OL Reign GM Lesle Gallimore on her new role and transition to the NWSL
OL Reign have found their new general manager in a familiar and local face: Lesle Gallimore, who was head coach at the University of Washington from 1994 to 2019 before moving on to serve as commissioner of the Girls Academy, a youth league started in 2020.
Gallimore’s been around OL Reign since their beginnings as Seattle Reign FC in 2013 as a fan and supporter (plus sometimes an opposing coach during preseason friendlies, and a color commentator during the league’s YouTube stream days).
She’s starting at a time of great transition for the club, which is currently on the market with no clear-cut timeline on when a sale might be completed. In better news on the field, the team bounced back from consecutive losses at the hands of the Courage and Gotham FC with a 4-1 win at home over Angel City this past weekend. The Reign are one of four teams currently sitting on 16 points, good enough for third place in the NWSL table thanks to their +6 goal differential.
Advertisement
Starting as the Reign’s general manager a couple of months into the 2023 season, with the World Cup on the horizon and plenty up in the air is a challenge Gallimore is clearly excited about, though. She spoke exclusively to The Athletic ahead of Wednesday’s announcement of her new role.
This interview has been slightly abbreviated and edited for clarity.
Why this role and why now?
This has been my club since the beginning, as far as fandom and just as a person in soccer in Seattle. When the Sounders came here, it was just a really, really exciting time for all of us at our men’s and women’s programs at the University of Washington, for the football faithful that have been here since the ‘60s and ‘70s. So when the NWSL awarded the Reign to the Predmores as a franchise, it was, ‘How do we help and how do we keep this thing going forward?’
Teresa and Bill (Predmore) were unbelievable at involving me in any way, shape or form. Playing our little community shield game in the spring so there was a connection between UW and the pro team. I did a lot of color commentary in those first couple of years at Memorial (Stadium) to help out. I was in and around the players and Laura (Harvey), helping her get settled here in the beginning.
It’s been exciting to watch it evolve. When I ended my time at UW in December 2019 after 26 years, I was continuing to do coaching education for U.S. Soccer, for CONCACAF, and then had some ins with FIFA to do a couple of small things. I thought I would take a break. Coaching education at the time in person and online, but it was more in person, and I was coming back from consulting for CONCACAF at the U-20 World Cup qualifiers in the Dominican Republic in March of 2020 back to an A license (course) in Florida when the pandemic hit and the wold changed as we know it. My timing of leaving a college job was actually a little bit serendipitous, but ended up being fine especially after I’d done it that long.
Advertisement
The DA (U.S. Soccer’s Development Academy) dropped and the commissioner role (of The Girls Academy) came around. It was something I could do to help and be impactful — and it was remote. I could stay home. There were other opportunities coming around. International opportunities, opportunities in the league. And to be fair, I had watched the league since its inception as the third go-round of a pro league in this country.
I wasn’t enamored. I didn’t know that it would be my next step. I didn’t know that it was going the right direction. That’s not from a financial standpoint; it was obviously doing a good job to get past the three-year mark, and then the five-year mark. But I joked with a lot of the players in the league at that time that it was like a construction site: zero days without an accident. NWSL: one day without drama. I think the record might have been two. There were not that many days in a row that something negative wasn’t popping up. It just didn’t feel right to me to move away from home and to jump into something that seemed not settled.
Three years into my commissioner job, and when (previous Reign GM) Nick (Perera) left in March, I thought about it for a little while. This job that I have currently (with the GA) keeps me so busy, I stopped thinking about it, to be honest, until Bloom Sports (an outside firm assisting on the search process) reached out.
The timing is just right for me personally. This is a club that I care deeply about. The circumstances are clearly unique. It’s the middle of the season, the club’s on the market. But it doesn’t matter to me. I care about this club and I care about pro soccer in Seattle, and I’m super excited for the opportunity that OL Reign has given me.
The timing is strange and the sale process did sort of come out of nowhere in a way. I think it’s fair to say that players don’t love uncertainty, so how can you come in at this moment — knowing the club, but maybe not 100% of its inner workings — and try to get a handle on what can be an uncertain and scary time?
The good news is that between Sophie (Sauvage, head of international women’s football for OL) and Vincent (Berthillot, OL Reign CEO) and Bloom Sports and Laura (Harvey) and the players that were involved in the search, the transparency, the candor, the ability to answer anything I was curious about — it was an easy decision for me. Yes, there’s uncertainty, but in this club, these are professionals and this is a roster that is extremely professional. Between the technical staff and the players, I think they’ve been able to, up to this point, handle the uncertainty.
But it’s time that they don’t have that uncertainty to that extent anymore. This position allows for me to come in and take some of that away from them. My job is going to be assessing what maybe even small pain points are preventing them from focusing on performing, preventing Laura from 100% focusing on coaching duties, and take that on. I know the staff and the front office have been divvying out a lot of different roles amongst themselves, and this position is going to be able to take that back and take the burden off others that have been doing double duty.
Advertisement
To me, it’s honestly really exciting. There’s a familiarity there but there’s also an unfamiliarity. I don’t think you want to be comfortable coming into any new role. I am on high alert to try, behind the scenes, to do the best job I can do helping this team lift the trophy at the end of the season.
You’ve watched the NWSL since the beginning; you’ve seen everything this league has gone through over the past couple of years from the extremely bad to the extremely positive. From your own background, whether it’s coaching or from an executive level in framing a system around players and player safety, how can you bring that experience into the NWSL?
It’s my life, right? It’s my entire life experience as a player, coach, and now commissioner of a youth league. What came to light in the NWSL was basically the outcome of what has been going on in youth sports forever. I don’t know what the right word is, it sort of festered up, if you will.
From the beginning of this league, we have tried really hard to put things in place from a safeguarding standpoint, from player development and a holistic way of looking at the experience of a youth player. I was asked to be on the participant safety committee by Mana (Shim) and Emily Cosler (U.S. Soccer’s director of strategy) and U.S. Soccer, so I’ve been able to sit in on a lot of those conversations. I’ve hopefully been able to be a good voice, and a voice of wearing different hats along my timeline.
All of this coming to a head and coming to light has been a positive. There’s so many things that had to happen for this to take place. First and foremost, the courage of people and the courage of players, and players that probably experienced things as professionals that had also experienced these things as youth players. It’s time for everyone to recognize that all athletes deserve better. For me, it’s exciting to be in the professional arena at this point in time. The standard, between the CBA and different policies that have been put in place, we can only go up from here.
You’re coming into this job midseason, as you said, with a World Cup right on the horizon. It’s maybe the weirdest time to step in as a general manager.
And fun! I’m an international football fan, I live for the World Cup. There must be some kind of poetic prophecy here because I didn’t buy my plane ticket to New Zealand, but I have game tickets. I don’t know what’s gonna happen during that time, if I’m selling tickets, giving them away, going to scout. I don’t know! I have to get into the office this Thursday.
First and foremost is dealing with roster management. World Cup replacements, looking at where the current roster is, having discussions with the technical staff, with Laura, with Vincent, seeing where we are budgetarily and what the plan is, the transfer window that’s right around the corner.
I said this during my interview, and I wholeheartedly believe it: I’ve watched Laura evolve as a coach over the last 10 to 12 years, in her different roles that she has had outside of the Reign and inside the Reign, and I couldn’t learn from someone better in the professional arena as a manager than from her. She knows so many nuances and ins and outs, and the way the rules have changed. I’m excited to pick her brain about a lot of different things, but I’m also comfortable and confident in having discussions with her. Agree, disagree, she and I have always been able to have good discussions around the game. I think we’ll be great sounding boards for one another.
Advertisement
Is there a part of this job that you feel like you haven’t done before, but you’re looking forward to?
When you talk about dealing with agents and players, it’s extremely similar to dealing with parents and kids that you’re recruiting for college. It really is, at a higher level. The contractual things, the finances, it’s next level, but the relationship building, and coming to agreements and being able to bargain and negotiate and listen to people, see what they want, what makes both parties align — it’s a lot like recruiting. I don’t think it will be brand, brand new, but it will be a learning curve for sure.
One thing that would be my guess would be learning how to behave in this role, versus being a fan and being a coach that has sat in Laura’s seat, knowing how to be the person that has to maintain an outer calm while matches are going on. Not that I’m a lunatic, but you know what I mean? It’s just a different feeling. Even over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been to two games since I knew I was getting this position. I’m just in my normal seat, and people have been around me and saying things, and I’m like, ‘Oh boy, I don’t think I can sit down here!’
There’s such a rich history here with the team in Seattle, and it feels like the Reign have always been on the cusp of being one of the major players in the league — before it would have been up there with Portland, but now it’s more staying in the conversation with Angel City, Kansas City, Portland. There’s been a core to this team with Megan Rapinoe, Lauren Barnes, Jess Fishlock. In this moment of transition, is there a way to help usher in the next stage of the Reign?
I have so much to say on this. Credit goes to everyone that’s been involved with this club, from the Predmores to the group at OL. But the three people you mentioned are class, Pinoe, Lu, and Fishlock — it can not be underestimated that the identity of this club revolves a lot around the three of them. Their leadership in the locker room, their leadership and voices off the pitch away from the Reign, their leadership globally and in the world.
How different the three of them are, but how aligned they are, caring about the game and each other. I can tell from my interview and just watching and following the team, the influence they have on the other players around them. This is something to be caught. You have to catch it, and keep it and not let it go. This season is a pivotal one, to be honest, in that you don’t know, timewise, what’s going to happen. They’re all clearly more towards the end rather than the beginning of their careers, but they’re irreplaceable as far as what they’ve brought over the last 11 years to this club.
You look at Memorial Stadium. You look at the move down to Tacoma. Then to secure for them to come to Lumen, to be working on that growth and that development and getting back into the city of Seattle, to be able to have a training facility that’s only going to improve as the Sounders go off and build their own and the Reign move in permanently to the Starfire training complex. There’s so many positive things, and in a big, urban city with a lot of professional sports and college sports, people here care about (the Reign). We have always been pushing that envelope for women’s pro football, to be the “it” of the league, in my opinion.
It doesn’t necessarily come — and this isn’t a bash on anyone else — with having everything plopped down, the glitz, the glamor, the facility. I think there’s something to be said for having to work for it, and having to evolve into what it is. Things matter. It matters for the players who want to be attracted (to playing) here, players that want to be comfortable playing here and treated as the top notch professional athletes that they are. But there’s so much to be said for the evolution, how it started and how it’s going. I do feel that this team is in a great place to transition for someone who understands how remarkable this club is and can be.
The balance of wanting to honor that history and also desperately needing to evolve. These are questions representative of the bigger issues that have faced the NWSL. The Reign have such an interesting story, but the big question has always been: how do you get Seattle to show up for this team?
This is a soccer community, it really is. They love all soccer, but there’s an appetite for girls’ and women’s soccer here. The pandemic, the timing of the changeover of going down to Tacoma, coming back — I think most people look at things in a way that’s very short-sighted: you want what you want when you want it.
Advertisement
I know this community. They love this team, and you watch. Even in a World Cup summer, people will still be here at home and looking for a place to watch high level soccer when the World Cup games aren’t on TV. I feel really confident in this team’s ability to build back the Seattle fan base and make it the city’s team.
(Photo: Jane Gershovich/OL Reign)
