Lights Out In Bridgeview

Bridgeview is a southwest suburb of Chicago. It’s a municipality of modest size (about 17,500) and recent vintage (incorporated 1947). It’s got a thin, tall shape along the major urban / suburban artery Harlem Avenue. In recent years, at the main commercial intersection of Harlem and 87th Street, the area has undergone a lot of change. Billboards for Arabic-language lawyers prevail. Bridgeview and adjoining suburbs like Worth are like nowhere else in the state in their mix of people and what the streets look like.

At the north end of Bridgeview, up at 71st Street, there’s a huge parking lot, and across it, a huge stadium, feeling very out of place. Today it’s called SeatGeek Stadium, but it opened in 2006 as Toyota Park, a soccer-specific stadium build to host the Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer. The Fire began as secondary tenants of Soldier Field, got displaced when the storied venue underwent major renovations, and went looking for a place to have a stadium of their own. Bridgeview won the bid and built the stadium.

A decade later, the Chicago Red Stars of the National Women’s Soccer League became co-tenants at Toyota Park. The club has been around since 2009 and were a founding member of NWSL, which started play in 2013. The Red Stars had bounced around some suburban sites - including a previous short stint at Toyota Park - before signing an extended lease. It all made a lot of sense, and, one might like to believe, it all could have turned Bridgeview into an enduring local soccer mecca.

It didn’t turn out that way. The naming rights were sold to SeatGeek, a ticketing company, in 2018. A place called Toyota Park sounds like a big-time stadium; a place called SeatGeek Stadium sounds like a joke. The Fire, under new ownership, departed after the 2019 season, to return to Soldier Field. The Red Stars, with a lease through 2025, became the primary tenant, but of a stadium which had left the village of Bridgeview deeply in the hole. Then the pandemic hit and the 2020 season was essentially lost. By the time 2021 rolled around, you could tell that properly keeping the place up was less and less of a concern to the village.

We - my kid and I - are a very small part of all of this. We enter the picture on June 17, 2017, when the Red Stars played the Washington Spirit to a 1-1 draw. It was the first professional (outdoor) soccer match I’d ever been to. In the last nine years, I’ve been to 50 soccer matches, the vast majority of them in Bridgeview, almost all of them with my now 12 year old son. I’ve been to more events at Toyota Park / SeatGeek Stadium than any other facility - more than any concert hall, more than any other sports arena. But most likely, we won’t be back.

My interest in soccer increased a lot about 2014. I’d followed the World Cup some but that year I followed it more closely. And I decided I wanted to adopt an English Premier League team. A lot of this had to do with being very sick of American football and wanting to get into something new, and, I think, a lot of that had to do with having a baby around and in general feeling like it was a time of great change. Now, when I went about trying to adopt a Premier League team, I didn’t have strong preconceived notions, except that I didn’t want to pick one of the really big ones. I wanted someone a little more run of the mill. I picked recently promoted Leicester City, followed along with the one English football-crazed acquaintance I had, saw Leicester play horribly for a while and then pull off “the great escape” in 2015, and then, absurdly, inexplicably, stun the world and win the Premier League in 2016. All of this made soccer seem like a hell of a lot of fun!

Early summer 2016, when Copa America was in the U.S., a friend and I went to Soldier Field and saw Venezuela defeat Jamaica 1-0. It was a fabulous experience. Were some of the finer points of the game lost on me, a guy who had never played? Maybe, but one of the things which is so appealing about the sport is that you simply don’t need to know a lot to be able to understand a lot.

This is a very funny thing to write but in 2017 I somehow became alerted to a Groupon for a Red Stars match. Groupon was (and allegedly still is) this website where you could do things like spend $30 to get a $50 voucher at a restaurant, and I suspect I got something like two tickets for the price of one or something. Thing is, I don’t remember who I went with that first time… or the second time in September. Maybe I took my three year old but I don’t think so… I think he didn’t come with until the following May.

We signed D up for his first soccer experience when he was 4. We were still living in the city at the time. There’s a facility called the Fire Pitch kind of on the line between the north and northwest sides, a huge turf facility which in the winter has a huge inflatable roof over it. The program was called Little Sparks and it was for the littlest kids to get their first soccer exposure. He went through a lot of sessions there, I think across three different signups. I even remember one time we stayed afterwards and got food in the little restaurant / bar on side and watched the World Cup match between France and Argentina and played foosball at halftime. I think when he was at that age I was really in the thrall of embracing this exciting new sport and he was old enough to be able to share it with him and for whatever reason I didn’t feel like we were there yet with baseball.

Based on the photographic evidence, the first match I took him to was on April 21, 2018, when he was still just 4. The Red Stars and Sky Blue FC played out a 1-1 draw and he had a merry time with concessions. A better photo is from a month later as it gives you a feel for what it was like in the stands: not too full, but easy to see all of the action:

That day ended in a 2-2 draw against the Houston Dash, and then a week after that, we were at our first Fire match, a 3-2 loss to the Houston Dynamo. Over the summer, Toyota Park hosted matches in the She Believes Cup, and we got to see the US Women’s National Team defeat Brazil 4-1 (and also got to see Australia defeat Japan 2-0!) I think he really liked the crowds and he definitely liked the concessions and quite literally, with the women’s game, we were seeing the very best athletes in the world play.

The Red Stars’ roster in 2017 had numerous players who had been with the team for a while, including players with national team experience like Julie Ertz (nee Johnston) and Casey Krueger (nee Short), and of course the indomitable goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher. There was a feeling that this was a strong and coherent team with players who were back year after year. It was a very easy team to start following.

Before the 2018 season, the team traded their star striker Christen Press, which seemed strange to me at the time, but it wound up being a dynamic trade, because they got the incredible Australian striker Sam Kerr. Across 2018 and 2019 we were able to see who I insist was the absolute greatest striker in the world on our home team, often being fed by a huge fan favorite, Japanese World Cup winner Yuki Nagasato. As a fan you truly felt that the team might suddenly score at any moment.

What made it all even better is that we moved in 2019, from the northwest side of Chicago to Brookfield, 15 minutes away from Toyota Park. Proximity to the soccer action was not a motivator for the move, but I was excited to have it as an added benefit. We saw 5 Red Stars and 3 Fire matches in 2019, including the Red Stars win in the NWSL Cup semifinals, and many chicken tenders were consumed (by one of us). And then that fall, ensconced in our new home, having just started kindergarten, D was able to play on his first soccer team. I was an assistant coach for Coach Mark, who was maybe the best coach of little kids I’ve ever been around. There was a lot of excitement and wonder that year.

2020, well. 2020 was Covid. No youth soccer in the spring. No soccer matches to go to. When youth soccer started back up in the fall, everybody was still a little skittish about things, and the way it worked out was super awkward - we had one big team of about 18 boys and we would split the team in half and only play each other every week. I don’t think it was the greatest experience for the kids, even though they really needed to be able to run around, even for the ones who really loved soccer.

We sort of picked up where we left off with the 2021 NWSL season, though by then the Fire had moved to Soldier Field, and when we went to SeatGeek for the first match in 2021, you could just kind of tell the experience was a little off. On top of that, Sam Kerr had left for Chelsea in England. But the team was still good. After making it to the finals in 2019, they made it again in 2021. More on that in a bit.

Because of Covid, what would have been D’s first year of baseball got lost, and of course so too did most of the Major League Baseball season. When the abbreviated 60-game season came around, though, I found myself unexpectedly glued to the TV like I hadn’t been in a long time. There had been this period in 2018-19 when, I think, I was following soccer overall at least as closely as baseball, if not more so. One of the strange side effects of the lockdown, and maybe just because of the overall timing of it, is that my passion for baseball thoroughly reignited. I was really excited for the 2021 season when it came around, plus this was when D would finally get to play baseball - the main sport I played as a kid, the one I’ve always known best.

We didn’t actually go to a lot of games in 2021, but that’s when I feel like we got back into the habit, and the habit actually grew. That was also the first year where I feel like NWSL matches were relatively easy to get on TV. We made it out to a couple of White Sox games, a couple of Fire matches, a couple of Red Stars matches.

November rolled around, and the Red Stars were in the NWSL playoffs, and hosted Gotham in a quarterfinal. It was an unexpectedly cold day, and I had to buy us hoodies because we were freezing. The Red Stars won 1-0, and starting at the end of the match, a really crazy sequence started. I wrote about this at length at the time so here I’ll summarize that a photo of me and D wound up on the front page of a local paper, and then the Red Stars surprisingly made the NWSL Finals, and we went to Louisville for the championship game. Unfortunately they lost to Washington 2-1, but the whole experience was wonderful, and I really felt like it had cemented this deep fanship.

Here’s the photo from the Desplaines Valley News:

[Note to the reader: This is a good breakpoint if you want to stop and come back later.]

The fall of 2021, as it so happened, I wound up being head coach for D’s soccer team when the local AYSO pleaded for more head coaches. For me, at the time, it was a lot of fun, and I think he liked that I was coaching. The same team from the fall then plays together in the spring, and so we went into 2022 with me coaching soccer, and as an assistant coach in baseball, and things were a lot more normal by then with vaccines having come online. We got out to more baseball and soccer in 2022. We even got to hang out with Supernova sometimes!

What we didn’t realize though is that reaching the NWSL championship in 2021 was a different kind of inflection point.

Not long after that match, the team very surprisingly fired their head coach. What would come out over time is that the man was a bad dude, and the team ownership had handled the situation very poorly. Eventually this would lead to the sale of the team. (I’m not trying to gloss over all of this… it’s just difficult to explain everything that happened without it overwhelming my narrative. There’s plenty of information out there if you want to know more of the details, and/or I’m happy to answer what I can if you have questions.)

At first all of this seemed very unfortunate but didn’t have a super-obvious impact on the ability to be a fan of the team. The roster was largely the same in 2022 and the team was still good and matches were still at SeatGeek and we went to more that year than any other, plus other people we knew were starting to go. This was also a time where it seemed like NWSL and women’s soccer in general was on an upswing.

In the background, though, a number of things were going on. The fallout from the scandal associated with the previous head coach was slowly playing out. Many of the stalwarts of the team left after 2022. The stadium situation was slowly deteriorating. NWSL was still trying to gain footing, and while some things were going well (like finally having teams in California), other things were still a little off (like television inconsistency). Then at the end of the 2022 season the players called on the owner to sell.

The 2023 season thus opened in a precarious state. The roster had largely turned off. Ownership was clearly on the way out. The stadium situation wasn’t getting any better. And all of this absolutely impacted the fan experience. Marketing wasn’t being done well, the stadium wasn’t being well-kept, the whole operation just seemed to be running on inertia.

At home though our appetite for fandom hadn’t changed. We were going to more things than ever. We went to a Milwaukee Wave (indoor soccer) match that February. We went to our first baseball game in Milwaukee that April and saw Shohei Ohtani hit a home run which may still not have landed. We did go to four Red Stars matches in 2023, but they didn’t win any of them, and at some point D actually just said it wasn’t as much fun, and a lot of what he was getting at was how the crowds were so weak and the game day experience so bleak.

The Red Stars were sold in September 2023 to a group led by Laura Ricketts. On the surface this seemed like a great move - a large investor group that seemed willing to spend and build the team back up. Yes, they were still saddled with two years remaining on the lease at SeatGeek, but there was a lot of reason to believe that having a co-owner of the Cubs as the lead owner of the Red Stars would signal a resurgence.

At home, the reality I’ve tended to experience is that D is most interested in whatever sport he played last. This has meant baseball in the summer and soccer in the fall. I was still coaching soccer in 2023-24, and we had a good team that year, but I could tell that he was wasn’t quite as into it. He had had a rough year of baseball in 2023 but then had a good one in 2024, and in general it seemed like baseball was in the ascendence. And it was definitely more in the ascendence for me, I was watching more ball than I had since I was a kid.

We were still going to Red Stars matches in 2024 - five in total - but to be honest, they were not like they used to be. The roster was in flux, there was something tentative about what ownership was doing, and the SeatGeek experience was bleak. The flipside was that we could always get good seats and we were kind of used to what to expect - I would usually eat before going there, because I knew how awful the concessions had become.

Then that fall something very confusing happened. Ownership announced a rebranding, changing the name of the team from Chicago Red Stars to Chicago Stars FC. There was no coherent explanation given. The crest was changed from something cool that oozed Chicago to something extremely generic. No other team out there is named Red Stars, but all sorts of teams in all sorts of sports are named Stars. To this day the rebranding seems like the biggest imaginable of own goals, and part of a pattern of ownership having absolutely no idea how to run a professional sports franchise. (You’ll notice as I continue that I still usually refer to the team as the Red Stars, because I’m stubborn.)

On a personal level, I was watching less soccer overall. We’d had some negative experiences going to Chicago Fire matches, and the Fire were just not a good team for several years besides. I wasn’t following Premier League as closely. Leicester had gone from a perpetual candidate to play in the European competitions to a disastrous collapse, getting relegated from the Premier League. And I stopped coaching at the end of the 2023-24 season. I felt like I was good at things like making sure everybody played equal time, but not great at helping the boys be better soccer players. They were at a point where they were good enough that it seemed to me that they needed coaches who knew the game better than I did. (I’ve been told I’m too harsh on myself here, and that’s probably true. But I was also burnt out from coaching soccer for so many years. I wanted to sit and watch my kid play for a change.)

Going into 2025, I was somehow even more into baseball. We had a free subscription to MLB.tv so I could watch almost every out of market game. We were going to numerous Brewers and White Sox games. In 2025, we also finally made it to Wrigley, and even went to a game in Boston. And I was really hopeful that this would be a big year for D for baseball as well. And, well, it wasn’t, but, it also sort of was. He didn’t really settle into the love of playing I hoped he would, but he did find an appreciation for going to games all over the place. (I’ve got more to write about all this for another time.)

Meanwhile D had experienced a down year of soccer in 2024-25. For the first time he was on a team with older kids, and the coach wasn’t that great. He didn’t even talk about wanting to go to soccer matches, and he was particularly uninterested in Red Stars matches. (He also did not approve of the different chicken tenders they had at one concessions stand. He really liked the old ones. They even got that wrong somehow.)

The Red Stars’ problems got worse in 2025. The new branding sucked, the roster construction was weird, another coach was let go, the face of the team was out for the season (Mallory Swanson had a baby last year), and the team struggled mightily as they were playing out the string of their last contractual year at SeatGeek. Halfway through the year they’d only won once, and not at all at home.

In 2024 the team had played a much hyped match at Wrigley Field and attracted over 30,000 fans - evidence that there was real interest and appetite for women’s soccer. In 2025, what they tried to hype was a game played at a temporary stadium in Evanston… not quite the same thing. Martin Stadium is where Northwestern plays soccer, and temporarily facilities had been put in place to allow the football team to play there for a couple of years while Ryan Field was being rebuilt. Given the impending contract expiration, it seemed clear that this match in Evanston was a test run for playing a full season there in 2026. And I have nothing against Evanston, but Bridgeview is a 15 minute drive, while Evanston is an hour.

The team eventually announced Evanston as their home for 2026, but with no plan for beyond that. Martin Stadium is necessarily temporary. The Chicago Fire are building their own new soccer-specific stadium due to open in 2028, but the Stars front office seems to absolutely refuse to consider playing there as a mere tenant. They want their own stadium like the KC Current have. But the Current stadium was privately funded, and this group is acting like they expect someone to build them a stadium, and that’s just not going to happen.

When I first thought about writing all of this, the idea of maintaining fandom was a huge part of what I wanted to get across. As I’ve written, I’ve found that this is a hard thing to explain, except in terms that things change, people changes, circumstances change. What I wanted to try and get at though was the idea that for a fan, there’s necessarily a connection with the idea of a team, something that’s more than the current roster, the history, the ownership group, whatever. It’s something more abstract but also more real.

I feel like I made a decision at some point to devote personal energy to being a fan of this team. I’ve been a sports fan for a long time, mind you, and I understand that a lot of things can test fandom. I grew up around long-suffering Cubs fans. As a White Sox fan, I recently experienced the nonsense of a 121-loss season. As a huge baseball fan, I am truly galled by how pathetically certain franchises seem to operate, notably the Pirates of recent years and the Marlins of forever.

All of that being said, it’s been sincerely difficult to maintain a sense of fan solidarity with franchise like Chicago Stars FC, where the stadium situation was so blah, where the ownership group is so incompetent, where almost the entire roster has rolled over multiple times (only Alyssa Naeher has somehow lasted through it all), where they’ve literally moved quite a bit further out, where they’ve even changed the name of the team to something generic and meaningless, more or less signaling that there’s little there to stay attached to.

I actually think that in these turbulent times in America, where so much of what matters is so easily uprooted and disregarded, that a sense of shared identity is as imporant as ever, and that that shared identity being in sports really does matter for social cohesion. For women’s teams where the roots are necessarily more shallow, maintaining those roots and building upon them seems especially important. I think this gets at much of my frustration with the course of this team. It wasn’t long ago that I would have said the two teams I follow most closely across all sports are the White Sox and the Red Stars. And I sincerely feel like the Stars front office doesn’t understand and doesn’t care. For me to be forced to argue that Jerry Reinsdorf and the White Sox are better at taking care of fans than some other team in Chicago is about as sad a statement as I can make.

On November 2, the Red Stars hosted Angel City (L.A.) in the last game of the season. Coming in, the only home match the team had won all year was the one in Evanston.

One ironic thing that happened some time in 2025 was that the village of Bridgeview had finally painted the water tower which is visible from almost every seat in the stadium. A lot of the mess that I’ve described above has to do with how much the stadium situation had fallen apart. Bridgeview never turned into a soccer mecca, and really never evolved past feeling like a scruffy outpost that didn’t even have restaurants to go to before or after matches. The rusty water tower had been emblematic of it all, and that they actually bothered to paint it in the end… <deep sigh>.

By coincidence, the Fire had played in Bridgeview the night before. When they moved back to Soldier Field, part of the agreement was that they couldn’t play within a week of a Bears game. That has mostly not been a problem, but when MLS playoffs rolled around, because the NFL schedule was already set, it meant that the Fire making the playoffs would almost certainly force them to play their biggest home match of the year in less-than-ideal circumstances. And, well, the less said about the match, the better. Philadelphia smoked the Fire, and by the end the match disintegrated as a substantial number of people in the crowd kept loudly using a homophobic slur.

I wound up in Bridgeview back to back nights then, with the awkwardness of the Fire match in my mind as we arrived for the Red Stars finale. It was a middling crowd - I think a fair number of people recognized this was the last game there and showed up for it, but it was also a chilly November night with two bad teams playing.

The home team was awful in the first half. It felt like the season in microcosm, few chances, sloppy play. They were down 1-0 at the half but it felt worse than that.

Something changed in the second half. The team brought energy to the pitch and started attacking like they hadn’t in the first half. Jameese Joseph, one of the few bright spots of the season, scored in the 49th minute, and they kept pressure on over the course of the half. There was a lot of injury stoppage, though, and the game slowed down again… until it got frantic in stoppage time. At the 98th minute, Ally Schlegel scored in what I remember as a frenetic sequence. But then Angel City went down the pitch, and after another frenetic sequence, the ball fell to former Red Star Christen Press in the box, who twisted, fired, and… got stoned by the GOAT, Alyssa Naeher.

Game, 2-1.

The only win all year in Bridgeview.

It felt like years earlier, when the Red Stars would rally at the end, which I saw happen several times. It didn’t feel like any sort of finality. Even walking to the car afterwards, what it felt like was belonging.

The new NWSL season is underway. As of the time of publishing, the Chicago Stars FC begin their home season tomorrow afternoon in Evanston. They’ve been going through a confusing situation where they tried to get approval to play at Ryan Field in 2027 but got unexpected pushback. They’ve since asked to play again at Martin Stadium in 2027, even though they’ve already said the facility isn’t up to professional standards. It’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s the ownership group which isn’t up to professional standards.

We expect to go to one or two matches in Evanston. Alyssa Naeher is still in goal. Mallory Swanson is back from maternity leave. There have been a number of puzzling personnel moves - the two leading goal scorers from 2025 were both just let go - but, well, it’s an entire team of stars, right? So something good can happen?

I hope they get it figured out. I hope they do get a stadium somehow, and it’s in a more convenient place than downtown Evanston, and they have decent chicken tenders, and we’ll be able to go sometimes.

I’m realistic though. I think the stadium situation will be rough for at least a couple more years. I think the difficulty in getting to Evanston and what I think will be continuing subpar gameday experiences will dissuade us from going too much. Frankly, given the hunger in other markets, I wouldn’t be too surprised if this ownership group bailed on the Chicago area altogether, and in a year or so we hear about the all-new Columbus Stars FC or Austin Stars FC.

However it goes, one thing I’m pretty sure about is that we won’t see the team back in Bridgeview again. Maybe there’ll be one of those random Fire matches that gets shoved over to Bridgeview in the years before their new stadium opens and we’ll go to one of those, but after what I saw with that at the end of last season, I kind of doubt that too.

I wanted to write this and end on something of an ambivalent note. I think that having a hard time understanding what that note was had kept me from finishing the piece for a couple of months.

What I had in mind was something which could celebrate the newfound stature of women’s sports in this country, while also lamenting that things haven’t really worked out the way a lot of people would have hoped. I don’t think I did a great job of the celebrating, so I wanted to add a little closer here about that. The NWSL isn’t at the level of prominence of the WNBA, but I see the leagues as more similar than dissimilar, both trying to break through noisy, complicated media congestion and more fully establish women’s sports, and while I think there have been a number of missteps (especially on the part of NWSL), I think we’re at a point where we should be talking about female athletes - and not just one or two - as some of the most popular, inspirational people going.

I’ve been fortunate to see all kinds of amazing athletes come through, both on the Red Stars and on opposing teams, and the two times I’ve seen the US Women’s National Team. These include legendary women like Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, and so many times, someone I truly think is one of the greatest inspirations I’ve ever seen, the singular force that is Alyssa Naeher. Watching her warm up is something I’ll never forget. I’ve seen so many wild saves I don’t even know how to describe them.

I guess I felt like I had unlocked something secret and wonderful when we first started going to these matches, and that more and more people would catch on, and… maybe this is what’s actually happened in places like Portland and Seattle where the Thorns and Reign draw much larger crowds. Maybe there was just always something about the fateful decision to build that stadium in Bridgeview which was going to hold back professional soccer in Chicago, for men and women alike.

And so I’m sad to have lost a lot of it. But I’m happy to have experienced everything I have, and especially happy that for most of those matches, my goofy kid was with me. So maybe I did find a more ambivalent way to close after all.

I actually think the Bridgeview experiment could have turned into a lot more. I can imagine it as a little mecca of soccer, Harlem Avenue transformed into more of a destination, the stadium having been kept up. Alas, they turned the lights off in Bridgeview after that last Red Stars match in November.