The crowd at the Dallas Stars game cheered loudly Friday night – for a professional soccer player.
Actually, she hasn’t played her first pro game yet. That will come February 15th. And, in fact, her team has itself only played 14 official games in its history. Dallas Trinity FC joined the USL Super League for the circuit’s inaugural 2024-25 season and will try to create a niche for itself in the North Texas sports scene.
DTFC has played seven regular-season home games so far at the Cotton Bowl Stadium. That’s six more than the Stars, who hosted the 2020 NHL Winter Classic there. The idea that ice hockey could fill a Texas football stadium would have seemed far-fetched when the team moved here in 1993. The new soccer club might find itself well-served to note some of the moves the Stars made that helped them become a significant part of the local sports landscape.
This is easier said than done, certainly, but the Stars won quickly, making the playoffs their first season. It didn’t hurt that they arrived from Minnesota with several core players from a team that had reached the Stanley Cup Finals two years prior. As a brand-new team, Dallas Trinity doesn’t have that built-in personnel advantage, but they’re also in a league with all first-year teams. Everyone started from scratch. GM Chris Petrucelli and Head Coach Pauline MacDonald have gotten their team into 2nd place in the league at the season’s midpoint – so far, so good.
The Stars also signed marquee players in the 1990s like Ed Belfour and Brett Hull to help propel them to the top of the league. Lexi Missimo, the player recognized at Friday’s hockey game, twice earned All-America honors at the collegiate level and just returned from a stint in the U.S. Women’s National Team’s futures camp. She got meet Belfour that evening – DTFC hopes she’ll have a similar impact in the midfield to the one he made in the crease.
Off the playing surface, another move the Stars made early on to improve their odds of success entailed enabling young people to play their sport. They worked with municipalities to build StarCenter ice rinks to fill with hockey players they hoped would also become fans of the local team. Those rinks have, in fact, produced NHL players among the thousands who have taken up the sport. The soccer team has a leg up here because soccer is already plenty popular at the youth levels and fields are plentiful. But DTFC still has plenty of room to carve a niche with that young potential fanbase. As MacDonald told us in the video interview that accompanies this post, they hope their presence will serve as an extra incentive for girls to pursue the sport all the way to the highest levels.
“We really want to paint a picture for any young girl that is here in Dallas that your journey, your full journey, can be here, through the recreational game to the club game to performance, and then you have the potential to live your dream out within your home state and your home city.”
Missimo hails from Southlake and played her college soccer at the University of Texas. She has a number of teammates with local and regional ties. “The league is built for local players, a lot of different markets around the country that have quality players that get a chance to play at home. So I think it’s a perfect setup for some of those really, really top players like Lexi,” said Petrucelli.
Local ties don’t hurt when it comes to generating interest, but it’s still an uphill battle to cut through the noise in a major market with big league teams in all the sports and the world’s most valuable sports franchise across the tollway from the Stars in Frisco. In fact, Dallas Trinity FC had to move the press announcement of Missimo’s contract when that behemoth, the Dallas Cowboys, scheduled their new coach to meet with the media at a conflicting time. The Stars made an early commitment to putting their games on TV when they arrived, though that landscape has changed, certainly. Both teams now stream most of their games, DTFC on Peacock and the Stars on Victory+. The current fragmented media world makes it more complicated than what the hockey team encountered on its arrival, but it also creates niche opportunities. One of the reasons the Stars were eager to recognize Missimo had to do with her being featured in the Raising Her Game docuseries that streams on their Victory+ network (which, by way of disclosure, I directed). Social media, connected TV, and more can help a team make an impact with audiences in ways that didn’t exist in 1993.
The sport of hockey was on the rise in the early-to-mid 1990s. A new commissioner, new TV deals, and Sun Belt expansion positioned it for growth. Women’s soccer and women’s sports generally have seen their own stocks rise exponentially in the last few years. A country that once couldn’t sustain one women’s professional league now has two Division I circuits.
Barely thirty years ago, the idea that we’d see an NHL team succeed in Texas and women have pro soccer teams on which to play would have seemed speculative at best (not to mention that there would be this thing called “streaming whereby you could watch the games and a documentary series that charts the evolution of those opportunities for women athletes). Friday, Dallas Trinity FC saw one of its players recognized in front of 18,000+ fans in an arena that didn’t exist when its current tenants started play in Dallas. They’ll hope their path in the coming years grows their position in the market the same way as the one the Stars followed.
