in the field: lesley ryder of gal pal sports
"Dreaming is so great, but sometimes you just want to talk some shit about about some sports."
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This installment of In the Field is an interview with Lesley Ryder, who is one half of the team at Gal Pal Sports. Ryder and her wife, Emily Anderson, started Gal Pal Sports as a Twitter account back in 2019. What started as one of my favorite places to find memes and jokes about the gay goings-on in the world of women’s soccer has become so much more than that—thanks to Ryder’s move into original reporting, their account has is now a place to get hard news, too.
Alongside Diana Moskovitz at Defector, Ryder has been publishing in-depth feature stories into the ongoing workplace harassment lawsuits against the NWSL’s San Diego Wave and the team’s former head coach, Jill Ellis.
Ryder is the writer and on-screen host at Gal Pal Sports, and likely the person you are talking to when you engage with their social media accounts. Meanwhile, Anderson is the photographer and videographer, the website tech support, and the “making things happen in the way that we need them to” person, says Ryder (“I think she takes really nice photos, and I want it on the record.”). The couple lives is based in the Chicagoland area.
You can follow Gal Pal Sports on X, Bluesky, Instagram, or TikTok. You can also follow Ryder on Bluesky or TikTok.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Out of Your League: For people who are unfamiliar with Gal Pal Sports, can you tell me a little bit about what it is you guys do?
Lesley Ryder: We started in 2019 around the Women's World Cup coming around, and we were noticing the conversations around the event to be in a very ‘See her, be her,’ tone. I think the official motto of the 2019 World Cup was ‘Dare To Dream,’ which is great, dreaming is so great, but sometimes you just want to talk some shit about about some sports, and that is the silly place that we were born out of.
At the time, there really wasn't a way to engage with people in a fun way about [women’s] sports. And we're just like, ‘All right, we'll do a Twitter account and see what happens.’ The plan was just to post some memes about what's going on on the field, and then [the USWNT] won, so we had some longevity there during the tournament.
I come from a comedy acting background. We were both in LA at the time, and my wife did a bit of TV and film production stuff, so we did some fun little sketches of things that were happening, and people started liking it. So we kept doing it.
OOYL: And it's evolved. I'd say now you still do memes and fun things, but you also have some elements of actual reporting that you didn't have before. Can you talk about that pivot and expansion of your content?
LR: After following the NWSL for a couple of years, we got to 2021 and things were extremely terrible. You had coaches who were being fired or “resigning” when they had done terrible things, and things stopped being so funny. It just seemed really stupid to be making dumb little sketches about the league when there were these serious things happening. And around that time, we were looking to move. We ended up landing in Chicago and that gave us an opportunity to follow the Red Stars.
It took me a while to figure out how I can fit into [the media] landscape. I still love making jokes. I am a silly goose and will forever be a silly goose, but being in an NWSL market felt like an opportunity that I had to take. It's taken me a while to really settle into a rhythm and figure out how it should work for us in terms of writing about games, figuring out how to get our podcast going, and doing the best we can do to still be in this fun and informative space. But now that we have this opportunity for access and storytelling, it has evolved into a more reporty, capital J journalist way. Over time, in the past couple of seasons, it's been building trust,and talking to people, getting the sources, all of that. And so when this summer we had that whole thing with Jill Ellis [and the San Diego Wave], it was like, ‘Shoot, we're getting into some real shit here. Let's go talk to a publication who might be able to help,’ because I was not equipped to handle that story with my little website that I run with my wife.
OOYL: Okay, so before we get into the Jill Ellis of it all, I must ask, because you have been in the Red Stars market, what do you think about the rebrand?
LR: It's fine, I guess. But I think the timing of it, with the BOS Nation FC fiasco, just really didn't help them. It's not unusual for a new ownership group to come in and want to change things up. But I think the sentiment that I've gathered is that the name felt like it was a tangible thing, connected to the city. But it probably is going to be a thing we look back on in a couple of years and shrug about.
OOYL: Let's talk about the Jill Ellis story. I know you worked with Diana at Defector on what I think is the most in-depth piece on this lawsuit that I have seen anywhere. You’ve also written a few follow-ups now. When did the story first come onto your radar?
LR: I had come around to it pretty much when most of the public did, when Brittany Alvarado made her statement on Twitter. Obviously, I read it and saw a lot of the response to it. I had gotten a few messages from people who were encouraging me to look into things a little bit more, because there was some stuff that hadn't come out yet, like that San Diego had been under investigation before. And so I just started getting on my research horse and looking into the background of Jill Ellis, and a lot of this stuff is just out in the open. There are old interviews with players, book excerpts from Megan Rapinoe.
And then when Jill Ellis’ filing came out where she was suing Brittany Alvarado for defamation, that was the moment for me of like, ‘I need to tag in with someone else on this,’ because it showed the ruthlessness that Jill Ellis was working with. In the initial statement from San Diego Wave FC, [there wasn’t] a super standard PR thing of something like, ‘We have heard this complaint, we will be investigating fully.’ They called it “damaging” and “defamation.” They said, essentially, ‘We will pursue all legal matters.’
I had reached out to a couple of newspapers just to be, like, ‘Hey, this is happening. This is a story. I have sources who are corroborating this.’ I didn't hear back from some people, and then I got a, ‘Hey, I'm doing something right now, but I'll get back to you on this’ from another person—and then they didn't get back to me. So I sent a cold email to Defector, because I think what they do is really great. I emailed Tom Ley, just ‘Hey, here's what I’ve got.’ And a couple days later, I got an email back from Diana [Moskovitz], who was already working on it and she needed someone to give her a hand with it because it was this big beast of a story, just because of who Jill Ellis is and how long she's been embedded in U.S. Soccer. That was in July, and then the Defector story came out in October, so it's been a long process.
OOYL: It is a huge story, and I will say that most of what I know about it came from Brittany's tweets, and her other colleague that came out in support of her shortly after that. I have also followed you know your reporting on it but other than that, I have been surprised at how little coverage from a lot of the mainstream outlets there has been. Has that been surprising to you at all?
LR: I know the media landscape around women's sports right now is not really well equipped for news of this nature. The last time we saw comprehensive coverage around the NWSL was, unfortunately, 2021 when you had Mana Shim and Sinead Farley coming forward about what Paul Riley did. It seems like we all agreed abuse is bad, and then we get this lawsuit out of San Diego, where you have five (now six) former employees coming forward to describe what it was like working at an NWSL club at a time where this historic CBA was reached.
You have all these gains for the on-field players, but off the field in the front office, it's a nightmare. I was really surprised that it took The Athletic two days to write something. I think there was an AP article about it, and Jeff Kassouf did a write up at ESPN. It's not really a topic of conversation—we have a 24/7 soccer news network at CBS Chicago and I don't think this has come up once. I'm surprised it hasn't been on Attacking Third. It hasn't been on any of the other women's soccer podcasts. It seems like a no brainer, even to just be like, ‘Hey, this is happening.’
I would say I'm shocked at the lack of response, and I know it's a very small landscape, but if we can drop everything to report on a disastrous name roll out at BOS Nation, I think we can spare some time to talk about this lawsuit.
OOYL: I was recently asked this question about, ‘Is there a place where you think sports are really failing?’ I brought up the NWSL because you've got the U.S. Women's National Team so you have so much buy-in for women's soccer in the U.S. But the main reason I think that the NWSL is really failing has been at this level that we’re talking about: the big stories out of the NWSL continue to be abuse and workplace harassment and sexual harassment stories, one after the other after the other.
Women's sports and men's sports are different. The fandom actually cares about the values that these teams and leagues have, and the way the players are treated, and they want to support and empower women. I wanted to ask you, because you know this league a lot better than I do. Just in the amount that I've engaged in it, I sit back and wonder, ‘What is this league doing here?’ Because there seems to be a really big disconnect right between the news that we keep getting out of a lot of these front offices and locker rooms and this branding that they really want to be pushing forward for the fans.
LR: It feels like we are still making some young league mistakes that should have been handled already. We are getting to this point where the league is expanding1. It's growing very quickly, and there are things around the sport that are not necessarily growing with it. And I think media is a big part of that.
For all the explosive growth in the boardroom and these multi-million dollar valuations, we're not really seeing that same investment in the media space. That feels like an industry-wide problem, but there's not much of a dedicated coverage to the sport. I do think that the media is there to hold people accountable. And it's like, if you can't be accountable to your fans, if you can't be accountable to the media, then who are you going to be accountable to? That is one of the frustrations around this period of explosive growth, is people who are just seeing the dollar signs and not thinking about impacts on the community.
I feel like the Boston NWSL announcement is ticking every box here that we keep bringing up: you have these people coming into a new space that had an NWSL team before, and for their big launch date they decided that their hook was “too many balls.” And it's just like, did you talk to anyone here?
OOYL: Oh my god, when I tell you that that event was one of the most bizarre things I've ever been to, it felt like one big practical joke that was being played.
LR: It's also part of the Red Stars rebrand too—I get that you want to make your big splash and you want to have this moment of putting your flag in the ground, but it's like do you need to call a branding office in upstate New York to help you with your rebrand in Chicago? It does seem like the fans who have been here are feeling like an afterthought.
It feels like there was a page turned when Angel City came out with their announcement and it does feel like everyone's chasing that big, shiny thing that Angel City is doing over there. But Angel City did something that was for LA, and it was problematic in the same way—they weren't necessarily plugged into the community as much at the outset. I think they're doing a much better job now, but in the very beginning there was a lot of roasting of Angel City for being this venture capitalist look at ‘what if there was a way for soccer to to be played in Los Angeles,’ and this really suave and stylized VSCO filter presentation.
OOYL: The last thing I want to ask you about, because it's both related to what we've been talking about with the league and its growth and trying to market itself, but I think also tapping into something that Gal Pal Sports saw at the beginning, which is that sports can be fun and silly and there can be drama and there are personalities here. What do you think about The OffSeason, as a show but also conceptually as a direction for this league to go?
LR: I was excited from the start for that show, as someone who loves the NWSL and watching The Challenge for sporty people living in a house. It felt like this was right up my alley. A lot of my gripes with it are not necessarily to do with the content itself. Like, I don't know why it's on Twitter. I think that is a silly decision. Don't put it on Twitter. But for the show itself, I was really interested in the conversations [between players] that were behind the curtain, things like Lo'eau Labonta’s contract. I love seeing the inside baseball to it all. For the casual viewer, I think this is a good introduction to get to know some of these players who might not be on your team and you may not know much about them.
I think it's a cool thing that Midge Purse did to just be like, ‘I'm going to make this OffSeason thing happen and create this environment where we can have this high-tech, high impact, high reps training environment.
OOYL: Alexis Ohanian has alluded to potentially trying to do a WNBA version of this (they’re going to be in Miami for Unrivaled this offseason, and that’s where The OffSeason filmed its NWSL players. Could they be filming during Unrivaled’s run? Who knows!). The reason I bring up the W is because that league is known more for having rivalries and drama and people who have dated and don't like each other. Even the ‘Welcome to the W’ commercial they put out was a lot of high conflict, high rivalry stuff.
I feel like NWSL branding has done a lot to be like, ‘We're all friends here,’ a lot more ‘women supporting women’ vibes. You don't see as much of the drama between players as part of how the league is marketed, or even with how the players represent themselves publicly. So I'm interested to see if The OffSeason can help any of this come out, because I think those are storylines that interest fans. It's a great way to get more people into the NWSL.
LR: The W is so far ahead of the NWSL when it comes to coverage, storylines, all that stuff. I'm hoping that this [show] opens the door to more of that for the NWSL. I think it's really tricky, because we don't really get to see those rivalries happen in the NWSL. Part of that is we don't have the coverage. Like, there are no beat writers that I know of in the NWSL who are getting paid full-time to follow one team. If you have anyone who's working for a publication and covering an NWSL team, that's usually as part of a collection of other sports teams that they're covering in their city (shout out to Marisa Ingemi for doing the damn thing no matter what city she's in. She's like, ‘I'm writing about women's sports, and that's that’). When you have constant coverage, you get more of those storylines.
We're only a couple years in now to having regular nationally televised games on a major network, so it's gonna take time for the storytelling to catch up. I do think it's good that the athletes are so tapped into the internet and social media and they can choose to share what they want to share with people. If we ever get The OffSeason to be like an on-season show where we follow a team, I think that would open the door even more.
OOYL: I know Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe have been following a few pro women’s sports athletes for a reality show, so it'll be interesting to see. But something I do appreciate about The OffSeason, because it's not affiliated with a team or the league directly2, their social media accounts have been able to post snarky reactions to the goings-on. They posted a reaction tweet to the “too many balls” campaign, they did the communist tweet to the Red Stars rebrand, and took shots at Alexi Lalas and Korbin Albert. They're able to actually be a little petty, which I like and I think fans like, too.
LR: We used to get a little bit of the pettiness between [team social media] admins. But people move on in their jobs and the legacy doesn't necessarily continue. So we just have a bunch of really polite social media accounts for our teams. Although we did get the one tweet from Portland after they beat Orlando. So, we got something.
You can follow Gal Pal Sports on X, Bluesky, Instagram, or TikTok. You can also follow Ryder on Bluesky or TikTok.
Earlier this month, Denver was announced as the next expansion team, making them the 16th NWSL team.
Though the league was happy to send out a press release taking credit for their viewership numbers.
Love! Thank you to Gal Pal Sports for following and reporting on the San Diego Wave. It has barely been covered here in San Diego.