Photo Credit: Seattle Reign FC/Jane Gershovich
It’s not ideal to play three home games 280 miles from your usual base, but the Seattle Reign made the most of their sojourn to Spokane. Across three games, the Reign earned seven of nine available points and scored five goals in the first two games.
“Spokane has treated us brilliantly,” Reign head coach Laura Harvey said after the final match in Spokane. “We’ve enjoyed it, enjoyed being here, but now we can sort of get back to our regular, scheduled routine a little bit, which will be really nice to get back and play at Lumen and sleep in our own beds for an extended period of time.”
The Reign opened their brief residency at ONE Spokane Stadium with a 3-0 win over Kansas City on March 25. They followed that up with a 2-1 victory over Racing Louisville on March 28. Then they closed it out with a scoreless draw against Denver Summit on April 4.
Perhaps the most impressive part of these results is that the Reign did it while heavily rotating the squad and dealing with injuries to key players. Two players filling in for injured teammates particularly stood out across the start of the season: defender Emily Mason and forward Maddie Mercado.
Mercado took over the starting mantle after Mia Fishel was injured in the team’s first game of the season. After Fishel was injured, Mercado started and played the full 90 minutes in the next four games. She scored twice in Spokane, once against Kansas City and again against Louisville.
“I think Maddie has been superb over the last four games. She’s put a shift in. She works really hard on both sides of the ball. She’s a threat in the box aerially and on the ground, and she holds up the ball really well,” Harvey praised after drawing Denver. “Tonight, she comes off, and at the end of the game, she’s just frustrated she didn’t take her chances, which I’ll take that all day, you know?”
Mason has started every regular season game so far at center back, filling in for young U.S. women’s national team defender Jordyn Bugg. This is just her second year as a professional. As a rookie, Mason only appeared in 12 total games, and only two of those were as a starter.
“I think [Mason] is a great player. I think that we’ve known that since she was here last year,” center back partner Phoebe McClernon said after the game against Denver. “I think it really speaks to her character, the way that she stepped into that role when JB went down. And I think that there’s nothing but good things that could come from multiple players being competitive in the same position. I think that’s like your dream situation on a team. So, regardless of who’s healthy or what that starting lineup looks like, I think that we’re all better because [Mason] is really good.”
Harvey outwardly hoped that the FIFA break would give her team some time to get healthy, promote competition within the team, and prevent individual players from being run into the ground. Sunday, they will return to National Women’s Soccer League play on Lumen’s temporary natural grass field, the installation of which for this summer’s World Cup necessitated the move to Eastern Washington.
As far as Spokane goes, their home away from home treated them well.
“The stadium was nice. I mean, a small, intimate stadium is always different from what we’re used to, because Lumen is obviously a bigger stadium. So I would say we had a pretty good time tonight,” defender Sofia Huerta said after downing the Current.
“Obviously, we’re not really at home, but the fans have been great,” midfielder Sam Meza said. “I think as a collective, we’ve taken the opportunity to still get the job done. Obviously, that’s super big. Ultimately, for us, we’re just trying to get three points, wherever it is.”
Despite thinking they would sell out the 5,000-seat stadium, attendance was relatively disappointing. The first game drew 3,023 on a Wednesday, the following Saturday saw 3,879 and the final game hosted 3,952 fans. The fans that did attend made themselves heard and reminded Harvey of the team’s early days back at Memorial Stadium.
“It was the first time I’d been to the stadium, so it had a little bit of a nostalgic feel to me. I know it’s new, but it being quite intimate, the field being a little smaller, I actually love that,” Harvey said.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Spokane isn’t really home.
“We’ve tried to do everything to make it feel like a home game, but really our schedule feels like it’s an away game, just because we’re in a hotel and all together and stuff,” Harvey said.
The team previously said this would not be a one-and-done, “‘Come be our fan,’ and then not provide ways for you to be our fan in the future.” The possibility of a future training camp or preseason games in the area were floated as options. Maybe the outlook on those possibilities will be even more positive now that the team found so much success in their short time there. Or the team could refocus its energy on attendance at Lumen. Either way, the Spokane sojourn is done for now and the Reign are ready for the rest of the season.
“We’re hard to beat. We’re creating chances when things aren’t going our way. We don’t buckle,” Harvey said of what her team has shown in its first five games. “I think we’ve shown ourselves in a way that we know we’re on a journey and we’re not exactly where we want to be, but you can see where we’re trying to go with everything that we’ve had to deal with.
“The injury situation has been big for us, but we’ve survived it and we’ve pushed through it, and we’ve been able to utilize players in ways that maybe we hadn’t planned, and they’ve really stood up and been counted, which has been amazing.”
