Edgewater Castle

Edgewater Castle now step up to USL League Two for the men and the USL W League for the women, and they do it from a bigger address: Winnemac Stadium in Ravenswood, with room for 4,500. In 2025 the club played at Hoyne Field on the Loyola University Chicago campus, where about 200 could watch.

The step follows the best year the club has had. The men's first team won the ISSA Men's Open Cup, the first men's trophy the club has taken, and added the Midwest Premier League (MWPL) Heartland Division 2 title. They reached the final three years running: a 2–1 defeat to Czarni Jasło in 2023, a 0–2 loss to Wisloka Chicago in 2024, then a 2–1 win over FC Select. They won the United Women's Soccer (UWS) National Championship with a 2–0 victory over New England Mutiny, and took the UWS Midwest Conference and the ISSA Women's Open Cup (the Flo Dyson Cup) as well. Duygu Erdoğan leads the men this season and Emma Woodley the women.

Kellyn Acosta, the former USMNT midfielder, became one of more than 50 minority owners in 2025. Sega Coulibaly, Angelo Kelly and Thomas Amang have gone from the club to professional football in the USL and MLS. The club has no named derby, but it meets Chicago Dutch Lions, RKC Third Coast and Ukrainian Lions regularly. In 2025 the home shirt carried light blue hoops taken from Lake Michigan, though black and gold remain the colours, and the rook on the crest, drawn over a castle silhouette, gives the side its nickname, The Rooks.

James Kitia and Andrew Swanson started the club in 2017 as a registered non-profit, so that children and adults in Edgewater, Uptown, Rogers Park and Ravenswood, many of them from low-income, immigrant and refugee families, could play without paying. The club still runs on that principle, and the move to Winnemac Park puts the first team in the middle of those same neighbourhoods.