Cleveland Force Women

Pittsburgh Riveters SC is the name that has come to matter most on the Cleveland Force Women's calendar. The two sides played each other for the first time on 16 May 2025, and the meeting quickly hardened into the club's sharpest rivalry, running alongside a wider conference contest with Steel City FC Women inside the USL W League's Great Forest Division. Pittsburgh got the better of the 2026 season, finishing above Force and leaving Cleveland second.

That runner-up finish is as close as the club has come to a trophy. Force entered the league as an expansion side and played their first season in 2023, finishing sixth in the Great Lakes Division. Fourth place followed a year later, and fourth again in 2025, once the division had been renamed Great Forest. Rob Miller has coached the side through that climb.

Home matches are played at Krenzler Field, on the Cleveland State University campus, which holds 1,680. The team plays in blue and yellow, and the Force name was not invented for this side: it belonged first to a Major Indoor Soccer League club that played Cleveland from 1978 to 1988, and the badge nods to that team as much as to the Force of Star Wars.

There was no women's side under that name until 2018, when three of the city's youth clubs — CSA Impact, Cleveland United and Internationals SC — merged to form Cleveland Force SC, the organisation the current team still plays under.