North Carolina Courage Women

WakeMed Soccer Park sits on the same complex the North Carolina Courage have called home since the franchise formed in Cary, and 10,000 seats — the number the ground reached after a 2012 expansion — has been enough to hold the crowds that turned out for the club's biggest nights. It is a stadium built for a soccer-first calendar, not one squeezed into a larger venue's off-dates, which suited a team that arrived with a claim to make quickly.

That claim came fast. Formed on 9 January 2017, the Courage took the NWSL Shield in their debut season, then kept it the following two years running, a run matched by back-to-back league championships in 2018 and 2019. The 2018 final brought a 3-0 win over Portland Thorns FC, and the same year the club beat all comers at the Women's International Champions Cup, the first team to hold that trophy in the women's game. The following year's Champions Cup ended differently — a 1-0 final loss to Lyon — a reminder of where the bar sat by then. A trophy from a leaner spell arrived in 2022, when the Courage won the NWSL Challenge Cup.

Jessica McDonald is the name attached to the club's high point. She was named MVP of that 2018 championship final, the game that announced a two-year-old club as the league's team to beat.