Media Opinion

 “And Other Thoughts:” How Local Sports Media Covers a New Pro Women’s Team in Boston

Saturday March 14, 2026

By Laura Everett

Before this week, the last time The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy wrote about pro women’s soccer in Boston was July 2022. It was just one sentence, in his regular “and other thoughts” section at the end of his columns. A throw-away line, but more than that, a punch line designed to thumb the nose at Robert Kraft’s attempt to build a soccer stadium in Everett. He wrote, “if Kraft wants any taxpayer help to build a stadium for the Revolution in Everett, he should commit to bringing a women’s professional soccer team to Greater Boston. Bring back the Breakers.” Just one line:

“Bring back the Breakers.”

The sum total of the coverage of pro women’s soccer in Dan Shaughnessy’s previous 190,000 sports columns, until this week. 

Shaughnessy doesn’t just reflect sports media, he directs it. 

Until this week, Shaughnessy has failed to direct any of his considerable spotlight to pro women’s soccer in Boston. And when he did, it was skeptical and grounded in the presumptions of the pro men’s leagues of Boston. 

We deserve so much more. 

When the Breakers were shuttered in 2018, columnist Shira Springer wrote the post-mortem analysis for the Globe. 

But a prescient letter to the editor made it through in February 2018, from Melissa Kenny of Ashland, a season ticket holder for the Breakers from 2009-2018. Kenny wrote:

The region’s major newspaper barely mentioned the Breakers. Through eight seasons, you rarely printed season previews or wrap-ups and almost never provided game stories. In the past two years, your coverage of the Breakers was carried exclusively in the SportsLog section. Springer asks about the message the team’s failure sends regarding the value of female athletes. You’ve already answered that question in your pages: You don’t value them at all.

Kenny continued, “In fact, it seems the only time you write about women’s professional sports is to note failure.”

Which makes me wonder how much has changed in local media coverage of women’s sports the past eight years since Kenny’s letter? 

It’s true, the Boston Globe has just hired a “women’s sports beat reporter,” in the excellent Emma Healy to cover all women’s sports, pro and other (and who also still is writing about men’s teams). WBUR and GBH mostly now include the upcoming PWHL Boston Fleet games when announcing who is playing at home and sometimes run stories from in-house  journalists like the outstanding Esteban Bustillos. NESN carries the PWHL locally (unless it decides to preempt it by something like the Bruins). The Herald is totally MIA.  Sadly, a number of media outlets from local newspapers or blogs have cut staff coverage entirely. 

Generally, there has been positive change towards more equitable coverage. Citizen and freelance journalism is on the rise, but we need to acknowledge that it is mostly unpaid and done by majority women, queer folx, and people of color who are taking on the financial burdens themselves- I think of the excellent work of people like Frankie de la Cretaz and Lydia Murray. I like to think we’ve been a part of prompting change, given that when we started Boston Women’s Sports, we were in fact the only outlet in the press box at the Boston Pride. Truly. We were the only media outlet in the press box watching Olympians and a championship team play. 

There has indeed been positive change in the local media landscape. And yet, the majority of mainstream Boston sports media remains decidedly entrenched in promoting a majority male, normatively white world view of the local sports landscape, to the detriment of professional women’s leagues. One “women’s sports beat” does not cut it for 50% of the population. Nor would it in any other newspaper section. 

In most circumstances, I would not take the time to opine on Shaughnessy or the Globe’s coverage of pro-women’s sports, because if you don’t have anything nice to say, etc. But Boston Women’s Sports origin story began back in 2022 when the Boston Globe’s sports section failed to adequately cover the championship run of the Boston Pride. 

This week, in advance of the Boston Legacy’s inaugural season and first home game, Shaughnessy interviewed controlling team owner Jennifer Epstein.

Spite reading Dan Shaughnessy columns is as much a local sport in Boston as the Shaughnessy proclaimed “Four Horsemen” of the Bruins, Pats, Sox, and Celts. Though as a cleric by day and women’s sports journalist by night, I am duty bound to remind the gentle reader that the Biblica four horsemen are signs of the apocalypse in Revelation 6, signaling conquest, war, famine, and death. 

Yet, 

Shaughnessy doesn’t just reflect sports media, he directs it. 

So his choice to begin in skepticism is telling. He asks Epstein, “starting a sports team in Boston isn’t easy. What makes Boston Legacy FC believe it has what it takes?”

Women don’t deserve a place in Boston sports, as men do. We have to prove our worthiness. 

Male sports teams in Boston have the privilege of presumption.

There have been as many professional women’s soccer leagues (United Soccer Association, Women’s Professional Soccer, National Women’s Soccer League, USL Super League)  in the US as there have been Red Sox championships (2004, 2007, 2013, 2018) in the 20th century. 

Read that again: there have been as many professional women’s soccer leagues in the US as there have been Red Sox championships in the 20th century. 

The precarity of existence is part of what it means to be an athlete in a pro women’s league. 

The Professional Women’s Hockey League was in 2023. The base salary for a player in the PWHL is $37,131.50.  There have been at least three pro women’s hockey leagues that have folded before this one.

This is what allows Shaughnessy to write columns that end with “and other thoughts.” Pro male teams, and pro male athletes, and pro male columnists are allowed to have “other thoughts.” They are privileged with the spacious existence to do so. Their leagues will not fail. Their games will be covered. Their columns will continue to have other thoughts. 

Yet, we are still in the unjust era where pro women’s leagues and the athletes who play in them are forced to consider “other thoughts,” like if they will get equal media coverage, enough of a salary to live, and if their league will continue to exist. Even as I write, the WNBAPA is still in negotiations for a fair share of league revenue, as the NBA is the largest stakeholder. Players in the male pro leagues do not have to hold “other thoughts” about the stability of their leagues or the legitimacy of their media coverage. 

Perhaps I’ve written as many sermons as Shaughnessy has written sports columns. But I’m also writing, without financial compensation, sports columns on the side because the pro women athletes of Boston deserve excellent, equitable, and anti-racist coverage. The failure to do so is part of what doomed Boston’s prior women’s pro soccer team.

Until the day when the horsemen are not apocalyptic but signs of a new, more just world breaking forth.