Green Bay has the Packers and Milwaukee has the Bucks, but what about Madison?
Of course the isthmus is full of Badger pride on game days, but there’s an entirely new sports community building a home in Madison and it's full of female athletes.
Women’s sports are having a moment in Madison — soon the city will be home to women’s pro soccer and volleyball teams, and a fast-pitch collegiate softball team.
“It's exciting to be kind of on the forefront of women's sports. I think that the movement here in Madison is huge. It's quick. It's fast moving,” Samantha Rubin, the general manager of the Madison Mallards, said on the City Cast Madison podcast.
Rubin is a trailblazer herself. She’s the fourth general manager of the Mallards and the first woman to have the job. And she sees a lot of potential for Madison’s incoming women’s sports teams to not only have a local impact, but one that branches across the state and midwest.
She said she hopes the soon-to-be-named softball team will help build a community for other athletes looking to strengthen their skills by hosting tournaments, clinics, and games for players from beyond Madison.
With the way the city has already embraced the Mallards and Forward Madison FC, it’s clear the appetite for sports is huge on the isthmus and adding women’s teams to the mix has the potential to bring even more fans to the stands, Rubin said.
The Madison Women’s Pro Soccer team hopes to play its inaugural games by the start of the 2025-26 season. But the plan to bring women’s soccer has long been in the works.
“Since we launched professional soccer in Madison in 2019, we have had the goal of bringing the first professional women’s soccer team in the State of Wisconsin to Madison” Forward Madison partners Conor Caloia and Vern Stenman said in a statement when the team was announced.
The announcement of women’s pro soccer in May 2023 came just weeks after Madison was chosen as the home for a professional women’s volleyball team.
League One Volleyball or LOVB (pronounced “love”) is set to start playing matches later this year. League officials said they chose Madison because of the city’s massive support for UW-Madison’s volleyball team and the area’s growing club volleyball scene. The Madison team will be the first professional volleyball team in the Midwest.
“It feels like women’s sports are having a moment in Madison, and I’m absolutely here for it,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said at a 2023 news conference.
