‘It’s going to be surreal’: Brittany Ratcliffe, Nicole Barnhart make homecomings as NWSL comes to Subaru Park

Brittany Ratcliffe grew up taking car rides over the Commodore Barry Bridge from her Williamstown home to youth club practices in Wayne, looking out the window at Subaru Park along the way. She was then, and still is, a Union fan.

But only now, in her ninth season as a pro, will the 30-year-old get to play a professional game at her hometown team’s soccer stadium.

It will happen Sunday, when Ratcliffe’s Washington Spirit face Mexico’s Chivas on the opening weekend of the NWSL’s summer tournament against Mexican clubs (4:30 p.m., CBS Sports’ Golazo Network streaming platform and TUDN), as the leagues pause their regular seasons while Olympic stars are away in France.

“It’s going to be a lot of emotions, excitement — it’s going to be surreal,” Ratcliffe said. “I don’t know what to expect, but I know it’s just going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

» READ MORE: Subaru Park will host two NWSL games in July, including one with champions Gotham FC

She’ll have a lot of friends and family in the stands, enough that she hasn’t been able to keep an official count.

“I’ve had people who I’ve gone to grade school and high school with who were like, ‘I bought a ticket. I’m going to see you,’ and I’m like, ‘Wow,’” Ratcliffe said. “I think the coolest part about coming back to Philly is that you realize how many people follow women’s sports, or follow you, or follow your team, and you don’t realize it until you have an opportunity to come back home.”

It will be the NWSL’s first visit to Subaru Park since Gotham brought a game here in the 2021 and 2022 seasons. Gotham will return here on July 28, “hosting” Washington in the tournament (6 p.m., Golazo Network). But one of Washington’s players played in Chester long before any of that.

Goalkeeper Nicole Barnhart of Gilbertsville, still at it at age 42, is in her 15th year of a career spanning two American pro leagues.

Thirteen years ago, Barnhart was part of the old Philadelphia Independence and played at the Union’s home — then called PPL Park — in the last season played by a local major pro women’s sports team. The Independence spent most of their two-year existence at West Chester and Widener’s small college football stadiums, and their only game at the region’s soccer stadium was a 2011 playoff game.

“A lot of really good memories,” Barnhart said, and that playoff game was one: a 2-0 shutout of the old MagicJack SC team with Abby Wambach, Megan Rapinoe, and Christen Press. “The opportunity to come back and be in front of friends, family, former teammates, back home and in a really incredible stadium, I think it’ll be fun.”

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One of those friends will be the Union’s lead video analyst, Jay Cooney. He was an assistant at Stanford when Barnhart played for the Cardinal and helped her become a volunteer assistant there when she graduated in 2004 and there was no U.S. pro league to play in.

Cooney was at Stanford for 11 years, then worked for the NWSL’s Sky Blue FC (Gotham FC’s former name), and has now been in the Union organization for nine years.

“He kind of took me under his wing, and mentored me on the coaching side,” Barnhart said. “It’s always fun to see him, but to know he’s in the stands able to support me and see me on the field, it means a lot for sure.”

The Union have home games on the Saturdays of these weekends, and Barnhart and Ratcliffe will be paying attention. Not just because it’s their hometown club, but because they know about Cavan Sullivan and all the other great young talents the Union’s academy has produced.

It’s normal these days to see elite young men’s soccer prospects bypass college, go into professional youth academies, and turn pro as teenagers. But in women’s soccer, it’s still standard practice for top players to go to college for a while, then reach the NWSL.

That tide is slowly starting to turn, as this year’s U.S. Olympic team shows. Lindsey Horan, Mallory Swanson, and Jaedyn Shaw turned pro without going to college; Trinity Rodman turned pro after her freshman season at Washington State was canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic; and Korbin Albert, 20, a rising star for the U.S. team and France’s Paris Saint-Germain, left Notre Dame after her sophomore campaign to turn pro with PSG.

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But NWSL teams still don’t have full-fledged youth academies like MLS teams do. It’s a hot topic around the league, and players from the Philly area know well what it could look like.

“It’s what gets the game to the next level,” said Barnhart, who also played 54 times for the U.S. national team. “I would hope everybody has the same agenda to just grow and develop players, to help generate and develop the best players in the world. And I think we fall behind a little bit, honestly, in this country because we don’t have that system.”

It would take spending a lot of money to build the infrastructure and to ensure teenagers can develop in a safe environment. Barnhart hopes it happens, not just as a veteran player but as a leader of the NWSL Players Association.

“Obviously, it is a huge investment, but I think it’s the investment that is needed to kind of help jump this league to the next level, in all honesty,” she said.

As for having a Philadelphia NWSL team some day, talk of expansion here has gone quiet lately, with more attention on pushing for a WNBA team.

“I don’t doubt Philly can do it,” said Ratcliffe, who has played for six NWSL teams. “Philly is — everyone talks about it — the biggest sports city in the world. I think if they got a women’s team, they would support them, but it just takes a lot of work to market.”

» READ MORE: This Philly WNBA watch party wants to show that the city is more than ready for a team

The Spirit do tons of marketing, with ads across Washington’s subway system and impossible-to-miss billboards at Amtrak’s Union Station.

This region has long had lots of women’s soccer fans, as shown by attendances and TV ratings for U.S. national team games. The Independence drew well by their league’s standards, as did the Charge in their league two decades ago — with Ratcliffe in the stands to help.

“It’d be great for Philly to get a team one day, obviously, but the fact that the Spirit [are] able to come and play and grow the visibility of women soccer, I think it’s awesome,” she said.

When Ratcliffe said playing here will be “a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she quickly realized it shouldn’t have to be.

“I hope it happens again every year,” she said, as hopeful as all the other women’s soccer fans in town.

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