Portland Hearts of Pine to add a women’s soccer team

The Portland Hearts of Pine, Maine’s USL males’s soccer membership, will quickly add a girls’s workforce.

The Hearts of Pine introduced Thursday the membership has secured the rights to a USL W League workforce that can kick off its inaugural season in Might 2027. The boys’s aspect has developed a cult following since its first season in 2025.

“Having a girls’s workforce has been a part of the plan since Day One,” Gabe Hoffman-Johnson, Hearts of Pine’s founder and chief group officer, stated in a launch. “That is about creating new methods for Mainers to attach with the game, new pathways for gamers to develop, and extra alternatives for girls and women throughout the state to see themselves represented on the pitch.”

The USL W League is a pre-professional league designed to bridge the hole between youth, faculty, {and professional} soccer, giving high-level collegiate gamers significant summer time competitors whereas sustaining their NCAA eligibility. The USL W League season runs from Might via July, and the membership expects the ladies’s workforce to play roughly six dwelling video games subsequent season.

The Portland workforce, for which a reputation and branding haven’t been introduced, will be part of the Northeast Division alongside fellow New England-area golf equipment AC Connecticut, Hartford Athletic, Hudson Valley Crusaders, Vermont Inexperienced FC, and New England Mutiny.

The membership held a collection of city halls in March of this 12 months to gauge curiosity and collect group enter about bringing a USL W League workforce to Portland.

Suggestions from the conferences indicated that supporters favor a powerful connection to the Hearts of Pine id, whereas additionally giving the ladies’s workforce “a definite voice, tradition, and sense of goal.”

The workforce will play at Fitzpatrick Stadium, the place the Hearts of Pine play their dwelling matches, pending Portland Metropolis Council approval of an modification to the membership’s lease settlement.

“Hearts of Pine has proven what’s doable when a membership is constructed with a deep dedication to its group, and we’re assured it would carry that very same goal and intention to the launch of its girls’s workforce,” stated Joel Nash, the senior vice chairman of USL Youth and Pre-Skilled.

The Hearts of Pine compete in USL League One, an expert league within the third tier of American soccer organized by the United Soccer League. The league attracts about 3,000 followers per sport, however sellouts are the norm in Portland. Almost 6,000 followers pack the stands every week, and the 4,000-plus season tickets for the inaugural season bought out.

The match-day expertise for the ladies’s aspect will replicate the festival-style setting that the Hearts have made their signature, that includes native companions and distributors and a welcoming supporter base. Season ticket deposits for the workforce’s inaugural season will go on sale June 11 at 12 p.m. at tickets.uslwmaine.com.

Curiosity in girls’s sports activities has surged throughout the nation lately, and Maine is not any exception, regardless of not being dwelling to any girls’s skilled groups. In March, The Sports activities Bra, a preferred sports activities bar devoted to exhibiting girls’s sports activities, introduced it will open a location in Portland to be referred to as The Sports activities Bra Maine (to keep away from confusion with the unique location in Portland, Ore.).

“The launch of a USL W League workforce builds on the unimaginable momentum round soccer in our state and creates a brand new platform for girls and women to guide and compete,” Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, stated within the launch. “Hearts of Pine has introduced Maine folks collectively in a robust means, and I’m excited to see that very same vitality assist develop the ladies’s sport right here in Maine.”