Lexington SC 2, Dallas Trinity FC 0
The road ended in Kentucky. Dallas Trinity FC gave everything it had on Saturday night and ran into a Lexington SC side that was simply better, falling 2-0 in a USL Super League semifinal at Lexington SC Stadium. The Players’ Shield winners advance to the championship match. The Golden Girls go home.
Dallas closes its second consecutive season one round shy of the final. Lexington now waits to host either Sporting Club JAX or Carolina Ascent FC on Saturday, May 30, with the second semifinal still to come on Sunday in Jacksonville to decide it.
Nathan Thackeray went with the 4-2-3-1 that has been Dallas’s spring shape, with Tyler McCamey in goal behind a back four of Cyera Hintzen, Maya McCutcheon, Hannah Davison, and Samar Guidry. Sydney Cheesman and captain Amber Wisner, in what would be the final match of her career, started in the double-pivot, Sealey Strawn played her final match before leaving for college in the Fall in the number 10 role. Jasmine Hamid, Allie Thornton, and Camryn Lancaster started up top.
The first half was a goalkeeper performance and a wave. Dallas started the match with possession, but couldn’t generate chances in Lexington’s end. McCamey faced four saves before the break, three of them from Sarah Griffith and one from Darya Rajaee, and stopped them all. The shots came from everywhere.
Lexington outshot Dallas 8-2 in the opening 45 minutes and put five on frame to none. The line that protected McCamey did its job for 39 minutes against a side that has been the most prolific attacking team in the league all year. Then Lexington won a corner. Dallas only half-cleared it. Griffith ran onto the loose ball at the top of the box and bent a left-footed strike to the bottom-right corner past McCamey in the 40th minute.
A minute later, Davison nearly answered with a long-distance shot that flashed past the top-right post. The half ended on a goal Dallas had defended toward and a post Dallas had nearly equalized through.
Hintzen had been booked in the 32nd minute for a foul on Lexington left back Alyssa Bourgeois. That detail mattered six minutes after halftime. A cross from Bourgeois on the right floated to Cat Barry in the Dallas box, and the league’s Golden Boot winner headed it past McCamey to the top-left corner. 2-0 Lexington. They wouldn’t look back.
Barry’s goal was the kind that has defined her record-breaking season. The former South Carolina Gamecock finished the regular season with 16 goals — four more than any other player in the league and three more than the previous single-season record, which had been set last spring by Thornton, the Dallas striker who started this match across the field from her. Five braces for Barry. Twenty total goal contributions. League-leading goals added. A cross arrived. She got there first.
Trinity pushed forward in response, and the second half belonged to Dallas in everything except the scoreboard. Dallas outshot Lexington 11-5 after the break. Three blocked Hintzen attempts inside 90 seconds around the 63rd minute. A McCutcheon header off a corner wide. A Strawn drive saved to the top corner in the 67th. Bethany Bos, on for Thornton in the 73rd, headed a Dulaney cross past the post in the 86th and forced a save off a Wisner ball in the 89th. Lexi Missimo brought Kat Asman off her line for a fifth save in the 90th.
Asman stopped all five. The Gainbridge Golden Glove winner — 11 clean sheets, 68 saves on 92 shots faced, a 73.9 percent save rate during the regular season — kept the shutout that sent Lexington through.
In the 94th minute, Lauren Lapomarda came on for Strawn. The Prosper native and Texas alum, who had not yet made a single appearance this season, made her professional debut in the dying seconds of a playoff semifinal. Wisner went the full 90, and the captain’s two-season run of consecutive league minutes carries into the offseason. Sixteen players saw the field. McCamey finished her playoff debut with five saves, adding to the 51 she compiled across 15 regular-season appearances. Dallas is one of two Super League clubs to reach the postseason in back-to-back years.
“We had to make some tweaks at halftime,” Thackeray said. “Lexington is a very good team and very deserving to be in the championship. We tried to push our line a bit higher defensively, which led to more takeaways for us. After their second goal, I think that we played quite well and kept the ball in their half with scoring chances. Overall, I thought it was a pretty even game.”
Bos reflected on the year:
“I’m really proud of our group. The girls we have are very tight-knit, and it’s special to be a part of. A lot of unfortunate injuries in the spring kind of changed the way we did things. People stepped up and filled in the gaps where we needed it. You could tell that we lost some of the depth that we had due to key players going down, but the fact that we could still make the playoffs and make it to this point says a lot about this group.”
Hintzen looked ahead:
“I think that making a playoff push in front of our home fans in back-to-back seasons just shows our grit and resilience as a club. These past two years, it’s come down to the final match. In the future, we want that mindset to transfer over into the first round of playoffs, just digging deep and having that resilience to keep battling and make it past the semifinals.”
The offseason begins now. The 2026/27 USL Super League season opens in August.
STARTING LINEUPS DAL: McCamey; Hintzen, McCutcheon, Davison, Guidry; Cheesman, Wisner (C), Strawn; Hamid, Thornton, Lancaster
LEX: Asman; Bourgeois, Pantuso, Steigleder, Brown; S. Griffith, Rajaee, Aylmer (C), Weinert; Barry, McCain
SCORING SUMMARY 40′ — LEX: Sarah Griffith 51′ — LEX: Catherine Barry (Alyssa Bourgeois)