Steph Yang: Why I Joined the Club
Starting her journalism career in 2013 as a local beat writer for the Boston Breakers, she has since covered the last three Women's World Cups and become a trusted authority on the National Women’s Soccer League and U.S. Women’s National Team.
I've been covering women's soccer in some form or fashion since about 2013. I say "about" because the beginning is a little blurry - were those initial blogs just a fun hobby, or do they count as the start of a career? Regardless, it's been a decade of writing stories about soccer, from humble Dilboy Stadium in Somerville, where the grounds crew would routinely yell at players not to step on the track in their cleats or empty anything but water into the turf, to the soaring stands of Wembley or Stadium Australia, watching international heavyweights duke it out in front of fifty, sixty, seventy thousand, and more.
In my 10 years of covering soccer and even more years simply being a fan in Boston, I have seen this game evolve, grow, wither, reinvent itself, and bloom again. I remember watching the 2003 Women's World Cup at Gillette Stadium and sharing a cab back from the commuter rail with one of the referees from that doubleheader; I remember going to Boston Breakers WPS games in Harvard Stadium and sitting by my lonesome because I was too shy to join the rowdy supporters group down the way; I remember getting a 2013 Breakers jersey signed by the team at a season-end event and thinking I'd treasure it when the team was 10 years old and the league was hopefully chugging along. I remember sitting on the Boston College Law campus in 2012 when WPS folded, venting my feelings on social media between classes because what else could I do?
Now with a new professional women's team ready to leave a new footprint in a new era of women's soccer, it felt like a chance to do some evolution and blooming of my own. When I got hired, I joked with former colleagues that after years of thinking "I could have run that media call better," the universe was about to humble me. I have no illusions that this won't be a nights-and-weekends kind of undertaking. When people talk about a labor of love, they sometimes don't put enough weight on the "labor" part of that equation. And when it comes to launching an expansion team - well, you're gonna be leaning on the "love" part a lot.
There's no getting away from the fact that Boston has had a rough start. As we go through the rebuilding process with the fan community, it's my hope that the "communication" part of my job will help bring Boston into a bright and kind and exciting inaugural 2026 season, starting with the many, many, many moving parts we hope to assemble in 2025, including key business and sporting hires, commercial partnerships, and stadium developments.
Just as I believed that there was something I could do by diving headfirst into the world of sports journalism, now I believe there's things I can do to build the game by working on the team side of the ecosystem. It's scary to leave behind something you've loved and done for years with, I hope, at least some modest amount of success. But it's exciting to think that I could help build something new that is cherished, something which endures.
Boston welcomed me as a shy college student from small town Louisiana who was too intimidated to so much as take the Red Line a few stops her first semester. Women's soccer welcomed me as a fan and as a writer, and as someone searching for connection and joy. Now I think I get to do some of the welcoming - welcome to the league, welcome to this team, welcome to an era of growth and change. I hope I run all the media calls as well as I thought I could.
