What makes a relay different from every other race is not how fast any single runner moves, but how deliberately they place the baton into the hand of the person after them.
Bay FC was founded by women who understood that distinction immensely. Founders who spent careers in a sport that asked everything of them, yet never lost sight of what it meant to pass the baton to the next generation to continue the race.
The First Leg
Four women poured themselves into soccer through World Cups, Olympics, and decades of competition at both the highest and most local levels. They played a sport that never stopped demanding more, and still found a way to shape what came after them.
After their own professional careers, Brandi Chastain, Leslie Osborne, Danielle Slaton, and Aly Wagner looked at the Bay Area and decided it deserved something built by players who understood, from the inside, what a professional women’s club could truly mean, with the infrastructure to outlast any single season.
Launching a new franchise in a competitive sports market was no small ask. However, they knew the region had been there before. The Bay Area CyberRays, the first-ever women’s professional soccer team in the Bay Area and the club where Chastain herself had played, won the inaugural WUSA Founders Cup in 2001— the first domestic women’s professional championship.
Photo By: John Todd
More than two decades passed before the four founders, all Santa Clara alums and three of them San Jose natives, set out to bring another professional women’s soccer club to the Bay Area, this time with the NWSL.
None of it was built for personal gain. These players already had their careers, their legacies, and their place in the history of soccer. Bay FC was built because they understood the most important thing a person can do after reaching the top of their field is to make sure the path behind them stays open for whoever is still climbing.
The Second Leg
What the founding four constructed made Bay FC a club capable of attracting players at the very top of the game.
Racheal Kundananji arrived from Madrid CFF in what was then the most expensive transfer signing in the history of women’s football, a record that sent a clear message about the kind of club Bay FC intended to be. Claire Hutton, a 2025 NWSL Best XI First Team selection and widely regarded as one of the best players in the league, joined in a transfer that ranks among the highest fees ever paid for a women’s player worldwide. These were not top-tier players who ended up at Bay FC by default. They are players who actively chose to be there.
Bay FC’s is firmly grounded in the Bay Area, but the vision extends well beyond it. Karlie Lema, a Bay Area native who played her college soccer at Cal Berkeley, represents the kind of homegrown talent the club was made to develop and retain. The addition of international players from England, Argentina, and Italy signals something that Bay FC has become a destination, not just a club.
The Third Leg
In 2025, Bay FC announced the launch of its Players of Tomorrow league, an all-girls soccer league in San Francisco, in partnership with Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco and Street Soccer USA, and supported by Visa. The league aims to increase access to soccer for elementary and middle school girls, directing resources into the neighborhoods that have been historically underrepresented in organized sports specifically for girls in the Mission, Excelsior, Tenderloin, Fillmore/Western Addition, and Bayview-Hunters Point.
The league is a structural response to an uneven distribution of opportunity that requires continued investment and attention. Girls who play sports are healthier, more confident, and more likely to succeed in the classroom, and yet in neighborhoods like these, too few have had easy access to play. The gap is not one of interest, but rather one of access.
Street Soccer USA, a national nonprofit that uses soccer as a tool to fight poverty and strengthen communities, is a key partner as the league expands across San Francisco. Visa, a Founding Partner of Bay FC, is supporting the initiative.
Bay FC is passing the baton to a generation waiting to hold it, and making sure, for the first time, they have everything they need to run.
The Final Leg – Bring the Bay
On March 21, Bay FC’s Women’s Empowerment Match at PayPal Park is the moment the relay becomes visible all at once. The founders who established the institution, the players who elevated it, and the girls across the Bay who are only beginning to understand what has been made possible for them.
The relay does not end on the pitch or through a growing all-girls’ league in San Francisco. It ends in the stands, with every woman in the Bay Area who looks at what is being built and decides it is worth showing up for.
The relay is in the hands of the Bay Area fans now.
Bring the Bay to Women’s Empowerment Match
