It’s just past 7 p.m. on Saturday, Sep. 13 at Inter&Co Stadium, and Bay FC has secured its first point against the reigning National Women’s Soccer League champions, Orlando Pride, with a hard-fought 1-1 draw. The team hasn’t reached the locker rooms yet, but they have to leave for the airport in 50 minutes for a 9 p.m. cross-country flight back to California. Fullback Caprice Dydasco, hair still wet from a postgame shower, realizes she forgot to put on moisturizer as she gets situated before th
Fullback Caprice Dydasco, hair still wet from a postgame shower, realizes she forgot to put on moisturizer as she gets situated before the camera in the makeshift press room. Her teammate Racheal Kundananji is all smiles, sitting to Dydasco’s left, still basking in the afterglow of her goal, which Dydasco assisted.
It has been a whirlwind road trip. The club opted to maximize the rest achieved when players sleep in their own beds and limited its stay in Florida to one night.
No commercial flight from any of the Bay Area airports to Orlando fit its parameters, so the team took advantage of the NWSL’s expanded charter flight allowance. Per the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players, each team is allowed six legs of chartered transport per season. Otherwise, they must fly commercial.
Bay FC invited The Athletic to join them on this road trip to get a closer look at the culture it is building.
I was struck by the self-assuredness of the claim — and by the timing of it.
On July 8, the NWSL completed its investigation of head coach Albertin Montoya after receiving reports of a toxic work environment from former players and staff. The audit cleared Montoya of any wrongdoing but found shortcomings in his communication style.
Ten days before I was scheduled to travel with the team, Nigerian striker Asisat Oshoala, one of the club’s splashiest signings when it acquired her from FC Barcelona ahead of its inaugural 2024 season, departed the club for Saudi Arabian side Al Hilal. A week after that, Bay FC announced that Montoya would step down from his position at the end of the season.
While Bay FC had just set a new NWSL attendance record when it drew 40,091 people to a match at Oracle Park, home of baseball’s San Francisco Giants, it also slid down the league table since the summer break, unable to break free from 12th place. Their most recent win was on June 7.
Some might say this was the worst possible time to invite a journalist along to nose around during a busy trip.
I was prepared for the team to renege, but they stood by their word. As I pulled up to Santa Clara Youth Soccer Park, a small complex nestled in the hulking shadow of Levi’s Stadium, where the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers play and the venue for this season’s Super Bowl, on the Thursday afternoon, I wondered whether the faith in everything eventually falling into place was one of the cornerstones of the culture Bay FC was so eager for me to observe.
Based on feedback from last season, Bay FC leadership learned the players preferred tight-turn road trips to lengthier ones that elongate time spent away from their own beds — even if it meant making moves akin to those viral travel stunts where backpackers challenge themselves to get from their front doors to the boarding gates in under an hour or plan daytrips several states over.
“There’s a lot of thought and process that goes into it, and there (was) a lot of communication at the beginning of the year,” Dydasco said. “Personally, I love it, because as long as we can keep our normal scheduled routine at home and fewer sleeps in a hotel, I’m all for it.”
Initially, this felt counterintuitive. Wouldn’t having more time to adjust to a new time zone—and climate, in the case of swapping California for balmy Orlando—be worth sacrificing a night at home when a game was on the line?
Not necessarily. According to the team, some studies suggest an elite athlete can maintain a high-level performance if the quality of sleep they get on the eve of competition is sub-par; let’s say that’s the night players spend in a hotel. But if they don’t rest well two nights out from gameday, they risk a dip in performance.
Bay FC is one of the few clubs in the NWSL striking this compromise right now, and it requires just as much logistical prowess as it does mental fortitude from the players.
At the airport in San Jose around 8:20 a.m. Friday, the players are buzzing—partly from caffeine. But it is still fairly early, and many of them spend the flight with their hoodies pulled up. Players sit in the front of the plane, with enough space to get a whole row to themselves if they choose, followed by coaches and training staff. Altogether, there are about 40 of us on the flight.
As the four-hour, fifty-three-minute journey wears on, a few get up to stretch their legs and visit teammates. Flight attendants come around often with snacks and drinks to supplement our boxed lunches of sandwiches, potato chips, and a dessert.
We land in Orlando just after 5 p.m. local time.
A team bus is parked beside the plane by the time we step out into the thick humidity. As the players pile aboard, a flurry of movement takes place behind them. Everybody else—including Montoya, assistant coaches Jason Goodson and Angela Salem and goalkeeper coach Kelly Miller—is unloading luggage and cargo from the belly of the aircraft, from players’ rollerboards to trunks carrying drone cameras for the data team, to cases of bottled water and snacks for the hotel.
In the spirit of being a thoughtful guest, I feel compelled to offer my help, but this choreography is so precise that I might create more problems than I would solve.
At the hotel, a table greets us before the entrance. White envelopes containing each player’s hotel key card are arranged carefully on a tablecloth—one room per player on Bay FC’s roadtrips, which is not the norm across the league. Players hardly break stride as they retrieve their luggage, which has been unloaded from the bus, locate their envelopes and go up to their rooms before dinner.
The lush foliage, pop art, and colorful furniture in the lobby—and the DJ presiding over the outdoor pool and bar—indicate that this is a hot spot. None of it seems to deter Bay FC.
At some point during the evening, the operations team transforms the adjoining conference rooms on one of the hotel floors into spaces for meals and treatment of the body and the mind. Traveling with this cohort are massage therapist Eva Popper and mental performance specialist Agustina De Giovanni, a former Olympic swimmer from Argentina who will guide players through a pregame visualization session Saturday morning.
In each of their three previous meetings with Orlando, Bay FC has lost by the same scoreline, 1-0, the past two to the same culprit, NWSL Championship MVP and Zambian international Barbra Banda, who sustained a season-ending hip injury last month.
Bay FC now stands its most promising chance yet to withstand the Pride; the energy of hope is palpable throughout the camp. Beyond the need to keep playoff hopes alive, it feels crucial not to leave Florida empty-handed, considering what the team lost earlier that week.
Montoya is doing his best to stay composed.
For everyone Bay FC’s head coach encounters, there is either a high five, a fist bump, or, for those he knows personally, a warm hug. Always with a smile and a sense of humor.
When we are introduced, he playfully wonders about the reason behind my visit. “It’s not like there’s much going on around here,” he says.
The 50-year-old has been part of the tapestry of Northern California’s soccer scene for decades, never more than a few degrees of separation from anyone who grew up playing in the region. After chatting for a few minutes, we discover that he and my youth club coach played together on an amateur team.
Montoya coached professional women’s soccer before Bay FC—first the star-studded FC Gold Pride in the late 2000s, and most recently as an interim with the Washington Spirit in 2022—but this was the first NWSL team he’s helped build from scratch. Whenever the topic of the team or his waning future with it arises, his eyes soften and glimmer. The decision to see out the season was part of a larger plan, according to Montoya, which was created when he took the job.
“This is a project that we agreed from the very beginning, in the first couple of years, to help this process start,” he said at the pregame press conference. “My goal was to help any way that I could with the organization, and we feel like we can still have a playoff spot here, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t change too much before the season is over because it was seven games ahead.”
The environment at Bay FC looked starkly different at the beginning of the season.
On March 7, the San Francisco Chronicle published the results of a two-month investigation into allegations of a toxic work culture at the club. According to the article, two former players and four former employees said they decided to leave the team specifically because of Montoya. One former player, who spoke with the paper anonymously, said Montoya punished players for speaking up about their mental health or would ignore players if he was unhappy with them.
Then in July, the results of one of the league’s biannual player surveys revealed that Bay FC was ranked 11th out of the 14 NWSL teams in overall player satisfaction. Its coaching staff placed 13th.
The same day the Chronicle report came out, a club official shared that the team had “implemented new procedures to improve our communications” in light of the survey results. By the next survey, Bay FC’s ranking improved to sixth.
Defender Maddie Moreau joined the team at the start of its first season as a trialist. She credits Montoya and his staff for giving her a shot.
“I’m gutted about Albertin (Montoya) leaving,” she said. “I didn’t have much interest (from other teams), but I really, really wanted to be here, and he gave me a chance. Throughout this whole time in these two years, it’s been challenging, no doubt. But he is a player’s coach and I’m going to grieve him leaving the club and hopefully maintain that relationship outside of it.”
Dydasco has pretty much seen it all in her 11 NWSL seasons. The 32-year-old referenced the unavoidable “outside noise” that surrounds professional sports and insisted it hadn’t wilted Bay FC’s resolve. “As sad as it sounds, I’ve gone through so many coaches,” she said. “They come and go, but we’re the players. We’re the people that can make these changes.”
They managed to pull off as much last season, sneaking into the playoffs after a bumpy start to NWSL life that brought seven defeats in the opening nine matches. “If we get this momentum like last year. Some of the girls experienced that. We had a good switch and change in the second half of the season, we ran with it,” Dydasco added.
The 26-strong roster includes 12 players in either their rookie or second seasons in the league, and is now also without the guidance of its two leaders, Abby Dahlkemper and Emily Menges—both centerback captains on maternity leave.
Moreau thinks the team’s culture is great. “I don’t know if I’m naive, it’s only my second year, but it feels like everyone who comes here should stay,” she said.
Other things are in flux, too, like the team’s short- and long-term base as it stretches its footprint across the Bay Area. This season and last have been centered in Santa Clara County, with practices at San Jose State University and games at PayPal Park, which they share with the San Jose Earthquakes of Major League Soccer. The stadium is located conveniently across the street from the San Jose International Airport.
Last week, Bay FC broke ground on a training facility on Treasure Island, just off the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland. The distance between Bay’s future training center and its current stadium is about 50 miles, an hour-plus commute each way. It feels inevitable that players and staff will need to relocate once the Treasure Island hub is complete, though nobody knows for sure just yet.
On the morning of the match, the team is given a two-hour window to come down to their conference room-turned-cafeteria for breakfast, a well-balanced mix of savory (scrambled eggs, baked turkey bacon, plenty of sliced avocado) and sweet (miniature Belgian waffles, an oatmeal station, assorted berries).
A majority of the players arrive in the final 15 minutes of the window. Some gather around one person’s laptop to watch an English Premier League match, while others keep to themselves with their AirPods in and heads down. As breakfast ends, I spot midfielder Tess Boade spreading bedsheets out in the foyer of the conference rooms, preparing for post-breakfast activations.
Bay FC security guard Moses Barrera, who works double duty for the 49ers, has also traveled with the team. He has set up a candy table, his gameday tradition for the players, off to the side in the meal room. It is a modest Halloween haul, complete with pink Starbursts arranged in a heart.
I arrive at the stadium hours later and learn 17 members of the operations staff had been on site since 11 a.m., six hours before kickoff, to unload equipment, steam the players’ kits and training shirts, arrange their in-stadium treatment room to their liking, and eventually set up the field for warmups.
In the visitors’ locker room, some of the players’ cubicles have been set up with specific comforts — a pack of Sour Patch Kids or a Ziploc bag with packets of electrolytes. These finer details simply couldn’t have been attended to in the early days of the league, when teams were lucky to bring along a handful of staff members to support the players and coach.
Nobody is under any illusions about the team’s ongoing rough patch. Their current 4-7-10 record has been most recently marked by a slight uptick with a pair of draws against two teams above the playoff line in the Pride and Gotham FC (1-1 at home on Monday), but Bay still sit 12th in the table, two spots and four points out of the basement. They set a high bar for themselves in that inaugural season last year, from reaching the playoffs to ranking fifth among 14 teams for highest attendance.
Some signs of a transition out of this sophomore slump have begun to emerge. With her goal versus Orlando, Kundananji, the only international player left on the roster, overtook Oshoala as the club’s top scorer. She followed that up with the goal against Gotham FC, making it nine goals across the two seasons. She is second only to Banda for shots taken in the league this season, but has converted just four so far. Unlocking her efficiency is vital, a fact Kundananji and her teammates all seem deeply aware of.
“I’m just hoping to score every chance and work on every mistake that I’m making, because hitting the post is my mistake, not the post’s mistake,” Kundananji said after the Orlando game. “Sometimes it’s frustrating to see the ball hitting the post, but my fellow players, also myself, kept on pushing me and (saying), ‘Let’s go, we can do it’, and that’s why I’m coming back, and coming back strong.”
Once the press conference wraps, the players and staff grab their postgame pizza, bruschetta and chicken wings before shuffling onto the bus, which drives straight up to the plane.
Again, the players hardly pause between departing the bus, whizzing through an extremely light-touch security, grabbing sandwiches and salad for the flight, and beginning the unglamorous work of contorting themselves into comfortable positions across the rows of seats for the long trip back home.
From a few, there is a glow of a Kindle or pre-downloaded show beaming from their phones, but most sleep, or attempt to.
We land at 11:47 p.m. Pacific Time, bleary-eyed and stiff as we descend our last set of airport steps this trip.
The players parked their cars at the airport, so close to the final position of the plane that they have all picked up their luggage and driven off before my Uber arrives. Even as someone whose second cross-country flight in as many days was not preceded by ninety-plus minutes of pro soccer, I am drained, physically and mentally. I am staying in one last hotel for the night.
As I settle into another unfamiliar mattress, it’s not lost on me how much more satisfying this late-night return would have been if I were back in my own bed.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Bay FC, NWSL, Women's Soccer
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Category: General Sports
