Wave GM says they approached 2025 as a building year, now they're chasing the NWSL Shield

New York Times

15 hours ago

For the past year, San Diego Wave general manager and sporting director Cami Levin Ashton has been commuting an hour and 20 minutes each way to work from Orange County, where she grew up and where her family still resides, to the team's offices 70 miles south.
Her move to Southern California from Kansas City last summer, where she was the KC Current's general manager, had been swift, and it helped to be closer to home as she made the transition. It also didn't hurt to lean on family to help out with her one-year-old child.
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Ashton Levin inherited a club in San Diego that was up against multiple challenges on and off the field, from the abrupt firing of former head coach Casey Stoney to the retirement of U.S. women's national team forward Alex Morgan.
Four months after she started, the Wave ushered in new ownership in the Levine Leichtman family, who completed their purchase of the team for a $120 million valuation last October.
Things only got busier in January. The Wave hired ex-Arsenal coach Jonas Eidevall, transferred defender Naomi Girma on a world record fee to Chelsea, sent attacking player Jaedyn Shaw to the North Carolina Courage and brought on international players including Kenza Dali of France, Chiamaka Okwuchukwu of Nigeria and Gia Corley of Germany. They also tapped into the top tier of the NCAA's talent offering in the NWSL's first offseason without a draft, bringing on Trinity Armstrong from the University of North Carolina, and signed goalkeeper DiDi Haračić from SoCal rival Angel City FC.
The newness was raw and plentiful heading into this season, and despite the Wave making history as the first club to reach the playoffs in its inaugural year back in 2022, expectations were reasonably low for a team that finished 10th last season under two interim head coaches.
'With so many new pieces, you just don't know how long that's going to take for it to come together, for them to blend and mesh and find this cohesion,' Levin Ashton told The Athletic, reflecting on the offseason four months later.
Yet as they approach their 11th match of the 2025 campaign, they sit second in the league table, four points behind the Current and a point above 2024 NWSL champions and finalists, the Orlando Pride and Washington Spirit, respectively. They've scored 21 goals by 13 different players, and on May 25, set a new club record for most goals scored in a single match with their 5-2 comeback win over the Courage.
'With what we were building this year, we really believed in the group of players that we had, both existing from last season and the pieces we added,' Levin Ashton told The Athletic. 'We also really believed in Jonas (Eidevall) and the staff that we brought on board to really build something special here.'
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One of the pillars of NWSL lore is the often abrasive introduction that managers from overseas experience during their first season in the league — and Eidevall, who arrived in San Diego after an underwhelming run with Arsenal, seemed especially primed for that quintessential rude awakening. But Levin Ashton said Eidevall's vision for the Wave throughout his interviews aligned with hers, sparking an interest in the possibility.
'In looking at building the roster, if you see the way that we're playing, and obviously in hiring Jonas as the head coach as well, we want to be a team that possesses the ball.' But, Levin Ashton added, 'it's possession with a purpose, because we're not just possessing to keep the ball, it's ultimately to win games. We really emphasize recruiting players that really fit into the way we want to play the game.'
Following that May 25 home victory over North Carolina, Eidevall, who was recently named NWSL Coach of the Month, spoke to the media about how the team learned from previous matches against NJ/NY Gotham FC and the Portland Thorns; both meetings exposed disparities between the degree to which they felt they controlled the game and the lack of goal-scoring opportunities they created.
That was their primary mandate going into their game against the Courage, and he attributed part of the players' execution of that to the work of the Wave's technical staff.
'A week like this, they've been incredibly challenging in being like, 'What if we do that? That can be a problem,'' he said, reiterating the ways they first tried to imagine potential risks in the game to mitigate them. 'It's long days, and we go over film over and over and over again, but we play out the situation, we create a lot of clarity, and I think there is no shortcut to that, so I'm very blessed with having a strong technical staff that challenges and (supports), and I think that helps us as well, being prepared for the games.'
That club-wide buy-in also required Levin Ashton to dress some of the wounds from the previous season that needed tending to. As is typical for front-office staff getting settled in at a new team, she had frank conversations with veterans about where and how the club could improve.
'It's not a surprise and not something that we're shy to talk about, the disappointment at the club last season after successful seasons,' she said, referring not only to the team's performance but the jolt of Stoney's dismissal, and the ongoing discrimination lawsuit filed by former club employees, alleging multiple claims of discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination and sexual harassment.
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Levin Ashton said that after a 'combination of my observations and my evaluations, and feedback I received from players, there was a need to raise some of the standards and that obviously comes with investment from ownership,' like upgrades to resources and facilities and expanding staff.
Since then, the Wave have added dedicated meal and meeting spaces to their training center, and rather than constantly catering, the club hired a chef and is building out a kitchen. They're not direct responses to the broader issues exposed by last season's challenges — Levin Ashton did not delve into the specifics of conversations related to other aspects of players' dissatisfaction with the club — but they're attempts at reestablishing goodwill off the field to ensure sustainability on it.
It helps that soon, Levin Ashton will be moving to San Diego, reducing her commute from almost 90 minutes to 10 minutes to the Wave's training center, which will be crucial soon as she's expecting another child. But her vision and expectations of the team, no matter the distance traveled, remain unchanged.
'We set out this season knowing that this was a building year,' she said. 'But I don't mean we were going into the season with no expectations or no goals. I said this to the team and the staff from day one: Our expectation as a club is to be playing in November and fighting for a championship.'