Beyond the World Cup: Sacramento women’s team plans move to Sac Republic’s field

When Jerry Zanelli – founder of the Women’s Premier Soccer League and a Sacramento resident – died last year, he bestowed the thing he prized the most to Jamie Howard-Levoy: the women’s soccer team he owned and coached, California Storm.

Howard-Levoy, then Zanelli’s assistant coach and now owner and head coach herself, felt the full weight of her new responsibilities. Under Zanelli, the Storm won three WPSL national championships. He’d coached current USNWT star Alex Morgan in 2010 when she was fresh out of college, and three 1999 World Cup stars – Brandi Chastain, Keri Sanchez and Sissi, who’d won the Golden Boot that year – signed with the team simultaneously in 2004. Sissi still plays for the team. The roster, Howard-Levoy said, is full of talent.

She and Zanelli had been a team unto themselves, opposites who balanced each other. As a coach, Zanelli favored a defensive approach; Howard-Levoy liked a “high-pressure system” to “keep the other team on their toes.” He was a staunch advocate for civil rights, a “hardcore Democrat” and a former lobbyist; she’s a Republican. He didn’t practice religion; she’s an active Christian.

“Times would happen when we’d win games and he’d look at me and I’d go, ‘Okay, you were right,’” Howard-Levoy recalled. “And then other times, when we lost, he’d look at me and I’d go, ‘Hm?’ and he’d go, ‘You were right.’”

For 10 years they’d been collaborators and friends. His death and bequeath of the team to her were bitter and sweet, respectively. But Howard-Levoy assumed her role with composure and focus. She recognized the team’s desire for more: More structure, more practices, more outreach, more resources. And she delivered: “Okay, let’s have these training practices, let’s have a season kickoff party, let’s get more involved in the community, let’s do these promo videos online and have more of a presence.”

The team rose to the new regimen with enthusiasm. Practices were better attended than ever, player Mikayla Reed said, and Howard-Levoy was careful to correlate practice time with playing time on the field. “Everything’s black and white this season: No favoritism, nothing in the past predicting the future .... no predetermined thoughts of how the season was going,” Reed said. “A fresh new slate, a fresh new coach.”

The team recently won the Pacnorth conference for the third time and had a perfect regular season of 11-0 and finally lost in the regional final to the Seattle Sounders.

The growth of women’s soccer leagues in the past few decades – the WPSL was established in 1997, and the National Women’s Soccer League in 2012 – has provided women with pathways to continue playing at a high level once they’ve left the educational institutions around which women’s soccer previously revolved. The newer league, the NWSL, is considered a higher level of soccer. Players routinely move up from the WPSL to the NWSL.

“The WPSL used to be the only way you could keep playing after college,” Reed said, “until the NWSL came into play.”

After devoting much of their lives to sport, players “don’t just to have to play a pick-up league at a local indoor place” anymore, Howard-Levoy said. Some of California Storm’s younger members – college students, fresh graduates, even a few high-schoolers – are trying to go professional.

Others – older women – are on the other side of their careers. Katie Hardeman was Howard-Levoy’s teammate at Sacramento State. Howard-Levoy, Hardeman and one other player are mothers whose children come to cheer on their games.

The WPSL now has 119 teams, but the NWSL has only nine. It’s a growing league.

“It’s still super young and still has so much more growth to do,” Reed said. “We need to get a professional team in California next,” she added later.

Howard-Levoy has hopes of taking California Storm to the NWSL, but she cited a series of material barriers they’d need to surmount in order to do so, sponsorship chief among them.

She echoed members of U.S. women’s national team – which recently won its fourth World Cup and is ranked as the best women’s soccer team worldwide – who have been vocal about the fact that lack of resources, not lack of ability or interest, keeps women’s soccer in the shadow of men’s soccer.

“There needs to be a major paradigm shift,” team captain and Golden Boot–winner Megan Rapinoe told ESPN. “Is there a gender pay gap? Yes. Have women historically been treated unequally? Yes. Have they been underinvested in? Yes. So what are we doing? You (the US Soccer Federation) have tons of money that you’re sitting on, you’re a non-profit, you have the opportunity to completely change the narrative and be a world leader in the way that women’s sports is viewed and handled.”

Howard-Levoy and her team watched the World Cup as avidly as the rest of the American public – but emphasized the need to spotlight women’s soccer and buttress year-round attendance and viewership, which is infamously weak.

“The main thing is keeping women’s soccer out there and not forgetting about it for the next four years until the next World Cup,” Howard-Levoy said.

Next season, California Storm will be sharing the pitch with the Sacramento Republic Football Club at Papa Murphy’s Park – a significant step up from the high school stadium where they used to play.

The stadium, Howad-Levoy said, will offer amenities that fans want – food and alcoholic drinks that can’t be sold at high schools – and help the team build a bigger fanbase. Just as importantly, it will offer an atmosphere befitting “the level these girls are actually playing at.”

“The WPSL is still growing,” Howard-Levoy said. “It’ll continue to grow.”