Dallas Trinity FC 4, Fort Lauderdale United FC 0
Sealey Strawn sang the national anthem before kickoff Saturday night at Cotton Bowl Stadium. Ninety minutes later, she had two goals, Player of the Match honors, and a playoff berth to show for it.
Dallas Trinity FC routed Fort Lauderdale United FC 4-0 in front of 5,682 on Fan Appreciation Night, clinching the fourth and final Gainbridge Super League playoff spot with the most complete performance the Golden Girls have produced all spring.
Allie Thornton opened the scoring. Strawn added two more. Bethany Bos capped it late. Dallas (11-10-7, 40 points) finishes the regular season in fourth and travels to Lexington SC next Saturday for a semifinal.
It was the final home match of Amber Wisner‘s career. The captain played every minute, as she has in every match across two seasons of Dallas Trinity’s existence, and reached 5,000 career regular-season minutes at the 50-minute mark, the first player in league history to hit that number. She finished at 5,040. It was her 300th professional club appearance.
In a few months, Strawn will arrive at North Carolina, where Wisner is a Tar Heel legend. The 18-year-old from Prosper, Texas, is inheriting a legacy that stretches from Chapel Hill to Fair Park, and Saturday night, she looked ready for it.
Spokane Zephyr FC had beaten Brooklyn 4-0 earlier in the afternoon, climbing to 39 points and pulling ahead of Dallas. Elsewhere, Carolina Ascent beat Sporting Jacksonville 3-1 at home, and Lexington won the Players Shield on what has been referred to around the league as a controversial penalty call.
A Dallas win was no longer optional.
“If I have to give you any kind of messaging about how to get up for this game, then something is wrong,” Nathan Thackeray told the broadcast team earlier in the day.
Kickoff was delayed roughly 30 minutes while grounds crew addressed an issue with the 18-yard box lines. The top line was removed and then re-added in the same spot with no explanation provided. Clear skies and 86 degrees greeted the teams when they finally took the field.
Dallas wore gold kits with black lettering and black socks. Fort Lauderdale was in black with blue-green accents. The chants and drums from the supporters’ section were already booming, louder than they had been all season.
Thackeray sent out a 4-2-3-1 with Tyler McCamey in goal, Cyera Hintzen and Samar Guidry at fullback, Maya McCutcheon and Hannah Davison at center back, Wisner captaining the double pivot alongside Sydney Cheesman, and Jasmine Hamid, Strawn, and Camryn Lancaster behind Thornton up top.
Fort Lauderdale’s Paul Jennison matched the shape, Sh’nia Gordon captaining a side that arrived on a five-match losing streak.
Wisner tested Haley Craig from outside the box inside the first two minutes, Lancaster finding her with a pass. Craig saved it. Dallas was pressing from the start.
The first 15 minutes were physical and contested. Fort Lauderdale came out aggressively with their pressure and caused Dallas some problems early, but Strawn sprung Thornton on a fast break in the 16th, but Thornton’s left-footed effort from the center of the box missed just right. The connection between the two was already there.
Kate Colvin met a Gordon cross with a header from the center of the box in the 18th minute, and McCamey saved it.
Thackeray said afterward that once Dallas got through that first 20-minute spell of Fort Lauderdale’s aggressive press, he felt comfortable. But the match nearly turned before Dallas could take control. In the moments before the opening goal, Dallas almost conceded an own goal trying to play out of the back. McCamey was in the right position to keep it out.
“Amazing how games change in a moment,” Thackeray said. “I think it would have been an own goal. She’s in the right spot at the right time, and then we go down and punish them.”
Trinity punished the opposition immediately.
Seconds later, Strawn played a ball up the left side to Hamid, who had space to run. Hamid drove forward and slid the ball across the face of goal to a wide-open Thornton, who slotted it home with her right foot. 1-0 Dallas in the 27th minute. Hamid’s first assist in a Dallas shirt and against her old club. Three minutes earlier she had picked up a yellow card for a foul on Margot Mace. Three minutes later she was celebrating Thornton’s fourth goal of the season.
Four minutes after that, Dallas had a second. Davison played a long ball over the top from center back. Lancaster ran onto it and delivered an excellent pass across to Strawn, who finished clean with her right foot to the bottom right corner. 2-0 in the 31st minute. The buildup started from the back line and traveled 60 yards in two passes. Strawn’s fourth goal of the season.
Lancaster tested Craig from outside the box a minute later, Craig saving to the top right corner. Then Wisner headed a Cheesman corner just wide in the 33rd.
Fort Lauderdale was caught offside twice in quick succession near the end of the half, Locklear in the 40th and Gordon in the 41st, and Gordon forced a save from McCamey in first-half stoppage time with a right-footed effort from the right side of the box. It was as close as Fort Lauderdale came to anything in the opening 45 minutes.
Dallas went to the half controlling the scoreboard and their destiny.
The second half opened with Dallas pressing again. Wisner fired from close range in the 48th minute off a Hamid-headed pass, Craig saving at the bottom right. Thornton was blocked in the 49th off a Wisner pass. Hamid missed from the left side of the box in the 54th off a Lancaster ball. Wisner was pushing hard for a goal of her own on her final home night, and chances kept falling just short.
Fort Lauderdale managed one dangerous second-half moment. Gordon broke on a fast break in the 68th minute and missed just right of the far post. It was the closest they came.
A minute later, Dallas put the game away. Lancaster played it forward to Thornton, who passed it across the box. Strawn’s first effort was saved by Craig at the bottom right corner. The rebound fell back to her on the right side of the six-yard box, and she buried it with her right foot. 3-0. Strawn’s first professional brace. Her fifth goal of the season.
The Cotton Bowl erupted. The supporters’ section was the loudest it had been all season. Thackeray said afterward he was struggling to get messages to his players because of the noise.
“Since I’ve moved her into a central role, I can’t say too many good things about her,” Thackeray said of Strawn. “She’s been excellent. For an 18-year-old, her desire to get in the box, to press, to get on the ball, to dominate from that position, it’s pretty special.”
Strawn credited the Tampa match the week before for helping her find it. “I felt really comfortable tonight. Last game kind of helped me see what I needed to do this game. It was just that moment of finding the click and finding the right spot, one step to the left and one step to the right.”
Thackeray made a double substitution in the 72nd minute, bringing on Chioma Ubogagu for Hamid and Bos for Thornton. A triple change followed at the 79th: Kiley Dulaney for Guidry, Lexi Missimo for McCutcheon, and Jenny Danielsson for Lancaster. Fort Lauderdale made five changes of their own across the second half, none of which altered the match.
Dallas did not relent at 3-0. They kept attacking.
In the 86th minute, Bos fired a right-footed shot from outside the box that Craig saved to the top right corner. A minute later, Missimo ran through the middle and played it left to Bos, who found herself one-on-one with Craig. She finished calmly with her left foot to the high center of the goal and ran to the supporters’ section. 4-0. Bos had been on the pitch 15 minutes and taken four shots before finding the net. Her third goal of the season across 14 matches in her first year with the club.
Dallas was still attacking when the final whistle blew.
Twenty shots to four. Ten on target to two. Fifty-eight final-third entries to 37. Five corners to zero. Five big chances to zero for Fort Lauderdale. Dallas won 70 percent of aerial duels and 88 percent of their tackles. Fort Lauderdale held 54 percent of possession and did almost nothing with it, being caught offside five times across the match.
McCamey made three saves for her third clean sheet of the season, giving her 51 on the year across 15 matches. For a team that had conceded late goals at Carolina, at Brooklyn, and at DC across the spring, a shutout on the final night at home was overdue.
“We’ve scored six goals in the last two games after scoring one in the previous three,” Thackeray said. “I feel a lot better. The game is all about momentum, and our job now is to make sure this run keeps going.”
The night was not without cost. Ubogagu went down with a non-contact knee injury in stoppage time, grabbing her knee before being helped off the field. Dallas played the final minutes a player short, having already used all five substitutions. No update was provided on her condition. She left the building on crutches.
After the final whistle came the ceremony to honor the club captain.
Wisner stood at midfield as the club honored her career. Strawn’s pregame anthem had already brought the captain to tears before kickoff. The video tribute did the same afterward.
“She’s more than what Dallas Trinity is,” Thackeray said. “She’s a trailblazer for the sport. She’s carried her shirt with the utmost pride for the 13 years that she’s played. I showed video this week of her doing a 70-yard sprint, box to box, trying to overlap in the Tampa game. I was like, come on, there’s definitely more than one game left.”
Wisner reflected on the financial reality of a career that started when the NWSL was still finding its footing. “My mom would support me. In the offseasons, I had to go home. You don’t get housed. You don’t get paid. She bought my groceries, bought my gas so I could train and focus. It wasn’t too long ago that I finally was fully self-sufficient based off of my salary.” Her husband, she said, has been a part of her journey for almost every match since she joined the Reign in 2015. Out of roughly 300 games, he missed maybe the first 50 or 60. “He’s never put himself or his job first. It’s always been me.”
Asked if there were any second thoughts about retirement, Wisner did not hesitate. “No. Go out on top. Got healthy, got happy. It’s such a joy and a peace to be able to choose your ending.”
Her first introduction to Dallas soccer came in 2017, playing for the Houston Dash during Hurricane Harvey, when a match was relocated to North Texas. “We had 10,000 fans, and I was like, why doesn’t Dallas have a women’s professional team? Took another eight, nine years for us to get it. I knew Dallas was a special city.”
When asked about Thornton and Strawn scoring the goals around her on her final home night, Wisner pointed to the thread that ties them together. “Allie obviously had a goal and an assist, and then Sealey with two goals. She’s going to take over for me at UNC with that legacy. It was really great that between the two of them, they scored.”
Strawn, heading to Chapel Hill at the end of the season, framed it similarly. “Following her footsteps a little bit. She created history there. Hopefully winning a couple national championships too.”
Thackeray was asked about Lexington winning the Shield and what it means for playoff preparation. “We hadn’t even thought about who we were going to play,” he said. “Congrats to Lexington for winning the whole thing. I saw the goal that they won it with. Bitterly disappointed for Jacksonville. That shouldn’t happen, not at this level. That’s a big referee mistake.”
The bracket is set. Lexington (1) hosts Dallas (4). Carolina (3) travels to Jacksonville (2). Dallas and Carolina are the only clubs to make the playoffs in both of the league’s two seasons.
“Once you get to playoffs, anything can happen,” Wisner said. “The regular season’s thrown aside, and it’s a one-off. You just got to be the better team that day.”
Sixteen players saw action for Dallas. The series with Fort Lauderdale finishes 2-1-0 this season, 3-3-0 all-time.
Dallas travels to Lexington SC (14-3-11, 53 points) on Saturday, May 23, at 4:00 pm CT at Lexington SC Stadium for its playoff opener. The match airs on KFAA (Ch. 29) and streams on WFAA+, Peacock, and TUDN Radio.
DALLAS TRINITY FC McCamey; Hintzen, McCutcheon, Davison, Guidry; Cheesman, Wisner (C); Hamid, Strawn, Lancaster; Thornton Substitutions: Ubogagu for Hamid (72′), Bos for Thornton (72′), Dulaney for Guidry (79′), Missimo for McCutcheon (79′), Danielsson for Lancaster (79′)
FORT LAUDERDALE UNITED FC Craig; Hugh, Vaka, Cagle, Mace; González, Van Treeck; Colvin, Todd, Gordon (C); Locklear Substitutions: Simpson for Van Treeck (65′), Smith for González (65′), Long for Vaka (79′), Yasuda for Colvin (81′), Harding for Mace (82′)
SCORING SUMMARY 27′ — DAL: Allie Thornton (Jasmine Hamid) 31′ — DAL: Sealey Strawn (Camryn Lancaster) 69′ — DAL: Sealey Strawn 87′ — DAL: Bethany Bos (Lexi Missimo)
DISCIPLINE 23′ — FTL: Kate Colvin (Yellow Card) 24′ — DAL: Jasmine Hamid (Yellow Card) 57′ — FTL: Kathrynn González (Yellow Card) 90’+6 — DAL: Hannah Davison (Yellow Card) 90′ — FTL: Alana Yasuda (Yellow Card)