Gainbridge Super League season 2 starts Saturday

CAROLINA ASCENT

Carolina Ascent, which earned the Gainbridge Super League Supporters Shield in its inaugural season, opens its second season Aug. 30 at Fort Lauderdale.

The second season of the Gainbridge Super League takes flight on Saturday with four fixtures.

The campaign begins at 7 p.m. with Brooklyn FC hosting inaugural champion Tampa Bay Sun FC. A new addition to the league, which now has nine teams, is Sporting Jax, which will play its first match against DC Power in Jacksonville, Florida. Fort Lauderdale United FC against Lexington SC and Dallas Trinity vs. Spokane Zephyr FC leaves the Super League’s 2025 Players’ Shield winning Carolina Ascent as the odd team out on opening day. The Ascent will open at Fort Lauderdale on Aug.30 and the first home match is September 6 against Tampa Bay.

Launched as USL Super League last year, the second top-tier women’s professional league sanctioned by U.S. Soccer opened with a sellout crowd of 10,533 at Charlotte’s American Legion Memorial Stadium, where the Ascent downed DC Power 1-0 as Vicky Bruce scored the first goal in league history.

The Ascent went on a record tear of 11 games unbeaten but then lost three straight to close out the first half of the season 5-3-6. They went 8-3-3 in the second half to claim the best regular season record at 13-6-9). They lost to Fort Lauderdale in the semifinal. 

The Ascent are one of the more stable clubs in a league that will have five new coaches on the seven original teams. Philip Poole is back as Carolina’s head coach and general manager.

After signing a multi-year deal with the Ascent, 15-year-old Stella Spitzer is the league’s youngest player to sign a professional contract. Spitzer joined the Ascent in 2024 on an academy contract and made her debut in October. 

Twenty players transferred from one GSL club to another for the new season, including the 2024-25 Player of the Year Emina Ekic, who departed Spokane Zephyr FC to join Lexington SC in her home state.
Carolina’s Taylor Porter is one of four players to have competed every minute (2,520) in the regular season last year, along with Allison Pantuso (Lexington), Amber Wisner (Dallas), and 
Sarah Clark (Spokane).

As with last season, each team will play 28 games. Playing on the European schedule from late summer through spring, the Super League does include a winter break from Jan. 1.-Feb. 7, about three weeks shorter than last year’s break, which extended from Dec. 14 to Feb. 15. 

The record attendance from Carolina’s opening game might stand for some time without special circumstances since only two teams have stadiums larger than the Ascent. DC Power play at 20,000-seat Audi Field, the home of MLS side DC United and NWSL’s Washington Spirit, while Dallas competes in the Cotton Bowl, which can hold over 90,000 at full capacity.

Gainbridge, a digital platform that provides direct access to annuity products and has multiple sponsorships across men’s and women’s sports, is the first-ever entitlement partner of a professional soccer league in the United States. The first top-tier soccer league to be commercially branded was the English Premier League, which became known as the FA Carling Premiership at the start of the 1993-94 season. It later became Barclaycard Premier League, and then the Barclays Premier League until 2017 after more sponsorship streams were created and reorganized. 

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