Bay FC finally has a goalkeeper.
The National Women’s Soccer League completed its expansion draft on Friday night, and Bay FC made five selections to bolster its roster ahead of its inaugural season that will begin at PayPal Park in March.
Most notably, Bay FC landed 28-year-old goalie Katelyn Rowland, a former United States Women’s Youth National Team goalie who started in the 2014 U-20 World Cup. Rowland has since put together a decorated professional career in which she is one of just three players in NWSL history to have won four championships.
“Every good team needs a good goalkeeper,” said Bay FC general manager Lucy Rushton. “We’ve come into the draft having a strong feeling that we’d have a good goalkeeper available in the pool of players in this league. When we saw Katelyn’s name there it was a no brainer for us. We were really excited to see her name.”
Rowland is expected to compete for the No. 1 job, though Bay FC has been scouting some of the world’s best goalkeepers internationally and remains hopeful to bolster its roster via players overseas.
Rowland was taken with the sixth overall selection in the draft, which also included expansion team Utah Royals.
Bay FC made five picks out of a possible 12, while Utah selected only two players.
The roster now sits at 12 players. Teams are allowed to bring between 22 and 26 players to their regular season roster.
“It’s exactly where I wanted it to be,” Rushton said. “Positionally we can still see where we can bring in a couple people. International players, we have been looking abroad and want to bring in players internationally. That’s our focus now. We’ve had a good three or four solid months to acquire players in the NWSL, now we need to shift our focus internationally.”
The expansion draft offered an interesting opportunity for Bay FC, not only in that the club was allowed to select players who were left unprotected by other clubs, but also in that it allowed the expansion teams to leverage the draft as a way to acquire players ahead of time.
Rushton made five deals on Tuesday alone and seven overall as she was able to acquire players and allocation money in exchange for protection in the expansion draft.
There has been talk about the expansion draft needing an overhaul, but Rushton disagrees.
“I think it’s imperative and essential,” Rushton said. “Without it it would’ve been very difficult for us to amass a roster within the NWSL at these prices. I think having the draft made it essential for teams to move or lose players. They knew that. So we were able to do some business.
“If you take the draft away the prices for those players for an expansion team become absolutely insane because the teams know there is a need and there’s no implications on them if they don’t make the trade. It’s essential for that reason.”
Head coach Albertin Montoya made another interesting point about building out a roster: players coming to the Bay Area have to contend with Bay Area cost of living prices, and many have shown resistance to coming for that reason.
“They’re like, ‘we might have to rethink this,’” he said.
Montoya said he’s thrilled with where the roster is after the expansion draft. The club has now added a pair of electric fullbacks in Caprice Dydasco, who was their first-ever free agent signing in November, and on Friday they used their No. 1 overall pick to select Alyssa Malonson, a 24-year-old defender from OL Reign.
Malonson recently finished her collegiate career at Auburn, where she was the program’s record holder for games played and games started while earning SEC Defender of the Year and second-team All-American in her final season. She played a year professionally in Denmark before making her NWSL debut for OL Reign in June.
Rushton and Montoya said they were able to speak with all possible draft selections ahead of time, and they got the sense that Malonson really wanted to be in the Bay Area.
“She’s so exciting,” Rushton said. “Her ability and her ceiling is so high. Most importantly she fits our style of play. She’s a fullback who wants the ball. She drives with the ball, is able to come into half spaces and connect with people. To us, when we talk about positional profiles and what we’re looking for in players, she checks so many boxes.”
Bay FC has made it a point to build a roster mixed with young players and veterans.
After selecting Malonson, the club chose Tess Boade, 24, a midfielder from the North Carolina Courage, Rachel Hill, 28, a forward from San Diego Wave, Rowland, and Sierra Enge, 23, a midfielder from San Diego who won a national championship while playing for Stanford in 2019.
“Today was about finding the best players coming into our system,” Montoya said. “We were very excited with how it all came down.”
