Women’s soccer is coming to Breese Stevens Field next spring.
Big Top Sports, the company that owns the men’s professional soccer team Forward Madison FC, announced Saturday that it would field a team in the USL W League, a summer league for the country’s top women’s college soccer players, for the 2026 season.
“It’s long overdue,” said Big Top Sports Chief Operating Officer Conor Caloia. He said the company has planned to field a women’s team since Forward Madison first joined USL League One in 2019.
The company announced in 2023 that it had been granted a franchise in the new USL Superleague, a professional women’s soccer league that began play last fall. That would require significant improvements to the 98-year-old Breese Stevens Field.
“The facility just isn’t quite to the standard that needs to be to host a first division professional league in American soccer,” Caloia said. “We feel like the right league gets started with, and the right league to launch with is USL W League. It’s the best women’s amateur players across the country. The best college players come here in the summer months, May through July, and it’s a direct feeder to the (professional) National Women’s Soccer League and USL Super League.”
“We’re finally bringing another level of women’s soccer to Madison, but we’re not just adding a team, we’re expanding a community,” said April Kigeya, co-founder of the Forward Madison supporter’s group The Flock. “This is going to bring new faces, new voices and new energy to Breese that we’ve been longing for for such a long time.”
The team will play a 10-game season with five home games at Breese Stevens Field in downtown Madison. Current Forward Madison season ticket holders can now get a season ticket for the women’s team for $60.
The team will have its own name and identity, Caloia said, which will be determined in much the same way the name Forward Madison was chosen – through community engagement.
“The biggest lesson from launching Forward Madison is that everything has to be built by the community,” Caloia said. “The worst thing a sports team owner can do is pick the name, the logo, and the jerseys themselves. That should be done by the supporters and the community.”
“The difference is the community engagement,” Kigeya said. “Forward Madison said, ‘Here’s a team, but you get to name it, you pick the colors, you build the supporter group.’ It’s literally our team, and that makes all the difference.”
To that end, the company will soon begin the process of taking suggestions for names and allowing a fan vote to determine a few finalists.
Going pro still an option
Caloia said the amateur women’s team could still be a step toward bringing professional women’s soccer to Madison.
“In the last 60 or 90 days, there have been a few second division women’s leagues announced coming down the road,” he said. “And I think there could even be more of those coming. And so the landscape continues to change.”
The Women’s Premier Soccer League announced earlier this year that it intends to launch a second-division women’s professional league in 2026, and the first-division NWSL has applied to the United States Soccer Federation to launch a division two league of its own.
“The women’s supporters group felt strongly that … if we’re professional on the men’s side, they wanted to be professional on the women’s side, and we still have an interest in that long term,” Caloia said.
Either of those could be a place for a Madison women’s professional team if the first-division USL Super League remains out of reach.
Forward Madison recently launched youth programs for both boys and girls, and Caloia said the women’s team will be “interlocked” with the girls’ youth program.
Season ticket deposits and other information are available now at https://www.madisonwomenssoccer.com/.
