The reign have good players, but NWSL is not a good league and even the players barely care about the results, especially the players who are in the USWNT orbit. Their first goal is not to get hurt.

Condolences to Reign fans who don't look forward to negotiating the I-5 corridor at peak hours.
This does bring up the subject of what a wretched facility Memorial Stadium is.
It desperately needs to be retired as of, about 40 years ago.
Terrible property management by Seattle School District, every School Board member for the past 40 years should be ashamed.

Other than the inconvenience to Seattle fans, whom I feel for, this sounds like a positive for the team—who can watch soccer without beer?! Portland's Providence Park is great, it's gotta hurt to host your rivals in such a shitty house.

Also, kudos to the Reign for dropping Seattle from their name, something a certain Bay Area sports team that moved 45 miles from their namesake (and into a suburb of an even larger city) didn't have the decency to do.

Thanks for reporting on the beautiful game. It's a shame that a city with the men's highest attendance in the MLS can't support a women's team.

For this article to compare the reign to Portland is not doing their homework. First of all the thorns are also ran by their mls counter parts unlike the reign who were on their own. If anyone is a true reign fan they will figure a way to catch their team no matter the distance. I call bs

kallipugos, Memorial Stadium has been an issue for decades, but it's not just Seattle Public Schools to that are to blame. Seattle Center owns a lot of that problem. They would love to get rid of it and have blocked any real improvements to the place.

I wish I knew the history better so I knew who to blame.
We got rid of the Kingdome, we are finally getting rid of the viaduct... here is another poorly-designed, unsafe concrete monstrosity whose time has come & gone.

I'm a bit surprised by the negative tone of this story. Strikets me as oddly off-key. Sure, there are negatives, but the positives far outweigh them, and this move has generally been received with excitement.

I can take the bus to Memorial Stadium. Tacoma is way more of a schlep. But even despite the inconvenience, I'm much more excited to go to a game in Tacoma. Memorial Stadium was just that much of a dump. And it's not like this is the NBA or NHL where a season ticket holder would need to get to 41 games a year, many of them on weeknights. The Arizona Coyotes were popular in downtown Phoenix. Then they moved to farflung Glendale, AZ, and they wonder why they have attendance problems.

One thing this story doesn't do justice to is the importance of the soccer-specific stadium. Getting to watch the Reign at a sleek, modern soccer-specific stadium with perfect sightlines and nice amenities and what's sure to be a packed house--for a fan who wants to watch the home team live, that's a scintillating prospect. The stadium was already in the works for the Sounders' farm team, S2, now rebranded as the Tacoma Defiance. The exciting news here is that the Reign are going to be part of that project, so this region is going to have this great soccer fan experience that's quite different from the experience of watching the Sounders at the CLink, and now there's going to be twice as much soccer getting played at the new place.

And the glaring miss of this story is the regional importance. Anything to make Tacoma more of a centerpiece of this region and a center of gravity is a good thing. For me, Tacoma is already a destination with the art museums and the old-and-new urban vibe; plus, it's got some nice restaurants. Adding the Reign and the rebranded Tacoma Defiance just adds to that critical mass that makes Tacoma a destination.

And in 20 years when we finally have light rail to Tacoma (provided human civilization still exists by then), that's when things are really going to take off. They're going to need to expand that stadium by then if they haven't already.

Also, I know this story is about the Reign, but I'm stoked too about the new Tacoma Defiance. (Check out the wild logo.) As much as I am a Sounders fan, S2 was irrelevant to me. Now that they're Tacoma's team with their own identity and they're going to have their own special stadium experience, suddenly I'm interested in following them.

@5: "It's a shame that a city with the men's highest attendance in the MLS can't support a women's team."

Correction. The last two years, Atlanta United has had the highest attendance in MLS. I can't see the Sounders setting any attendance marks for years to come unless they make some transformational move that expands their fan base, and believe me, I'd love to see them do that.

Readers that LIVE in Tacoma, commuting 5x a week into Seattle for work, are playing the world's smallest violins right now. You can't whine to anyone making that trip on a regular basis, week after week, and expect to be taken seriously. Seattle fans claiming to be THAT upset about the move - show your love by moving to Tacoma. Sound Transit 590 runs nearly 24/7 - can't manage an Uber the rest of the way? Claims of devotion to this team sound dubious. You'd think they were moving to Idaho.

Seattle liberals would never set foot in a town with "so many bad neighborhoods, crime, scary people, and dirty people" (i.e. black people.) To them the idea of a city with a population of black people that is roughly proportional to the country at large is terrifying.

Liberals love to call people racists but if they actually see a black person in real life, it's "Call 911! That lady is walking down the street is suspicious! Drinking water or talking on the phone on the sidewalk? Can't the cops do something about this? It's making me nervous..." Nothing more hypocritical than a liberal from Seattle.

Also, Jeebus, liberals don't use public transportation, that's for dirty people (i.e. black people again.)

All of a sudden, sympathy in The Stranger for a for-profit professional sports franchise. More public money should have been spent on public facilities to enrich their owners? We “failed” them? WTF?!