Hearts of Pine, fans confident new stadium will elevate women’s team
A rendering of Cassidy Point in Portland, where the Hearts of Pine soccer club is hoping to build a new stadium that will serve as the home for its men's and women's teams. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)
The Portland Hearts of Pine’s women’s soccer team hasn’t played a game yet, hasn’t unveiled a logo, hasn’t even been given an official name.
But the new team can already anticipate having an upgraded home in its third season, a move that those running the club, as well as the fans supporting it, hope will pay dividends.
The Hearts of Pine announced plans Tuesday to build a stadium in Cassidy Point for both the men’s team currently playing in its second USL League One season, and the women’s team that will begin play next spring and summer in the USL W.
The women’s team, which has begun referring to itself as USLW Maine, would play two years at the Hearts’ current home, Fitzpatrick Stadium, before moving into the West End facility in 2029.
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The new stadium, Hearts officials said, should help the women’s team in a number of ways. It can improve the team’s place and prominence in the soccer landscape. It can help with player recruitment, possibly pave the way for league promotion and continue building what early indicators show is a strong base of support.
As Hearts founder Gabe Hoffman-Johnson put it, the new stadium “certainly helps” a team that will be looking to make its mark in Portland’s busy sports scene.
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“When we started Hearts of Pine, the men’s club, (the goal was to) set a new benchmark for what lower division soccer could be,” he said. “Same goal on the women’s side. … The stadium’s a big piece of that, for both the men and the women.”
Hearts of Pine founder Gabe Hoffman-Johnson speaks Tuesday at Cassidy Point in Portland, where the soccer club is hoping to build a new stadium that will serve as the home for its men’s and women’s teams. The club aims to begin construction in 2027 and open the stadium in early 2029. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer) Purchase this image
The USL W is a summer preprofessional league, meaning that players are not paid, and the teams consist mostly of college and international players. Most play in facilities either Fitzpatrick’s size or smaller, or share them with other teams and other sports.
A new stadium so early in its existence could raise USLW Maine’s profile within the league, said Meg Linehan, who writes about women’s soccer for The Athletic.
“I think there is a certain level of jealousy it’s going to inspire,” she said. “It’s going to be a rare sort of thing. … This is more like a (USL) Super League setup than it is a W League.”
The stadium plans ramped up the excitement for fans in Maine already buzzing about the team’s arrival.
“Hearing the stadium might be (9,000) to 11,000, that puts us on the same level as some (National Women’s Soccer League) teams,” said Kara Peruccio, the president of the Lightkeepers Supporters Group, a fan club for the USLW Maine team that was started in February. The Lightkeepers, which has 64 paying members and 800 followers online, and another fan group, The Halyard, are both geared toward the women’s team.
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“For women’s soccer, it’s a really big statement that they’re expecting to fill those seats,” she said. “There’s clearly a demand for women’s soccer in this state.”
Ticket sales have shown as much. A total of 5,000 season-ticket deposits went on sale for the team on June 11 and sold out in less than an hour, with 3,000 being sold in the first five minutes.
One of the first in line with a deposit was Carmen Poff, a Portland resident who works in the merchandise tent during Hearts of Pine matches. She said that the new stadium, with its increased capacity, can build the fanbase by giving more people a chance to see the team.
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“Part of the interest is being able to go,” she said. “If you’re exclusive and you keep people out, you can’t continue to build that momentum. So having space for more and more people, that’s going to keep the momentum going. People aren’t going to sour on it. (They won’t say) ‘Well, that’s great, but I can’t afford it. That’s not for me. I can’t get tickets.'”
South Portland resident Philip Mathieu, another fan who made a deposit for season tickets, said he’s interested to see how the new stadium could help the team eventually expand beyond the USL W into professional leagues like the USL Super League or the National Women’s Soccer League.
“I don’t know if you could work in enough games to move the team from USL W to a topflight USL Super League team at Fitzpatrick, because you’d have to add a lot more games and it’s already a booked stadium,” he said. “(This) effectively creates a whole new range of opportunities, if there’s any interest in shifting leagues down the line.”
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Club President Kevin Schohl said the USL W is a “perfect fit” for the new team as it gets started, but that the new stadium would have the team set up well for a move to professional soccer in later years.
“The aspiration is so much more, and that’s very difficult to do at Fitzpatrick right now,” he said. “We were fortunate to get approval for the five to six games that we need for the next couple of years. But as we grow, if we were to have a professional women’s team, we would need so many more dates than that, and practice time and all those things.”
Whether the team plays in the USL W or any other league, Linehan said the stadium can improve its ability to draw and recruit players at a regional and national level.
“We’ve seen it at the highest levels in the NWSL that having control over your own facility, and having a facility like that, is a massive pull,” she said. “The women’s team being able to point to the stadium and say, ‘We’re going to be playing here,’ that’s going to be a draw from year one.”
Carla Tracy, a South Portland fan who also paid a deposit for season tickets, said the stadium is continuing the growing trend of bringing attention to women’s sports in Portland, citing the coming women’s sports bar, The Sports Bra, as another example.
“It’s just an experience that I can’t ever remember growing up, where you get to see women’s sports on this kind of stage, in your own community, being built,” she said. “It feels like a statement that … we are so serious about this.”
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Drew Bonifant covers sports for the Press Herald, with beats in high school football, basketball and baseball. He was previously part of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel sports team. A New Hampshire. More by Drew Bonifant
