Reign extend Laura Harvey’s contract to 2028

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Laura Harvey, the NWSL’s winningest and most tenured coach, has signed a new contract to remain as head coach of Seattle Reign FC through the 2028 season.

Harvey is synonymous with the Reign, having coached the team in 10 of its 12 regular seasons to date, through multiple ownership and name changes and in-market relocation.

Harvey has been one of the few constants. Her continued presence on the sidelines with the Reign — famously sitting on a watercooler, no doubt — was widely assumed as such a given that the expiration of her previous contract came and went on Dec. 31 without any attention.

However, in an exclusive interview with ESPN, Harvey said that last season lit a fire in her that she hadn’t felt since the league launched in 2013.

“Last year was one of the most fun years I’ve had as a coach,” Harvey told ESPN. “It was like this new era had come. I wasn’t sure if I would ever feel that again. I think back to 2013 and 2014 and all the newness of what that felt like, and all the excitement around that.

“I didn’t feel I’d ever have that again — and I had it again last year. It was really fun turning up to work every day and working with the staff and the players was really, really fun. And that was credit to everybody involved in the environment we tried to create.”

Last year’s turnaround — a fifth-place finish and return to the playoffs — took place in the first full season under the new joint ownership of MLS’ Seattle Sounders and the Carlyle Group, which has injected a new sense of direction into the team after 18 months in limbo under previous ownership.

“When you sit and you hear and you see the work that people are doing behind the scenes to try and move the club forward, it makes you excited to see what that could be,” Harvey said.

“Having put so much time and effort, and blood sweat and tears into this place, I didn’t want that to be someone else’s joy that they got. I want that to be something that I can continue to enjoy that journey with this newfound ownership and vision of what we want the club to look like in the future.”

Harvey’s 113 victories as a head coach are the most in NWSL history. She has been named NWSL Coach of the Year three times and guided the Reign to three NWSL Shields since taking over as the team’s first coach in the inaugural NWSL season in 2013.

Throughout her decade-plus in the NWSL, she has been one of the few female head coaches in the league, a trend she says she still wants to see corrected. Harvey left the Reign after the 2017 season to guide the expansion Utah Royals for two seasons before joining U.S. Soccer in 2020.

She returned as head coach of the Reign midway through 2021 as a stabilizing force when the league was in turmoil and the club had just removed former head coach Farid Benstiti.

The Reign franchise was also entering turbulent times off the field. OL Groupe put the team up for sale in early 2023.

Reign general manager Lesle Gallimore, who was hired that year, described those 18 months that followed as filled with uncertainty and “chaos internally.”

Seattle still made it to the NWSL Championship in 2023 but finished second-bottom in 2024, conceding 44 goals in a miserable season matched only by the Reign’s ill-fated launch 10 years earlier. The Reign lost USWNT veterans Rose Lavelle and Emily Sonnett among others as the team sat idle and cash-strapped during a winter transfer window while it waited for its new owners.

Last season, however, brought a revival: A return to the playoffs, where the Reign lost to the 2024 champion Orlando Pride in the quarterfinals.

Gallimore said the team’s early-season success last year sparked contract renewal talks beginning in the summer.

“I have talked a lot about consistency and clarity and certainty,” Gallimore said. “And I think retaining Laura and moving forward and supporting her and her continued growth and development, but also someone that’s a known leader and a known winner in the league with the experience that she has — I’m looking around at all those clubs that I feel have struggled because of not having those things. Not having consistency, not having clarity, that’s hurt those clubs. We don’t want to be one of those. We want to be at the top consistently, competing consistently.”

Gallimore said that consistency should not be confused with complacency. Both she and Harvey separately said that the team’s identity needs to continue to evolve — especially offensively. Gallimore said that Harvey’s staff has nearly doubled in size since 2023 to allow Harvey to focus fully on coaching. Harvey is most proud of the team’s defensive resilience last year, having tightened things up to concede only 29 goals in 26 games.

But the Reign struggled to create goals, scoring just 32 — worst among the eight playoff teams — and finishing tied for the second worst expected goal (xG) difference in the league (-14.4).

Harvey said she “hates” xG as a metric used in a vacuum — and acknowledges the irony after going viral for using ChatGPT, because she said she is not a data person — but she knows that it indicates a trend, and that the team needs to create more scoring opportunities to improve.

That data, she said, shows they finish their chances when they get them, but they don’t create enough.

“Adapt or die, really,” Harvey said. “I think that’s the world that we live in. The world of women’s football moves at a pace that is unrecognizable in a lot of sport. It moves so fast, the goalposts move a lot, and you’ve got to roll with that.”

Harvey’s new contract will take her into the NWSL’s 15th regular season, most of which she will have spent in Seattle. She joked that she might finally buy a house in the city after all this time.

That final missing piece for Harvey and the Reign, however, is an NWSL Championship, a trophy that eluded even the 2014 squad, which was one of the best in league history and one of the best in the world at the time.

For that reason, Harvey said, her job is not done.

“That’s the elusive part for us,” Harvey said. “The legacy of the Reign has been to win, but the one thing we haven’t won yet is that. That’s the thing that obviously is at the top of everybody’s mind.”

This post was originally published at ESPN