Neither Alexander Straus nor Mark Parsons were around when Angel City played its first NWSL game in 2022. But they didn’t miss much; in four years the team had one winning season and made just one playoff appearance.
So Straus, in his first full season as coach, and Parsons, 15 months into his job as sporting director, decided to raze the club and its sad history and start over. And that break from the past couldn’t have been much clearer than it was in the opening game of the team’s fifth season Sunday, a 4-0 rout of the Chicago Stars.
“There is a little bit of a new beginning,” Straus said.
The performance was the most dominant in club history and the margin of victory matched Angel City’s largest ever. It was also the team’s first season-opening win since 2022.
“We’re a completely different organization than we were at the end of last year,” Parsons said.
For one thing the players are already having a good time, something that rarely happened the first four seasons. So if there was a black cloud hovering over the team when Straus and Parsons arrived, it has lifted — at least for one afternoon.
“It’s a lot different than last year,” said teenager Kennedy Fuller, who opened the scoring in the 33rd minute. “We’re just having fun. We’re expressing ourselves and we’re playing how we want to play and we’re doing what we’re able to do and what we’re good at.
“We’re OK to make mistakes. And so that really drives us to want to do better.”
Fuller said that new attitude is the product of having Straus for a full preseason camp. The coach arrived midway through last season and never had a chance to fully implement the aggressive, attacking style he wants to play. Those lessons took hold this winter.
The second big change was to the roster. Six of Sunday’s starters weren’t with Angel City at the start of last season and three of them — Evelyn Shores, Ary Borges and Maiara Niehues — scored. Borges also picked up her first Angel City assist.
“He kind of got his time to really structure us how he wanted. And he was able to bring in players that he thought were going to fit his style,” Fuller said of Straus. “With that, we were able to kind of mold into the team that he wants.
“Our meetings were very long and our trainings were very long, and so we were really able to focus on exactly what he wanted.”
Fuller’s goal was the only score in a first half Angel City dominated but the second half was just eight minutes old when Shores doubled the lead, heading in a Fuller corner for her second NWSL goal. Borges, a Brazilian international, made it 3-0 in the 66th minute, jumping in front of Chicago’s Maitane López to intercept a short goal kick by Alyssa Naeher, then beating the Stars‘ keeper cleanly with a left-footed shot from the center of the box.
Niehues, another Brazilian international, closed the scoring in the 70th minute on a right-footed shot from the center of the box. Iceland’s Sveindis Jonsdottir, got the assist on that goal. Of the four goal-scorers for Angel City, only Borges, who also had an assist in her Angel City debut, is older 21.
For Straus, part of the challenge now is convincing his young team that it can get better while also preparing it for the struggles that undoubtedly await.
“So we take this, we learn from the experience of what we were successful with today, and we keep that,” he said. “And when we try things that fail, we try again.
“From a coaching perspective, you have games like today and it’s great and it’s fantastic and it’s amazing. But I do exactly the same job when we when we lose. And [the] players do the same job. The outcome is something that sometimes is out of [our] control.”
Also likely to temper Straus’ excitement is that Sunday’s performance came against a team that finished last in the 14-team NWSL in 2025 and hasn’t had a winning record since 2022. Angel City’s long-suffering fans certainly still need to be convinced things have changed because the announced crowd of 16,813 on a beautiful sun-splashed afternoon at BMO Stadium was the smallest ever for an Angel City opener.
That was the only sour note of the day, though. In fact, the franchise got a second, arguably more important, victory in the 63rd minute when defender Savy King came off the bench to play for the first time since collapsing on the same field 10 months ago. King was rushed to a hospital and later underwent surgery to address a heart abnormality, which temporarily left her career in doubt.
Those doubts ended Sunday.
“The game is so much bigger than playing 90 minutes on the field,” Fuller said. “She came back and she was like, ‘I’m gonna play. And I’m gonna be better than I was.’
“To see her step on the field and have so much confidence, to be able to have that back in our environment, is so crucial. To be able to get that moment in front of her family, in front of her hometown, is so, so special.”
