Jill Ellis still wants to win

The Wave’s performance is personal for Ellis. After leaving the U.S. women’s national team, she began advising billionaire investor Ron Burkle, who wanted to start a new NWSL club. As she listened to him describe the type of team he wanted to create, she realized she could be the one to do it.

“I was like, ‘Ron, you know, I didn’t go to Wharton,’” Ellis said, referring to the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. “But I think I can build a club, and I want to run the whole thing.”

So instead of pacing the sidelines and analyzing opponents for vulnerabilities, Ellis watches games from a suite, assessing attendance figures and weighing how much fans should pay for parking. Ellis has embraced the more logistical aspects of her new job, taking a crash course in terms like “dynamic pricing” and “digital marketing” and deciding whether the Wave’s uniform shorts should be pink or white (she chose pink). She proudly points out that it was her idea to have a wave motif run through the uniform numbers.

One thing Ellis didn’t have to learn, though: the key to the franchise’s overall success would be victories on the field. The first player she signed was someone she knew very well: Abby Dahlkemper, a defenseman whom Ellis recruited to the University of California, Los Angeles, coached at the 2019 World Cup and decided to build the Wave roster around. For The Wave’s second acquisition, Ellis teamed up with Alex Morgan, the face of American football. Neither of them needed much convincing.

“Anything Jill is involved in, there’s excellence in it,” Dahlkemper said.

When it came time for Ellis to find a manager, she was determined to hire a woman. Another club president told her there weren’t many good female coaches on the roster, prompting Ellis to tell him he had clearly been looking in the wrong places. She hired Casey Stoney, a former England player who was named the league’s coach of the year for the 2022 season.