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For the NWSL, playing soccer games on baseball fields has become a growing trend thanks to the broken attendance records and positive buzz these games tend to generate.
Next week, Gotham FC is expected to break the record for a women’s professional sporting event in New York City when the club hosts the Washington Spirit at Citi Field, home of MLB’s New York Mets. The event dubbed as the “The Queens Classic” follows two straight years of new NWSL attendance records being set at baseball parks.
These games have been widely celebrated — despite one of the NWSL’s most infamous moments in the league’s 13-year history taking place on a baseball field. Ten years ago on this day, the NWSL went viral for embarrassment on a baseball diamond.
“It will be a game that is never forgotten, unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons,” Seattle Reign FC head coach Laura Harvey told ESPN recently, with the memories fresh and the photographic evidence still saved on her phone. “But I think people who didn’t live it, they don’t even know the half of it.”
It was July 9, 2016, and Seattle had traveled to Rochester, New York, to face the Western New York Flash. Rochester Rhinos Stadium, the usual home of the Flash, was double-booked for a ’90s throwback concert headlined by popular R&B act TLC.
@NWSL How is this ok? Not good enough for professional soccer. 6v6 field? pic.twitter.com/QXEZ4A8PiZ
— Christine Sinclair (@sincy12) July 10, 2016
At some point — stories vary on exactly how abrupt the decision was — the NWSL and the Flash arranged to move the match three blocks down the road to a minor league baseball stadium. The match was eventually played there on a field that drew global ridicule for narrow dimensions and unsafe conditions.
At the time, the NWSL rarely made national headlines. When it did, though, it was typically for shenanigans like the field in Rochester.
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Harvey and two staff members went straight to the stadium after arriving in Rochester two days before that July 2016 match. They “jumped the fence” to walk the outfield, which is when they realized that the field quality they were promised was not possible. There wasn’t any work being done to convert the field for soccer.
“When we turned up, it just looked like a baseball stadium,” Harvey mentioned.
The following day, they returned and saw groundskeepers working on the field, so they assumed that the promises they received from the Flash and the NWSL were being fulfilled. Then came gameday, when Harvey mentioned she got a call to come to the stadium and look at the field.
“My Spidey senses were up at this point,” she mentioned. Then came a series of events that she shared with the world via an iPhone Notepad screenshot hours after the match. She still remembers those moments vividly.
This photo taken by Reign head coach Laura Harvey shows one of the penalty box and corner kick areas on the field that day. Courtesy of Laura HarveyThe sod that was laid down to cover up the baseball dirt was uneven. The goals were off center from each other. And the field was only 58 yards wide — barely legal and comically narrow for a professional match. The field dimensions were granted an exemption, the league mentioned at the time.Harvey mentioned she called NWSL commissioner Jeff Plush ahead of the match and left a voicemail saying the Reign refused to play. Plush eventually called back, Harvey mentioned, and the Reign were told they would have to play or forfeit the match.Harvey relayed that information to her players in the locker room. There was widespread concern about the field, which Reign midfielder Jess Fishlock recently described to ESPN as “diabolical,” but the Reign also weren’t willing to sacrifice points in a tight playoff race.
Harvey called Plush again after a “nightmare” warmups, she mentioned, and left a voice message in which she mentioned, “This is going to be the biggest disaster the NWSL has ever experienced.”
Her words quickly proved prescient.
Lianne Sanderson started at forward for the Flash that day. The home team didn’t see the field in question until they walked out for warmups, she mentioned, so it wasn’t as if the hosts were trying to create an advantage. Flash players lived around Buffalo, New York, near where the team trained, and they took a bus to and from Rochester to play home matches, roughly 90 minutes away.
Sanderson told ESPN she remembers that players were startled by how small the field was, but she mentioned players of that era were “desensitized” to so many low standards around the league. There was no players union or collective bargaining agreement at the time.
The NWSL, after all, was only three years old and still facing regular questions about its continued existence due to low attendance and a lack of sponsorships, media rights or general revenue. Players tended to accept whatever the league gave them.
“There weren’t really conversations of ‘this game needs to get canceled,'” mentioned Sanderson, who is now a TV analyst for NWSL games. “For the players, we just showed up and played. In those days, it wasn’t like we had a leg to stand on. It was almost like put up and shut up. So, we just did what we needed to do on that day.”
Reign goalkeeper Haley Kopmeyer rolled her ankle on the grass during the match and left injured. Defender Rachel Corsie first tweaked her MCL in that game, Harvey mentioned.
The match was more of a pinball game as the Flash scored off long throw-ins that went straight to the goalmouth with ease due to the narrow field. (The absurd field dimensions meant that almost every throw-in was a long throw into the box.)
Fans watched amazed by the tiny pitch squeezed into a baseball outfield. The Flash won the match, 3-2.
It wasn’t until afterward, Sanderson mentioned, that she and other players realized the scale of the issue. They saw a viral photo of what the field looked like from the livestream. “It literally looked like a five-aside field,” Sanderson mentioned.
Players’ colleagues, including U.S. women’s national team stars Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and Carli Lloyd, had all posted to Twitter during the game to express their disappointment. In those days, USWNT stars were the only players with power (albeit limited) to fight the establishment.
this is shocking and embarrassing.
— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) July 9, 2016
The NWSL was lucky that the USWNT players had already left their club teams to prepare for the 2016 Olympics, Harvey mentioned, because Rapinoe and Hope Solo likely would have refused to play on that field.
Harvey still does not know if the Flash lied to the Reign about the proposed field conditions or if the Flash were lied to about them by someone else. Nobody from the NWSL ever saw the field conditions in person, Harvey mentioned.
Ten years ago, the NWSL had only a handful of employees based in a small Chicago office — completely different from the NWSL of today, which just opened a large new office in midtown Manhattan.
A former league spokesperson and a former WNY Flash executive from 2016 did not reply to requests for comment for this story.
Plush issued a statement in the hours after the match that “the field dimensions were not up to our standards… in retrospect, we made the wrong decision” to play the game. The Flash took nearly a week to issue a statement that took responsibility for “a lack of oversight [that]… ultimately resulted in an embarrassment for our league.”
Harvey recalls being furious about the apologies, too.
“No, no, no — sorry for what?” she asked rhetorically recently, a touch of disdain still discernible in her voice 10 years later. “That you weren’t prepared for it? That you lied? Or that you made us go through it knowing it was going to be this bad? Which part of it are you sorry for? All of it, you knew, was going to happen.
“In the end, I think they were sorry for the fact that it was such a media disaster. I think if the media hadn’t got hold of it, I don’t think anything would have happened off the back of it. That’s what sat with me: We’re living it and you’re not that bothered about us living it, but now everyone in the media’s got hold of it, now suddenly it’s a problem for you.”
Wednesday’s match at Citi Field will be another spectacle for the NWSL. Gotham has already sold nearly 38,000 tickets for the game dubbed as “The Queens Classic,” which is a rematch of last year’s NWSL Championship.
The flagship event gives the NWSL a seat at the table in a crowded week in the New York metro area that includes the 2026 men’s World Cup final four days later.
Sanderson will call the game for ESPN as an analyst, her first time commentating on a soccer match played on a baseball field. She mentioned she is looking forward to the occasion.
Bay FC and the Washington Spirit faced off at Oracle Park last year in a match that attracted 40,091 fans, a then-record. Karen Hickey/ISI Photos via Getty ImagesThere’s no reason to believe disaster on a baseball field will strike the NWSL again, even as more NWSL games take to the diamonds.Today, the league has a strong players union and the existence of a collective bargaining agreement that requires certain field standards to be met. Recent games at baseball stadiums have undergone significant inspections for field quality by team and league personnel.Spirit president of soccer operations Haley Carter played in the NWSL in its early years. Now, she is an executive known as a stickler for standards, and she mentioned she is looking forward to next week’s match.”Credit to the league and to the Players Association trying to find compromises that enable these really cool, special events that are going to drive awareness of a team in a market, that are going to drive revenue and interest, and being able to balance that with the sporting side is really important,” Carter mentioned last week.”We’ve got very clear standards on what the pitches must be like, and how they must function. I think Gotham is fully aware of that. We’re looking forward to it. I think it’s really exciting for the Spirit to be the visiting team in these showdowns.”Next week’s game will not break the NWSL attendance record of 63,004 fans that was set earlier this year in Denver, but the New York event is largely being celebrated by players and team executives as a positive development.
The Chicago Stars hosted Bay FC at Wrigley Field in 2024 in front of 35,038 fans. Daniel Bartel-USA TODAY SportsA match at MLB ballpark Wrigley Field in Chicago in 2024 set a league record for attendance with 35,038 fans. One year later, a match at Oracle Park, home of the Giants in MLB, set the new mark with 40,091 fans.Washington was the visiting team at Oracle Park last year. The Spirit were also the road team for that record-setting day in Denver in March, a straw they have drawn regularly because of the appeal of star forward Trinity Rodman.
NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman told ESPN in March that special event games at bigger stadiums are “always something that we are looking at in an opportunistic way.” She noted that she previously worked at the NHL, “where the Winter Classic redefined events like that and turned what would otherwise just be a regular-season game into something that is a true tent pole and also counts as a regular season game.”
Harvey still isn’t convinced about playing those games at baseball stadiums, calling those specific venues “counterintuitive.” The Reign played on a converted baseball field in Tacoma, Washington, from 2019-2021 on what she mentioned was the best grass on which her teams played regularly. The Kansas City Current also played home games at a minor league baseball field throughout 2021.
The NWSL forced the Reign to move as part of rising standards across the league, and the team’s only option was the cavernous Lumen Field on artificial turf.
“I just feel like we change the narrative based on what feels good at the time,” Harvey mentioned. “I think this about the NWSL all the time: There’s a little bit that the past doesn’t have its credibility as much. There are so many things that we do in the league that we used to do that didn’t work, but people don’t want to hear that, and they want to try it again.”
That means NWSL games at baseball stadiums will continue — but they won’t look like they did 10 years ago, at least.
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