This week, Dallas Trinity’s Instagram page was awash with “Welcome Back” posts for eight of the nine returning players. Here’s how the nine names shake out
General Manager Chris Petrucelli and Head Coach Nathan Thackeray will assemble the next roster together, and they start with nine players already under contract. Some of them earned their place last season. Some of them are bets. One of them is the most expensive question in the league.
Today, we’re going to take a look at the nine Golden Girls who remain from the 2025-26 campaign.
Heather Stainbrook
The best thing that happened to Dallas’s midfield last season was a player on loan from an NWSL club. Stainbrook was the most prolific scorer in Utah Valley history and then spent two seasons at the Washington Spirit watching from the bench, the minutes always going to bigger names.
Dallas borrowed her in January and handed her the keys, and she repaid them by becoming, in the eyes of nearly everyone who watched, the team’s best player from the moment she arrived until an injury ended her spring. She scored twice, set up another, and fired 16 shots from central midfield in just 670 minutes, a creator who still plays like the striker she used to be.
The calendar quietly handed Petrucelli and Thackeray a gift here: her loan was built to expire at the winter break, but the Fall season runs into December, so they now keep her for the entire campaign. The only thing they do not have is her signature on something permanent, and on this evidence, getting it should be near the top of the to-do list.
Wayny Balata
Balata was quietly good paired with Captain Amber Wisner in midfield but excelled most when paired alongside Stainbrook in the double-pivot.. A Montrealer who spent five college seasons at SMU, just a few miles up the road from the Cotton Bowl, she returned to Dallas after a year in Spokane and started all 22 of her appearances in the engine room, two goals, two assists, 23 shots, and the team’s corner-kick duty.
Balata breaks up play and carries it forward in equal measure, and on a side that struggled to create, her set pieces are a weapon worth keeping. For the build, she is the simplest entry on the list: a dependable starter in central midfield, which lets the two of them point their recruiting at the positions that actually hurt.
Lauren Flynn
Flynn came to Fair Park looking to rebuild her reputation after a year off from injury. A two-time national champion at Florida State and a first-round NWSL pick, she lost most of her rookie year in Utah to surgery on both legs, and the Royals let her walk. Dallas got a center back with that pedigree at a discount, and she anchored the back line through the spring while doing something a goal-shy team sorely needed at the other end, heading home two set-piece goals on only nine shots.
The build implication runs straight through her. The defense was the half of the field that mostly held, and Flynn is the piece it gets rebuilt around, but the goalkeeper who played behind her, Tyler McCamey, is gone to Barcelona, and Dallas does not have a single keeper under contract. The club’s most pressing job sits directly behind its best defender.
Camryn Lancaster
Lancaster is the rare returning attacker trending the right way. A Mansfield kid out of Solar SC and TCU who turned professional with Trinity, she led the returning forwards with four goals and three assists and drew more fouls than anyone on the roster, the work of a winger who defenders cannot stop without grabbing. Her defining moment, a 90th-minute equalizer at Brooklyn, came off the bench, which is the catch in her case: Dallas used her as a weapon, not a fixture, and she produced like a weapon.
In a short season with the attack thin, Petrucelli and Thackeray may need her starting, and they still need a finisher in front of her, because four goals leading your forwards is the scoring problem stated plainly rather than solved.
Lexi Missimo
Missimo is the closest thing the club has to a marquee name, and so far that is all she has been. The Southlake native left the University of Texas as the most decorated attacker in program history, its all-time leader in goals and assists, and the first Longhorn ever to post 20 of each in a single season. Dallas brought her home in 2025 to be the face of the franchise and pays her, by most reports, more than any player in the league.
None of that has translated. A foot surgery erased a full season, the back half of 2024/25, and the Fall of 2025/26. She did not return until December, and the player who came back logged 853 cautious minutes, scored just twice, and left almost no mark on the games she appeared in. The talent that rewrote the record book in Austin is not in question. Whether it survived two injury-wrecked professional seasons is, and the early returns in Dallas have been discouraging.
Petrucelli and Thackeray are not deciding whether to keep her, because she is signed through the year. They are deciding how much of the plan to build on a bet that has not yet paid off, with no runway in a fourteen-game schedule to wait for it. The highest-paid player in the league needs to start looking like it soon.
Jasmine Hamid
Hamid is the biggest swing on the roster. She left Fort Lauderdale as that club’s all-time leading scorer and the only player in the league ever named Player of the Month twice in one season, a relentless, physical forward who carried an expansion side to the inaugural final. Dallas acquired her for exactly that, but it has not shown up yet. She arrived in April, generated chances, and finished the season still searching for her first goal in a Dallas shirt.
The sample is small, which is the entire reason the deal made sense. If the scoring that made her a star reappears, she eases the most urgent need on the roster on her own. If it does not, Petrucelli and Thackeray are back in the market chasing goals. No offseason decision rides on a thinner stack of Dallas evidence, and the early flicker is worth watching closely.
Sydney Cheesman
Cheesman is the rookie who outran the timeline. North Carolina and then LSU, a call into the U.S. U-23 camp in February that prompted Trinity to sign her in March, a professional debut weeks later, and a start in the playoff semifinal by late May, trusted in the biggest match of the year inside two months of her first minute. She did not score or assist and barely shot, but that is not her job; she holds midfield and can drop into the back line or out to fullback. Her distribution and long passing are exceptional.
On a thin roster, that flexibility is real money saved. For Thackeray, she is a young, multi-position body to grow minutes around while Petrucelli works the bigger needs.
Cyera Hintzen
There is a goalscorer going to waste at fullback, and her name is Cyera Hintzen. She was the Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year at Texas, won a league title in Iceland, and finished a season as the top scorer in Australia, and in Dallas she has played every single minute at fullback. She started all 29 matches last season, durable and uncomplaining, and finished with no goals on 20 shots and two assists, a forward’s instincts firing from a defender’s address.
What she becomes next is entirely a function of the build. Bring in fullbacks, and Thackeray can finally push her up the field, where a 0-for-20 season is a flag he will have to weigh. Leave the position unaddressed, and she stays where she is, a reliable body the club would otherwise have to replace. Few players on the roster are as defined by what arrives around them.
Chioma Ubogagu
Ubogagu was the most accomplished player Dallas had and its most inventive, a Coppell kid who came up through Stanford and a U-20 World Cup before Arsenal, Real Madrid, Tottenham, and three caps for England, then came home to play in this club’s very first match and record the first assist in its history. Last season she led the team in assists, won December’s Player of the Month and Goal of the Month, and created more than anyone else in gold.
She is also the one returner the build can plan around with certainty, because a torn ACL in the May finale rules her out of the Fall season. Her absence subtracts the roster’s leading source of chances and shoves a creative attacker toward the front of the shopping list. The most experienced player on the team will shape the build by not being available at all.
There are quality pieces in Dallas, but there are also questions abound. Many of the names here have been wracked by injuries down the stretch, and their full conditions are largely unclear. Thackeray and Petrucelli have their work cut out for them, and they will need to gamble on some spots.
With the calendar shift scheduled for the start of the 2027 season, a 14-game sprint season among just 8 clubs is very winnable for a team that can pour it on. If they can repeat the success they had on defense last season while finding a way to add a significant number of goals, Trinity should be able to find themselves competing at the top of the table. What they will and won’t do, however, remains to be seen.
A full, updated roster announcement is expected in the coming weeks.