Sermanni left in 2018.

In 2022, the team hit a major speedbump that would end up becoming an inflection point. Then-head coach Amanda Cromwell, hired ahead of that season after a decorated career coaching UCLA, was placed on administrative leave in June on the recommendation of a joint NWSL/NWSL Players Association investigation due to “alleged retaliation in violation of the NWSL Policy to Prevent and Eliminate Workplace Discrimination, Harassment, and Bullying.” Cromwell was ultimately dismissed in October.

In the meantime, assistant coach Seb Hines, who had no head-coaching experience at the time, took over as interim.

“I had a lot of questions because I wasn’t sure if I was ready,” Hines said. “I think it was probably not the worst time because the expectations were pretty low at that point as well. That kind of helped. Anything just to be competitive would have been a positive… It was like, ‘Can I get a group of players to play for each other?’ and that was our first task.”

Hines’ second-ever game in charge as interim was a crushing 6-0 loss to the Portland Thorns but from his perspective, it came at the right time.

“It was almost a blessing in disguise,” he said. “We had that mandatory break (an international break in June) after that and I remember speaking to the players after the game on the field, saying, ‘Listen, we have to change a lot of things here. We can’t continue to keep doing what we’re doing’.”

After that, the Pride put together a seven-game undefeated streak, although they weren’t able to hang on to the momentum through the end of the season. They ended up finishing 10th overall, 11 points out of playoff position, but the seeds of change had been planted.

Ahead of the 2023 season, the Pride made Hines’ position permanent, then hired former Houston Dash goalkeeper Haley Carter as their new general manager. She spent the first few months fact-finding, listening, figuring out who needed what and why. Where there were easy fixes, she fixed them, like changing from the oft-translucent white uniform shorts to black shorts. She found a group that was eager to move on from last year.

Ally Watt, who was traded to the Pride in 2022, insisted that there was never a point where she despaired of being stuck. “I always truly thought there was a way forward,” said Watt. “I just refused to believe that we’re just going to be a team that’s going to be at the bottom forever.”

Just because the players were eager for a change didn’t make it an easy process to do so.

Hines admitted to running a grueling preseason, wanting the players to push themselves and perhaps find some togetherness in mutual struggle. The season also started off in rough shape with four losses in a row, including a big 4-0 goal dump by the Thorns to kick things off.

“It was really difficult last year because we’re trying to find an identity,” said Watt. “It was coach Seb’s first year as our full head coach and so we’re all learning. We’re all trying to put pieces together.”

Those new players trying to adjust included No 3 overall draft pick Emily Sams and Brazil internationals Adriana and Rafaelle. The club also drafted Messiah Bright and Summer Yates, with the thought of investing young and developing the players through several seasons. At the same time, Marta was still recovering from a March 2022 ACL tear. Hines cultivated an underdog mindset in his group — respect is earned, not given, and no one respects us right now.

“One of the main things I take away from last year that Seb said a lot was that we have a chip on our shoulder, and then we have to change the narrative,” said Sams. “We have to prove every game that we’re a team that’s worth playing against, and that’s hard to play against.”

The players that Orlando picked were also brought on in the midst of a total culture overhaul. While Hines began figuring out the 4-2-3-1 formation he would end up using for most of the season, Carter began working on personnel.

She promoted Emma Nunan to director of team operations and player affairs — a crucial but unglamorous role in any front office, wrangling the paperwork and making the phone calls that actually keep the team functioning — and added more medical and performance staff under director Cory Price.

She and Hines worked out a ‘two yes, one no’ system in terms of players, requiring both of them to be on board; if one is not, the other is free to try to get them to say yes.

That seems to be a core overarching value at the Pride: everyone can disagree without giving offense and everyone can make their case for their ideas. It extends above Carter to the ownership — while she’s required to make a business case for all of her requests, thus far she’s never been denied something the team truly needs — and it trickles down to the team, where players are expected to take and give feedback in good faith.

“We just have this mutual respect that we can tell someone something’s not good enough, and they’re not going to go off and sulk,” said goalkeeper Anna Moorhouse, who signed with Orlando ahead of the 2022 season.

It helped that team captain and legendary No 10 Marta was onboard.

“She doesn’t take up all the space when you sit in a room,” said Carter. “No one person is more important than the club; she lives that. And I think other people around her feel that. They know if Marta is not bigger than the club, then none of us are bigger than the club.”

The other piece of it for Carter was actually the ownership style of the Wilf family, who took over the club in July of 2021. Despite the early stumbling block with Cromwell, Carter credited the Wilfs, who also own the Minnesota Vikings, with sitting at the right level of owner interest: invested and in regular communication, but not overly fiddly or micro-managey.

“They’re generational owners” she said. “They understand the ebb and flow of professional sports, that you’re not always going to have these outrageous seasons. You’re not always going to be on the top of the table, and so they think bigger picture.”

That refusal to panic or overcorrect was part of why, despite a 10th-place finish as interim in 2022, Hines ultimately got the permanent head coach job in 2023, becoming the NWSL’s first Black head coach, after what Carter called a “comprehensive process”. Stopping the personnel churn also gave Carter and Hines room to build a foundation and find consistency.

The Pride began picking up steam as the season went on, including a bit of revenge on Portland with a 3-1 home win in June. Hines had a flip chart showing how many more games they needed to win in order to make playoffs, turning each page in a countdown until it came to the last game of the season, at home against the Houston Dash.

Barring a huge upset by Angel City over the reigning champion Thorns to give them a better goal differential, the Pride were in with a win. They beat Houston 1-0.

But Angel City beat the Thorns 5-1. Orlando finished seventh overall, just six points off shield-winners San Diego Wave.

If there was one common thread going into 2024, it was that the Pride’s players never wanted to feel the way they felt last season.

“It was a weird feeling on the pitch after the Houston game last year,” said Moorhouse. “The news filtering through; it wasn’t a good feeling.”

“I was pissed off — and kept that feeling with me the whole offseason,” said defender Sams. “I think everyone still remembers that day where we won and it still wasn’t enough.”

Hines worked the chip-on-the-shoulder feeling again but didn’t need to scratch much below the surface to leverage it into something practical. Players were coming into preseason already fit. “They were itching to get back,” he said. “They didn’t want a long offseason because of how it ended.”

Hines lightened up on his team’s preseason load, seeing that the players were already mentally in the space he’d been chasing in 2022 when he asked them for two-a-days and just wanted them to at least compete. Now they were already doing all the work he could have asked of them without needing to be told. Finish this run, make that sprint — they had an appetite all their own.

He also gave more responsibility to some of the team’s unsung stalwarts: the likes of Kylie Strom, Haley McCutcheon, and Kerry Abello. These were the non-superstars who had been with the team for a few years and would be expected to take on heavy minutes, especially in another season interrupted by a major international tournament in the Olympics.

Hines pointed to the Sir Alex Ferguson era at Manchester United as one of his touchpoints.

“As much as I don’t like them,” he said with a humorous grimace, “you’ve got (David) Beckham and you’ve got (Ryan) Giggs, who’ve all come through that development all the way to the first team, and so that’s embedded in their DNA. That’s who they are. They care about the club and that’s what I kind of wanted with our players.

“It’s not just a paycheck. It’s not just, ‘I just turn up and I like football’. They want to play for the badge and so, having gone through that rough period of 2022, you guys run it now. You guys own it. You own the badge.”

Near the end of 2023, Carter had also brought on former Texas State University head coach Kat Conner as the team’s head of scouting and analytics, and beefed up the team’s talent identification. Conner helped Hines build positional profiles for their 2024 recruiting and the team made their most pivotal signing yet in young Zambian international Barbra Banda.

From the jump, it felt good. There was trial and error, for sure, as the Pride tried to evolve their identity. Banda wasn’t available immediately and though it seems obvious to play a center-forward in behind, it took a little bit of experimentation to figure out how they wanted to look while building in possession and how they wanted to break teams down directly.

But Watt said she felt it even watching an early preseason scrimmage. “I remember just sitting there,” she said. “I was like: ‘this is gonna be a good year’.

Watt has been through a few preseasons in her career and can tell the difference between a hot start and a cold one, and she could see the Pride finding connection quickly even with new personnel. All the culture-first work of 2023 had given them the foundations for the trust you need to rely on the player next to you.

Even Marta, who has seen more preseasons than some of her teammates have seen total matches, could feel it going into 2024.

“Not the way that the training is happening,” she said via a translator, “but the way that they give themselves to training. Especially because in the previous years, the team went through a lot, a lot of different situations, a lot of things that not only involved staff. So they were possibly not really able to focus totally on the soccer.”

Perhaps the most visible change for the Pride has been having one of the world’s best goalscorers available to them. Banda signed a four-year contract with the Pride in March, a transaction which included a whopping $740k transfer fee to bring her in from Shanghai Shengli. Apples-to-apples comparison is difficult when modeling how a player might import skills from one league into another, but Conner said they were about as sure on Banda as any scouting department could be about a player.

“We needed a striker who could score goals. I think that was a missing piece for us last year,” said Hines. “And you look back at the history, when you get a striker who’s got over 10 goals, then you put yourself in the playoff space.”

Banda has repaid the team’s faith in her handsomely with 13 goals in 19 games played so far, with a further six assists thrown in for good measure. Sometimes she sits high in a 4-2-3-1 and sometimes plays alongside Marta in a 4-4-2. She has a finisher’s instinct for where to be and when to be there, sometimes making it look pathetically easy to bury a header at the far post.

“I think one of the major shifts is just how the other team has to deal with Barbra,” said Sams. “From the start, we put a ball behind and I think it puts a little bit of fear in the other team. Already from the first kick, Barbra chases down the ball. We already have that (mentality of), ‘OK, we’re gonna crush these people’.”

Banda has brought out some of the best in Marta as well. Some of it is that Marta has fully healed from her ACL rehab; in 2023, despite being able to average a good 80 minutes per game, she only got on the scoresheet four times, all from penalties. Positionally, she was farther from the goal too, asked to drift into wider space at times. Now Marta spends more time higher on the field, a little bit freer to roam where she wants.

She initially joked about her resurgence. “To run after Barbra, you need to work hard,” she said. “You need to be in good shape.”

But there’s quite a bit of truth in that. When Orlando tries to bypass a back line or play in Banda, Marta is there with her, positioning herself off her fellow forward while defenders scramble to cover them both.

Carter said that the team’s GPS data shows Marta’s initial acceleration, that first three to five feet she uses to gain space, is still exceptional: another testament to the medical and performance department. She has eight goals in 20 games this season, only one of them a penalty, and she and Banda have combined for 50 per cent of the team’s goals so far.

“The way that we play now makes me feel a little bit better,” Marta said. “Because now, we have players who can hold the ball, who can make a little bit more trouble for the opponent in the last line, and then give us a little bit more time to step up.”

“Marta is playing like she’s 25,” said Abello. “None of us can keep up with her. I don’t know how she does it.”

Banda wasn’t the only area where Orlando wanted to look more robust. They recruited in the midfield, trading the Kansas City Current for Morgan Gautrat in January, signing Brazilian international Angelina, and drafting Cori Dyke and Ally Lemos.

On the other end of the field, Moorhouse, whose first shaky appearances in NWSL in 2022 were very much those of an understudy to Erin McLeod, found real starting goalkeeper moxie.

“I think I struggled a little bit with the pace of the league when I first got here,” Moorhouse said. “That was something that I wasn’t used to. England and France definitely is a lot slower. You got a lot more time on the ball.”

Moorhouse’s growing presence in goal has matched the team’s defensive improvements. The Pride are the stingiest defense in the league by far, only allowing 13 goals in 23 games; last season, they let in 28 for a -1 goal differential, which ultimately nixed their playoff ambitions.

This season, they’ve had to shift around some pieces while also only sporadically having Rafaelle available due to a foot injury, but no one seems to have balked at the changes. Sams went from left center-back through most of 2023 to right center-back for this season, Abello has played nearly every possible position on the left from back to front, Strom has had to move out wide from left center-back as needed, and Dyke has stepped up big time in the latter half of the season as a right-back after moving around the defense and midfield.

It helps that Hines was a defender himself and commits to plenty of functional work with the back line, helping them learn other teams’ tendencies and having them practice against the front lines they can expect each week. He’s worked on Moorhouse’s ability to interpret her defense, to be able to read the most likely save off of their setup. Players said that Hines always tries to include defensive moments in game footage, asking them to trace good attacks back to their origins with a block or an interception.

Hines wants players to be well-rounded, able to shift as needed, with scouting lead Conner also instructed to look for players who have experience in different positions — like Dyke, who played multiple positions in college — or who are open to learning a new spot.

“I think he has an unbelievable calm, composed mentality and communication, to where I think it’s very, very receptive from the players and from the staff,” said Conner. “I think the players really appreciate that composure. They respect it and they shine.”

“Sebastian gives the opportunity for everybody. He really trusts every single player,” said Marta.

None of this happens without the culture overhaul that Carter helped begin in 2023. It seems an obvious answer but when the Pride’s players were asked if, with this same roster with these same tactics but playing with their 2022 mentality, would they still be in the same position, the resounding answer was ‘of course not’.

Teams love to talk about ‘culture’ but it’s a nebulous concept that can be hard to implement in the day-to-day of a team’s operation.

“It’s not like it was this one revolutionary thing that’s happened or that we’ve done,” said Carter. “It’s taken a lot of time. I mean, it’s taken every day of the last 18 months to get us where we’re at.”

The players and staff have gone all-in on their collective culture, down to Carter insisting that she and Hines serve themselves last at team meals. The entire staff is present for training with players who aren’t dressing for games instead of leaving it to the side for an assistant to run. In recruiting, Conner knows to go beyond stats and game tape and to look for that culture fit as well.

“Are they communicating to their teammates? Are they complaining to their teammates? You’re looking for all those little nuances that you can pick out,” said Conner. “How is she in offseason training? How is she to the janitor? Does she help pick up cones or whatever?”

Players on different teams always talk amongst each other. Abello said that when she and her teammates ask how it’s going, not everyone remarks that the culture is good, let alone thriving.

“It’s hard to create an encouraging culture in this league because it is such an intense environment, and it is so competitive and cutthroat,” she said. “It’s different at every club and it was different for us two years ago… it takes a lot of intentionality, in my opinion, and Haley Carter really came in here and did that.”

“It’s polar opposite,” Englishwoman Moorhouse said of the vibe in 2024 versus the end of 2022. “I feel like everyone in this team has my back. If I have a problem — because I’m also far from home — I could just ask someone, and they’d be there, and it doesn’t matter what time that would be. Someone would show up.”

That kind of trust doesn’t come easy. Several players talked about the bonding experience of going through 2022 together with relatively new owners and a suspended coach, as well as a spotty record. But there was active participation beyond the circumstances happening to them. There’s a difference between trauma bonding or having a common problem versus finding, in Watt’s words, “100 per cent faith” in your teammates.

“You can’t underestimate the power of culture and attitude, and how people feel coming into the facility every day,” said Abello. “We always joke like we’re having a good time all the time, and we love to be here… There’s a lot of parts of the season and the job that aren’t glamorous or as enjoyable, but I think since we love to be around each other, it makes everything that much better. Without all of that, I don’t think we would be like the team that we are this year.”

‘We’re having a good time all the time’ has been a common team refrain but there’s also its corollary, which Sams said comes from Marta: at home, no one has fun but us.

The Pride are 9-0-3 at home. They’re highly aware of their undefeated season and at the same, time entirely tired of hearing about it. Watt covered both her ears with her hands at hearing the U-word. Moorhouse shrugged at it. Sams simply treated it as a fact.

“I don’t think we put too much emphasis on it, but we definitely acknowledge it,” Sams said. “It’s a reality, so why not own it? And it’s also an incredible achievement in this league.”

On the rainswept night that Orlando clinched the shield with their 2-0 defeat of the Washington Spirit, an emotional Marta ruminated after the game that perhaps no other team would ever recreate what the Pride have done so far, not even the Pride themselves.

“It’s unbelievable, something that, wow, I dream about,” she said. “But to be honest, I never believed that we’re going to have (a season) the way that we did, you know? I can tell you guys; I don’t think that’s going to happen again with this team or another team, I’m sorry. Especially in the way that we did it. It was incredible.”

“That’s why we need to be proud of the noise that we’ve created,” said Moorhouse. “Because before it was a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, they’re just getting lucky. They’re gonna fall off at some point or another.’ And now we’re here. This is our team. This is our culture.”

The Pride may yet lose a game in the regular season. They’re on the road at the Portland Thorns on Friday night (kick-off 10:00p.m. ET). Strom said that they would prefer to lose now than in the playoffs. Sams talked about how it might even be good for the team, to experience the process of picking themselves up and moving forward after a disappointment.

But they still want to break records. They want to accomplish the extraordinary. They want to have a good time, and for every team they play to have a really, really bad time.

Not one player used language that communicated a sense of entitlement but there is a feeling that the Pride do deserve this. It’s a little bit like the underlying promise of NWSL: in this league, your fortunes can change in a season. Anyone can win on any given day. If you’re willing to do the work, take care of all the little things, invest in the right people and keep a level head, this promise can be yours too.

The Pride have taken every opportunity possible, turned up every advantage from every corner, and their reward might just be to do something unrepeatable.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Orlando Pride, Soccer, NWSL

2024 The Athletic Media Company