How the Orlando Pride went from ‘butt of many jokes’ to NWSL champions

When did the Orlando Pride know? Let’s begin at the players-only meeting. Two dozen determined women gathered at their training facility this past winter; they talked through their shared identity and values, then sketched out their 2024 NWSL season. They went “game by game,” vice-captain Kylie Strom remembers, jotting down predictions on a piece of paper. History suggested they should land right around 30 points — and outside the playoffs, as Orlando had in all but one previous campaign.

Instead, Strom said, “I think we gave ourselves 54 points” — more than they’d earned in 2022 and 2023 combined.

They looked around the meeting room, acknowledging the apparent absurdity — but hung the piece of paper in their locker room anyway.

And nine months later, here they are, champions. They won the NWSL Shield with a league-record 60 points. Then they marched through the playoffs, and topped Washington 1-0 in Saturday’s title game.

And the piece of paper? Throughout the season, it remained hanging.

“So, yeah,” Strom told Yahoo Sports in an interview last month, “we believed we had something special from the beginning of this year. And it's cool to kinda see it come together.”

They knew, though, that what they throughout 2024 is “kind of insane,” as head coach Seb Hines said. They trampled through a league renowned for its parity. Its 2023 champ lost seven of 22 regular-season games. Its salary cap and dispersion of talent make Pride-like dominance “almost unheard of,” and an unbeaten season “almost impossible,” defender Carson Pickett, a nine-year NWSL veteran, said.

And for nearly a decade, it all seemed especially impossible in Orlando. “The Pride,” sporting director Haley Carter told Yahoo Sports, “has been the butt of many jokes for many years.” The club’s brief history was full of futility. It employed stars — Marta, Alex Morgan, Ali Krieger, Sydney Leroux — but often languished in the NWSL’s bottom three. It hadn’t reached the playoffs since 2017, the longest active drought in the league.

Then, suddenly, in 2024, it soared to the top of the table. It stormed to eight straight wins this past spring. Players clawed through 23 matches without a loss, rewriting record books as they went. They clinched the NWSL’s regular-season title — and lifted the Shield, their maiden trophy — with three weeks to spare.

Their run, Carter raved in a September interview, has been “extraordinary. It's truly remarkable. I've never seen anything like it.”

And perhaps the most remarkable part is that the humans behind it are, for the most part, the same ones who finished seventh just last season.

Pride's success built on culture, not roster overhaul

In soccer, and throughout sports, sudden turnarounds typically feature an overhaul. Visionary leaders arrive; stars follow; together, they reverse fortunes. In MLS, for example, the two premier teams, the LA Galaxy and Inter Miami, were led by a new general manager and by Lionel Messi. After finishing second-to-last in their conferences in 2023, each handed over 60% of their 2024 minutes to players who’ve joined since the start of last season.

The Pride, on the other hand, were largely driven by holdovers. Strom joined in 2021. Marta, their captain, has been around since 2017. Over 75% of their 2024 minutes were logged by players who also appeared in 2023. (The rest of the NWSL’s 2024 top four, by comparison, were all under 65%.)

Their protagonists weren’t individuals; they were, according to players and coaches, “mentality” and “culture,” “camaraderie” and “togetherness” and “belief.” Cultivating all of that, Carter said, is how she and Hines built arguably the NWSL’s best-ever team.

“Finding success in my position is much bigger than just going and signing players,” Carter explained. In a league so often plagued in the past by unsafe or unprofessional working conditions, “it really is about leading people, and understanding people, and creating an environment where people can have healthy interactions with each other,” Carter continued. “Where they enjoy coming to work, and enjoy working together.”

“You have to get those things right,” she reiterated. “If you don't get those things right … it doesn't matter who you sign.” If you do, on the other hand, “results are going to come.”

How Orlando transformed into a winner

The environment had long been lacking in Orlando. Instability and inconsistency had been “hard to navigate,” Strom said. “As a player, you just didn’t know what was expected of you.” In June 2022, Hines became the Pride’s fifth head coach in less than a year, including interims — after the previous head coach, Amanda Cromwell, was placed on administrative leave during an NWSL investigation. Cromwell’s contract was later terminated after the investigation found that she “engaged in retaliation” toward players who, she believed, had made or supported earlier allegations of “verbal abuse and improper favoritism.”

Hines took over, with an interim tag, a few days after a 5-0 loss in Houston. A couple weeks later, his second game in charge ended 6-0 at Portland. Afterward, on the field, he told players: “We need to change something.”

“One thing that needed to change,” he says now, “was the culture.”

For weeks and months, with team-bonding exercises and demanding training sessions — with the interim tag and then without it, as of November 2022 — Hines strove to change it. Carter, a former goalkeeper and former Marine with a wide range of assistant coaching experience, joined as the VP of soccer operations in January 2023, and joined the effort. For years, Hines said Sunday, “people didn’t want to come to the club, people had no hope with this club.” Together, he and Carter toiled to transform it into a caring, supporting, collaborative workplace.

And what, exactly, did that entail?

“Small things,” Carter said. Her simple example: “Getting rid of white shorts.”

In her first month on the job, she worked with the club’s merchandise director, Michelle Serowchak, to tweak the team’s secondary kit, swapping white shorts for black, due to period concerns. She called it “a small but extremely impactful change” that would foster comfort, confidence and trust among players.

In general, she and Hines seek input from players and coworkers. “I'm not a dictator,” Hines said. He and Carter involve players in decisions around training load. Some film sessions are “more of a conversation” than a lecture, Strom said.

“I've been a part of clubs where whatever the head coach says goes,” the 32-year-old defender explained. Here, in Orlando, Hines’ door and mind are always open.

Carter, meanwhile, focused on investing in the players as humans. She mentioned things like housing and food, but also seemingly extraneous offerings like financial literacy and professional networking opportunities. And, with backing from ownership, she beefed up the team’s staff across multiple departments. The players, for example, now have access to a masseuse almost every day. “The amount of massages we get in a week is incredible,” Pickett said.

Carter learned along the way that she was “different than other GMs and sporting directors.” Whereas many prioritize the identification and recruitment of players, “to be honest with you, the time that I spend on roster construction is maybe 20% of what I do,” Carter told Yahoo Sports.

She did, though, make a few impactful signings in 2024 — and none more so than Zambian striker Barbra Banda, for a transfer fee of $740,000, the second highest in women’s soccer history.

The fee, coupled with a four-year contract worth up to $2.1 million, represented an unprecedented outlay for the Pride. Lead owner Mark Wilf signed off on the deal, but would ask Carter: “Is she gonna be worth it?”

“Mark,” Carter would respond, “I have never been more sure of anything in my life. I am 100% positive that she will be worth it.”

And within a few games — Banda scored four goals in her first three starts — Wilf had seen enough to conclude: “Yeah, she was worth it.”

Pride title run fueled by grit, resilience

Banda, with 17 goals, helped fuel the Pride to the top of the table and through the playoffs. She tallied twice in a 4-1 quarterfinal demolition of Chicago and once in a 3-2 semifinal win over Kansas City. She scored the only goal of Saturday’s final — “a great moment for me,” she said postgame.

But the story of the game, and of the Pride’s near-unbeaten season, was what transpired on the other side of the ball.

The unbeaten run nearly ended before Banda even arrived, on the NWSL’s opening weekend. The Pride trailed Louisville 2-0 that day. They rallied to 2-1, but, in the 62nd minute, Strom received a red card.

And that — backs against the proverbial wall, down a goal and down a player — is when they drew on a core piece of their identity, something they’d discussed during preseason.

They fought back to draw 2-2 in Louisville. Six days later, at home against Angel City, Marta rescued a point with an 88th-minute equalizer. And the identity crystallized. Strom described it with three words: “Whatever it takes.”

They stormed through the league not because they always played exquisite soccer, and not because they stockpiled national team-caliber talent. They sustained the unbeaten run — until a rotated lineup lost in Portland, five days after Orlando had already clinched the Shield — because they would do whatever it takes to find late goals or, especially, to not concede them.

The players, Pickett said, “will die on that field before we get a goal scored on us, or before we lose a game.”

They’d sprint to close down a cross. They’d fling their body at a shot. They’d press, but also hustle back and scramble a ball clear from their own goal mouth.

They conceded only 13 goals in their first 23 games. And that, players and Hines say, is no coincidence. They drilled their rotations and communication in training, often with “unopposed shape work,” Strom said. They’d often pit defense vs. attack, sometimes 4-v-8, “numbers down” — and “Are you gonna use that as an excuse?” Hines asks. “Or are you gonna thrive in that moment?”

Hines, a former defender himself, has taught them to thrive, and instilled the mentality: “It’s gotta be painful [to concede].”

Strom confirmed: “We hate getting scored on.” No matter the time or place, training or playoffs, tight game or blowout, “it is the worst feeling.”

They clung to that identity after Banda’s first-half goal on Saturday. They hung on to win, and as she lifted the NWSL trophy, Marta, at 38, let loose: “I f***ing waited eight years for this moment,” she said.

It was an “incredible moment,” in part because she could share it with her mom, in part because of what she’d been through with the Pride.

“I've been in Orlando for so long,” she said postgame. “I see players come and leave. We had ups and downs. Some seasons we were OK but not good enough.” At times, she’d ask herself, Why stay?

But then she’d think: “I don't want to leave this place without doing something really big.”

And “tonight,” she said Saturday, "I had all the answers."