Houston Dash

The Houston Dash have one trophy to their name, and it came in a season with no crowd to see it. In the Fall Series of 2020, played without spectators as the NWSL worked around the pandemic, Houston beat the Chicago Red Stars 2-0 in the Challenge Cup final. Weeks earlier they had also reached the final of the NWSL Community Shield, only to be beaten by the Portland Thorns. The Challenge Cup remains the only silverware the club has won since it was founded on 11 December 2013; the NWSL Shield and the league championship final have both stayed out of reach.

Houston play at Shell Energy Stadium, which holds 20,656 and was known as BBVA Stadium for much of the Dash's history. The ground and the ownership are shared with the men's MLS side Houston Dynamo, and the connection runs into the colours too: orange, black and sky blue, unveiled at the press conference on 12 December 2013 that gave the team its name.

For most of the 2010s the play-offs were somewhere Houston watched rather than joined. That changed in 2022, when a fourth-place finish in the regular season sent the Dash into the post-season for the first time. Kansas City Current ended the run in the quarter-final, winning 2-1, but the appearance itself marked a shift for a club that had spent its first years simply trying to get out of the bottom half of the table.

None of that history carries the weight of the fixture with Dynamo's city rivals in Kansas City, whose own rise has made them the team Houston are most often measured against in the standings now, but the sharper needle for Houston fans still runs through Texas: nothing in the Dash's calendar draws a longer memory than the away days against Chicago, the club they beat for their only trophy.