"Turnover is normal in this league, so we do not take continuity for granted." That line from Washington Spirit president of soccer operations Haley Carter says everything about what makes this team interesting — and why their consistency is harder to pull off than it looks.
The Spirit are in the top two of the NWSL table for the third consecutive season. In a league built on parity, wild upsets, and worst-to-first swings, that kind of sustained presence is genuinely rare. The North Carolina Courage finished first three seasons running from 2017 to 2019. Nobody else has really come close to that kind of table dominance since. Washington are quietly building toward something similar.
Doing it without the obvious pieces
What makes this season's run more impressive is who the Spirit are doing it without. Croix Bethune, the former NWSL Rookie of the Year, left for Kansas City. Goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury and defender Casey Krueger — both key figures in last season's championship run — are on maternity leave. Six more players are currently away at the Women's Africa Cup of Nations, representing Nigeria, Algeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso.
That's a lot of holes to paper over. Instead, Sandy MacIver stepped into goal and set a new club record with four consecutive clean sheets. She currently holds the fourth-best save percentage in the league. Meanwhile, 18-year-old Paraguayan rookie Claudia Martínez has three goals already, and Italian Sofia Cantore — the first from her country to play in the NWSL — has matched her four-goal tally from last season with games still to play.
Carter frames it less as crisis management and more as philosophy: "We try to be thoughtful about who joins the club. When we sign a player or hire on the sporting side, fit is one of the first things we look at, because we are trying to build an environment and not just a roster." The results back that up.
The Rodman factor — and the rule she created
Trinity Rodman sits at 13 goal contributions in 18 games. She's the engine. Her pressing, her ability to create space, and her link-up play with Cantore and Colombian midfielder Leicy Santos have been central to everything Washington do going forward. Interest from Europe was real enough that the NWSL created an entirely new salary structure around keeping her — the so-called "Rodman Rule" allows clubs to spend $1 million outside the standard salary cap for players meeting certain criteria. Owner Michele Kang backed the move, and the league followed.
Kang, currently embroiled in a $400 million lawsuit with John Textor, is also the owner of OL Lyonnais and London City Lionesses. According to Carter, that three-club network is now operational in a meaningful way — shared medical, performance, and technical infrastructure, plus increasingly unified software for talent identification and athlete wellness. "One of the most exciting parts of what we are building," Carter says, "is more structured than people might assume."
That cross-club collaboration could become a genuine competitive edge in recruitment and player development. It's also worth watching how that pipeline might influence Spirit roster decisions over the next few windows.
Gotham moved ahead of Washington into first place this past Sunday — and Gotham are one of three teams to beat the Spirit this season — so the final stretch of the regular season isn't settled. Twelve games remain. The playoffs are close enough that any defensive wobble or injury will shift the picture fast. But Washington have shown they can absorb disruption without losing structure. That's not a small thing in this league.
