After five historic and record-setting seasons with Seattle Reign FC, Laura Harvey’s reign as head coach and general manager has come to an end.
“When Bill Predmore and I sat down after the season to talk about the future, I just wasn’t sure what I wanted — but I knew the club needed a decision about my plans. Given my uncertainty it seemed best for all that I step away now to give the club a proper amount of time to hire my replacement,” said Laura Harvey. “I’m going to take a little bit of time to reflect and decide what the best next move is for me. I hope that an opportunity comes my way and I will decide if it is the right one. It’s been a tough decision to make but I feel like it’s the right one for me and for the club.”
Harvey was leaves behind a legacy built over five incredible seasons in Seattle. Finishing with a regular-season record of 51 wins, 33 losses and 26 draws with the club, Harvey led Reign FC to consecutive NWSL Shields and NWSL Championship matches. She remains the only NWSL head coach to win Coach of the Year multiple times and in back-to-back seasons. This season, Harvey became the first NWSL head coach to reach 100 matches coached, and 50 wins. She leaves Reign FC with the highest winning percentage of any NWSL head coach (.464) over 110 regular-season games.
“I am deeply appreciative of all Laura gave to our organization over the past five years. She is a brilliant coach, but more importantly, she is a tremendous individual — there is nobody I would have rather worked with to build the club,” said Reign FC owner Bill Predmore.
“I’m writing a book, I’m telling you right now,” said Harvey. “No one could have told me the things we’d go through. The good, bad, ugly, funny, hilarious things have happened in this club and within the group that we’ve had, no one could’ve written that.”
The road to all of those accolades began on December 21st, 2012, when Harvey was named the first head coach of Seattle Reign FC.
“I remember speaking to Bill on the phone, maybe the second day into the discussions of me maybe taking this job, and I could see that he was really driven,” said Harvey. “I really felt like we understood each other. We just had this shared vision of what Reign FC could look like. He wanted to build the best women’s football club in the world and I wanted to be a part of making that happen.”
Harvey had a strong resume from her time as the head coach at Arsenal, where she led the team to three-straight league titles, including 2011 when the Gunners also won the FA Women’s Cup and the FA WSL Continental Cup. She was named FA WSL Coach of the Year for her results that year.
Despite all those successes, Harvey felt the pressure to be someone she wasn’t at a club with that much history behind it. An opportunity to come to Seattle to build something from scratch was a huge motivator.
“When I was coaching at Arsenal, where I really felt like I had to be something I wasn’t at the start, and it didn’t work,” said Harvey. “I was at a club that had a lot of history that I knew I wasn’t going to emulate, no matter what I did. Coming somewhere that had no history, where we could create our own history, was quite exciting.”
As the majority of NWSL coaches at the beginning of the 2013 season had prior ties to U.S. Soccer or previous American women’s soccer leagues, Harvey was still a bit unknown to some in the states’ soccer scene. This group included a particular forward that would join the club midway through the 2013 season, Megan Rapinoe. Her skepticism was quickly extinguished.
“I realized she had a pretty good pedigree, and I was interested to see how she would manage a team, just because she was pretty young at the time,” said Rapinoe of her thoughts at the time of Harvey’s hiring. “That’s what turned out to be the most special thing about Laura, is her ability to be the manager and be the boss, but also I see her as a peer in a lot of ways. She’s able to really relate to us and have that other kind of relationship with us, not just a player-coach, but then when it comes time, we all have the utmost respect for her.”
The 2013 season would see the club face many challenges. The club finished with a 5–14–3 record overall, at one point losing nine straight matches, and was unable to earn a single shutout. Allowing 36 goals and scoring just 22, the NWSL was a brutal proving ground for Harvey and her young club.
“2013 was a huge learning curve for me, the club, and the league in terms of what this could be,” said Harvey. “Although on the field our results didn’t pan out like we wanted them to, it was clear we had something that was special that we could build on.”
Despite the results and disappointing end-of-season statistics, what was critical to Harvey was that the club was building something they believed in with a core group of players.
“Harvey has played a role in my career since she brought me here to Seattle,” said Seattle Reign FC midfielder Jess Fishlock. “It [2013] was a tossup between being absolutely amazing and absolutely brutal, but Harvey had me believing in her from game one.”
As Harvey and Reign FC began to prepare for the 2014 season, it was clear they had two key things figured out — the club’s culture and a core group of players to build around. Offseason arrived, and Harvey began to build, even though that process to build her 2014 squad was a difficult one.
“The trades are ruthless,” said Harvey. “They are really tough for me. Those conversations are the things that keep me up at night. Not the tactics, not the results. It’s those things that keep me up at night, and it’s maybe to my detriment.”
Many trades and many signings later, Reign FC had several new faces to join their Reign FC originals. This included the likes of forwards Nahomi Kawasumi and Beverly Yanez, midfielder Kim Little, and defender Kendall Fletcher, among many others.
Little, of course, would grab the headlines.
“In year one I remember very early on in the season thinking ‘if we could just get Kim out here it could change this team,’” said Harvey. “Bringing someone like her in just changed us into a true world-class team.”
“I obviously knew Laura previously from being at Arsenal,” said Little. “Seattle surpassed all my expectations. I came here because I really wanted to play in the United States and be involved in the best league in the world. The NWSL made me develop my game and make me do things quicker than I would’ve done.”
With the dust settled from wild offseason, Reign FC entered the 2014 season with their eyes locked on one goal: an NWSL Championship. Many knew the club would be much better than their 2013 edition, including one coach who told Equalizer Soccer at the time “if you ask me who has the best roster 1 through 20 it’s Seattle.”
The results from that roster would be unlike anything the NWSL had seen before. With a 16–2–6 record in the regular season, which is still tied for most wins in a single NWSL season, Reign FC delivered both offensively and defensively. The 2014 team holds all-time records for most goals scored in a season (50 goals / 2.08 per match), lowest goals against average in a season (.83 per game) and largest goal differential (+30). At one point Reign FC had strung together an unbeaten streak of 16 matches, which still stands as an NWSL record.
Reign FC was led offensively by Little. The midfielder scored a then-record 16 goals to help the team to an unbeaten home record of 8–0–2. Little was deservedly voted NWSL MVP for her remarkable first season with Seattle.
Seattle would clinch the NWSL Shield on July 20th, 2014 after a 4–1 victory over the Houston Dash, shoring up their home playoff semifinal with four regular-season games still to play. It was a show of regular-season dominance that has yet to be replicated in the NWSL, and a far cry from a 2013 season that saw the club take until June 26th to win their first-ever match.
Despite all the success in the regular season, the records were not enough. After a 2–1 victory over the Washington Spirit in the semi-final match, Reign FC fell in their first NWSL Championship appearance 2–1 against FC Kansas City.
Determination and resolve followed the team into the 2015 season. Returning most of their starting players and maintaining the core group from season one, the club was favored to retain the NWSL Shield and once again make the Championship match.
They would accomplish just that in a 2015 season that would have looked even more impressive had it not occurred after the stunning performance put on in 2014. Finishing 13–3–4 on the year, and extending their unbeaten streak at Memorial Stadium to 24 matches, Harvey led the squad back to the NWSL Championship and became the first and only coach to win back-to-back NWSL Coach of the Year honors.
While Reign FC would once again fall to FC Kansas City in the NWSL Championship match, as Harvey looks back on two of the most successful club seasons in NWSL history, she still feels a sense of success.
“I think what we did in 2014 and 2015 — and I’ll include Kansas City in this as well — changed the landscape of women’s soccer in this country from it just being about physicality and athleticism, to it being about having to know how to play,” said Harvey. “The players deserve huge credit for that because it was new, it was a different way of playing. I think we challenged everybody to be better, and I think they are now. I think the teams are better now because of what we, as a collective, did in those two years.”
After falling short of the ultimate goal two seasons in a row, to the same rival squad, the 2016 and 2017 seasons that followed would be filled with ever-increasing challenges to repeat the on-field success the club found in those magical seasons. Retirements, departures, new faces, and injuries all played roles in Reign FC’s painfully close playoff pushes that ultimately fell just short.
Even in those seasons, the club was still building on its history of setting records, and putting on incredible performances that left many in awe. In 2016, Reign FC set an NWSL record for consecutive shutouts with five. Those results were driven by standout performances from defenders Kendall Fletcher and 2016 NWSL Defender of the Year Lauren Barnes.
“It goes to show you how good Laura [Harvey] is with coaching and recruiting and making sure she’s getting the players that she wants on the field,” said Barnes. “I always say that’s why I’ve been so successful in the league, is because Laura actually lets me play the way I want to play, and has the confidence to let me do that.”
The 2017 season saw the re-emergence of Rapinoe as a superstar. In her best-ever season with the club, which saw her make the most starts of her NWSL career, Rapinoe seemingly put on a show every week, as she finished with 12 goals and was an NWSL MVP finalist.
Reign FC has continued to be a critical part of the women’s soccer landscape through the NWSL’s historic five seasons. What has allowed Reign FC to maintain that success over the years was the culture that Harvey has carefully laid as the foundation of the club.
“Over the years, the underlying thing that has been really important to me, has been that it’s not about me, or about individual player, it’s about the club,” said Harvey. “Even in 2014 and 2015 when we were super successful, outside of the club everyone would talk about the stars of the team, but inside it was never like that. It was always about us as a group, and the stuff we did away from the field, and the fun we had. Yeah, the games, the wins, and the successes will probably be remembered. But it’ll be all the things that no one sees that people will probably remember the most, which is our culture.”
As Harvey now steps away from Reign FC, the NWSL record books will carry memories of her work with the club for a long time to come. A coach who once felt the pressure to live up to the history of her club at Arsenal, she went on to write her own story and make history with Seattle Reign FC.
“Laura’s impact will be felt long after she departs, as she helped establish the enduring values that define what it means to be a part of Seattle Reign FC,” said Predmore. “Teresa and I will be her lifelong friends and fans, as well as her biggest advocates as she pursues her next opportunity.”
“To think from March of 2013 to present day how far this club has progressed — it’s a phenomenal transformation,” said Harvey. “Taking this job changed my life, for the better, for sure.”
