It took 11 seasons, but the Washington Spirit finally took some serious pride in their Pride Night.
Theme nights at Audi Field come and go, as they do at most stadiums. Fans who are particularly engrossed in the game, or who use halftime to buy a pupusa rather than watch the on-field festivities, might go home at full time without even knowing what the specific event was.
On June 3, being oblivious to the theme in place was impossible.
For one thing, it’s hard to even get into the stadium due to the lines the team’s Pride Night giveaway is attracting. Most nights, a table by Gate B has one or two fans grabbing an item funded by a sponsor and moving on.
On this night? Dozens are queued up to collect a full-sized Pride flag — these end up being ubiquitous throughout the stadium — before posing for selfies with their prize. A drag performer is belting out Tina Turner’s hits up at Gate A, and a table where fans can sign up for the Spirit Squadron supporters’ group is slammed. Kickoff is 45 minutes away, and people are beaming like the Spirit just walked off with a big win.
The vibe couldn’t be more different than in years past. Pride Night events have only rarely had official support from the team, and were held at distant, spartan venues or almost entirely spearheaded by fans themselves. The fact that 2022’s Pride Night was held at Segra Field (an exurban stadium that fans refer to as if it were an exorcised demon) rather than Audi Field in the District was just one point of contention on a long list.
“We have always had Pride,” Spirit Squadron vice president Meredith Bartley explained to Pro Soccer Wire. “It has just been small scale, what we could accomplish at the [Maryland Soccerplex] as a small supporters’ group, fighting incredible odds.”
“So to have this whole, entire — it’s festive. It’s awesome. People are grabbing flags, wearing them as capes, people are really into it. It feels incredible to have this, and we’ve come so far.”
In the NWSL’s early years, the Spirit — despite annual requests from fans and even players— never held a Pride event of any kind while its original owner Bill Lynch was the club’s controlling stakeholder. The team did hold military-themed nights, but otherwise steered clear of anything that could be construed as involving political opinions.
U.S. women’s national team stars Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger, who would later get married, manufactured moves away from the club. The team’s refusal to celebrate Pride was not the only reason to want out, but this particular issue seems high on their list. Krieger — a Virginia native and arguably the club’s most beloved player at the time of her departure — later told Power Plays that during her time with Washington, she “didn’t feel like I was playing for a club that really respected me and supported me and my lifestyle.”
In 2016, the Spirit hosted one of the most infamous nights in NWSL history. Lynch ordered staff to play the national anthem 25 minutes before kickoff to prevent Megan Rapinoe from having a platform to continue her support of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police violence against Black people nationwide. In discussing that choice with reporters, Rapinoe said she felt Lynch was homophobic, a charge Lynch denied.
Following a dismal 2018 season, Lynch sold most of his stake in the club to Steve Baldwin, but LGBTQ fans could be forgiven for seeing that as only the most modest step forward.
On one hand, Baldwin promised fans a Pride Night in a public statement within months of taking over as majority owner, and followed through in June 2019.
On the other, within weeks of taking over, Baldwin’s hand-picked head coach Richie Burke was accused of using homophobic language by a youth player he had previously coached. That accusation was followed by a second from a former D.C. United U-23 player. Burke would deny the claims, but the team never formally addressed the issue publicly at any point.
Adding to the distrust, Baldwin would spearhead a 2020 trip that saw him and several players go to Qatar for what the club called a “cultural exchange.” While Baldwin would defend the trip in an interview with The Athletic, the Spirit Squadron would issue a statement criticizing the trip, noting Qatar’s history of “government sanctioned intolerance and discrimination towards both women and the LGTBQ+ community.”
That rocky history played out amid the generally tough experience that came with being a Washington Spirit fan. Until a staggeringly unlikely run to win the 2021 NWSL championship, the club’s high-water mark was a heartbreaking loss on penalties in the 2016 final, and its lows included two of the worst seasons in American women’s soccer history. Even that 2021 triumph was inexorably linked to the abuse scandals that rocked the entire league that season, with the Spirit among the most directly involved after bombshell reports revealed abusive conduct from Burke and a hostile working environment linked to former team president Larry Best.
All of which is to say this year’s Pride Night comes with a mix of feelings around Audi Field. The joy is palpable, but for long-time fans, there is also relief, and a certain level of wariness.
It’s not hard to figure out why. The club’s checkered history off the field lends itself to skepticism, even as Michele Kang’s ownership has seen the club’s staff and resources grow in a way that makes a large-scale Pride Night celebration possible. It’s a huge step, but one step doesn’t heal the scars of a fraught history packed into just 11 years.
Even the positives are tangled within negatives. Pulling a trophy out of the wreckage of 2021 is a perfect example. The trade that got Krieger the escape from the club she needed was the first domino in a chain of events that eventually ended with the Spirit drafting Ashley Sanchez, an emerging USWNT star and fan favorite. Seemingly every facet of the club’s history is enmeshed.
“I think unfortunately that that is a part of the club’s history,” said Spirit defender Anna Heilferty, who despite being unavailable this season due to injury participated in the planning and promotion of the event. “I think a lot of what we’re doing moving forward is an emphasis on those areas that we’ve kind of maybe overlooked, or not necessarily valued how much impact it can have.”
That odyssey through more lows than highs explains the jubilant atmosphere being in place well before Trinity Rodman’s early goal, or what the team called the largest drag performance in NWSL history.
A drag queen/king performance at halftime will go down in Spirit history! pic.twitter.com/AGrAfKu0FI
— Washington Spirit (@WashSpirit) June 4, 2023
Drag was a particularly big point of emphasis for this year’s event, especially in the face of far-right protesters nationwide attempting to intimidate performers and attendees. Those protests may be less common in D.C. than in other parts of the country, but the Spirit still wanted to unabashedly embrace the idea.
With those realities in mind, the team’s president of business operations Emma May told Pro Soccer Wire “a considerable amount” of thought went into ensuring that Audi Field was truly a safe space on the night.
“We were proud of what we were going to put forward, and we also are aware of the environment that our world is currently in,” said May. “As an organization, we took additional steps to make sure that we had eyes and ears everywhere in the stadium, and that we were just kind of overtly on the look for anything that didn’t feel right.”
“Drag is flourishing in D.C., but only in the spaces that it’s really created for itself,” added Heilferty, who was done up in drag as part of the team and city’s joint promotional efforts. “It was so important to have [the team] create that safe space for drag to be celebrated, for the LGBTQ community to be celebrated, and I feel like that’s so rewarding.”
Who is ready for the LARGEST #Drag Halftime show in @NWSL herstory?
Join us for the #DistrictofPride Night Out with the @WashSpirit!#Pride2023 Tickets: https://t.co/JLLx4ywdWP
Proceeds benefit our #LGBTQIA sports and partners-@TeamDCSports and @ftsc_dc! pic.twitter.com/HS25xlnTT8
— Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs #DistrictofPride (@DCLGBTQ) May 29, 2023
Another key aspect of a Pride Night where fans felt truly seen and supported was the aforementioned flag giveaway. There’s no other way to put it: they’re big flags. With temperatures dipping lower than expected as the game wore on, many fans were literally wrapped in their Pride flags.
Event planning involves hammering out as many details as possible, but it also requires some agility when things change. For example, if you order what you think will be thousands of medium-sized flags for Pride Night, only to find a box full of much larger versions arriving for gameday.
For the Spirit, this was a happy accident, but it was one they had to consider from all angles.
“When I got there, and I saw them putting out the massive flags — this is hours and hours before the match — I was shocked, because I knew we were giving out flags, but I had no idea that we were giving out massive, real-size flags,” explained May. “We were not planning that. They were still [supposed] to be pretty big. They weren’t the dinky flags, right? But I did not think they were full size flags.”
May said the operations team had a quick meeting to discuss the possibility that people may be careless with the flags, either holding them up and blocking the view of the game for other fans, or by discarding with them due to their sheer size.
“What if people didn’t like them? What if they were too big, and people were putting them on the ground?” said May in summarizing that pre-game huddle. “That would have been just, it would have broken our hearts.”
The club decided to put its trust in the fans, and the result was Pride colors anywhere a person could look.
“We had no idea how loved they were going to be,” said May. “We certainly worked really hard to make sure that they were the most up-to-date flag, to include intersex, but we did not know. We were so thrilled, and of course now we’re like, ‘well now we can’t give away dinky small flags ever again.'”
All that said, the positivity of the team’s most successful Pride Night does not undo the decade that came before it. As Jim Ensor, a member of 202 Unique (a queer-centered supporters’ group for both the Spirit and D.C. United) told Pro Soccer Wire, there is still a lot of work to be done to rebuild trust.
“You have to remember that at the end of the day, it was just one night, and it was just one event,” said Ensor. “I think everybody is coming at it from — and by everybody, I mean fan-wise and supporters’ group-wise — we’re coming in with a sense of, ‘okay, we’ll give you another shot.'”
“Because you’re trying to do the right thing here. And you’re communicating with us. You’re asking the right questions now. You’re listening. You’re delivering on some of the things that you said you do. So I think we come at it from ‘okay, we get another shot at this.'”
Bartley noted that the local issues with the Spirit are happening in the larger context of the NWSL, a league that has effectively started from zero after the devastating revelations in both the Yates report and the joint league/NWSL Players’ Association investigation.
“We are not there yet,” said Bartley. “There are still some stories that need to be told as far as the front office staff goes. But, we are a lot further along, and we can’t not celebrate just because there’s still work to do.”
May, who like many Spirit employees involved in the event only joined the club in recent months, acknowledged that there’s pressure from multiple angles to get it right.
“It is tricky, right? And so is pulling off massive drag shows. But here’s the thing: we don’t have an option to fail,” said May. “We are in a place in our organization, and the league, where we’ve got new people coming in every single match. We have got to make an amazing impression every single time, because truly, the business depends on it.”
While no one on any side was ready to say this job was done, that’s a level of urgency that has been hard to find with the Spirit, or within the NWSL writ large. Few things could underline the energy behind the Spirit’s shift towards embracing its LGBTQ fans than a current player on the team like Heilferty getting involved with the nitty-gritty of Pride Night.
It’s easy to do a quick video for social media or other de rigueur non-soccer promotional duties that players always have. It’s another to try drag make-up for the first time — Heilferty confessed that, as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy getting dressed up, she was surprised at how much fun she had with her “drag mother” Shi-Queeta Lee — or help paint a Spirit Squadron tifo that read “District of Pride.”
“The fans, the community around soccer, have been asking for these things. They’re passionate about these things,” said Heilferty. “They want to see their team investing in these topics. And I’m happy to show up in that way, with the time that I’m now given.”
Heilferty was quick to downplay her own role, crediting multiple club staffers and former Spirit midfielder Gaby Vincent (who now works as a Community Outreach Specialist for the D.C. Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs) for the event’s success. Still, as both a player on the team and a local who knows the team’s past, Heilferty could speak to how this Pride Night might make a longer-lasting impact.
“I think moving forward as a club, it’s a focus for us to return that love and create spaces where they feel safe,” said Heilferty. “I think playing a role in that, as much as I can as a player, was important to me.”
June 3 didn’t mark the first example of Pride being important to the culture around the Spirit, but it is possibly a much-needed turning point for fans who have felt like their care for the team isn’t fully reciprocated.
“I mean, we have always celebrated Pride because that is who we are,” said Bartley. “We celebrate all of our communities, but to have the team and have the front office behind it? It has been incredible, because it feels like my team loves me back.”
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