Joanna Lohman, known for her blonde mohawk, retired from the National Women’s Soccer League in 2019.

Esther Ciammachilli / DCist

Joanna Lohman once revered former National Women’s Soccer League coach Paul Riley. In her book released earlier this year, Raising Tomorrow’s Champions, the former Washington Spirit midfielder included an extremely favorable sidebar about Riley, who she played for when he coached the Philadelphia Independence. She wrote things like, “Where has this guy been all my life?” and “The game needs more Paul Rileys.” But that was before the news about Riley’s alleged sexual predation came to light. 

An explosive story by the Athletic in September featured former players Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim accusing Riley, who coached them on the Portland Thorns, of sexual harassment and misconduct. Riley denied these allegations. The scandal unraveled to reveal the league had failed on its promise to protect players and ensure a safe work environment for all women, and eventually led to the resignation of former NWSL commissioner Lisa Baird.

Lohman’s book will now include a rewrite of the section that mentions Riley. She issued a statement last week saying, “After recently learning and listening to the stories of Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim, I instantly realized Paul had a true dark side.”

As she processed the allegations against her former mentor, another NWSL scandal hit Lohman close to home. Richie Burke, former head coach of the Washington Spirit was fired in September after a league investigation found he created a toxic workplace culture for female employees. Burke has denied the allegations, which were first reported by the Washington Post. He and Riley are two of four former coaches, all men, who’ve left or been fired from the NWSL for similar allegations in the last four months.

Lohman retired in 2019, Burke’s first season with the Spirit, and only trained with him for the pre-season. But having watched how the Spirit declined from the start of the 2019 season to the end, she says she could tell that something was wrong. Now, she calls the allegations “not shocking.”

“I would often attend practices and help the team any way that I could,” Lohman tells WAMU/DCist. “And I often found that the way Richie spoke to players, the way that he treated players, they weren’t a team that was full of confidence. They were a team that was mostly afraid to make mistakes.”

The Burke saga wasn’t the only scandal to scar the Spirit this season. Steve Baldwin, former managing partner of the team, resigned recently, and announced last week that he will sell his stake in the team. Demands for Baldwin to sell his shares have echoed throughout the Spirit universe since the Burke scandal began. Baldwin also caused friction when he hired former D.C. United head coach Ben Olsen as the team’s new president, following an internal power struggle among Spirit owners.

Lohman herself entered the women’s soccer world during a tumultuous time for the sport. A native of Silver Spring, she was just coming out of college at Penn State in 2003, and expected to go top five in the draft for the Women’s United Soccer Association, the league that started after the historic 1999 FIFA World Cup win by the U.S. Women’s National Team.

But the league folded in 2003 after three seasons that saw financial struggles, low game attendance, and a lack of television broadcasting rights. “That dream was shattered,” Lohman recalls. “Like many women’s professional soccer players, you always have to have a Plan B.” She eventually ended up on a plane to Europe in search of professional soccer opportunities abroad.

In Europe, “Most of the women’s teams are supported by the men’s side, and the men’s side makes a lot of money,” Lohman says. “You have the stability of knowing that the team is going to be there year-in and year-out. But you don’t have the support necessarily.”

And, Lohman says, women were sometimes treated like second-class citizens. For example, when she played on a women’s team in Spain, they were forced to train at 8:00 at night because the men’s, and youth boy’s teams received higher priority when it came to field time. She also says that there were times when the women weren’t paid when the team struggled financially. In Sweden, she recalls, there were games with barely 100 fans in the stands. “It wasn’t a glamorous lifestyle,” she admits.

The lack of financial stability meant Lohman, like many other professional female athletes, had to fall back on a job outside of her sport to make ends meet. She began selling commercial real estate to fill in the pay gap. “[I] almost retired from the game, because it’s so difficult as a female athlete many times to want to continue to pursue your dreams, but financially not get compensated for it,” she says.

The pay gap in professional soccer persists to this day in Europe and the U.S. It’s stark when comparing the NWSL and Major League Soccer, the men’s side. The average base salary for senior roster players in the MLS is currently $398,725, according to the MLS Players Association.

The NWSL isn’t as transparent about the actual salaries of its players, but according to women’s soccer outlet The Equalizer, the maximum base salary for a player in the NWSL is $52,500. That’s a five percent increase over 2020. (Salaries in both the men’s and women’s leagues vary.)

Lohman finally got the chance to come home to the states to play in the Women’s Professional Soccer league, the second iteration of a women’s league in the U.S., which debuted in 2009. But the WPS folded in 2012 after a costly litigation with former Florida magicJack owner Dan Borislow.

The NWSL came along in 2013, and after several years of country-hopping to play the game, Lohman finally had the chance to come back and play soccer in the states. She played midfield for the Washington Spirit from 2015 to 2018, where she played under coach Mark Parsons.

“It was a dream come true for me,” Lohman says of that time. “I lived for a decade around the country and the world, just out of a bag, trying to follow my dreams. So to be able to come home and play for the Washington Spirit, in a city that I loved and in front of my friends and family, that was really the capstone of my career.” Her first two seasons there were her best ever, she says. In 2016, she played in all 20 of the Spirit’s regular season games, and scored the opening goal of that NWSL season with a dramatic bicycle kick.

After nearly a decade of success as the longest running women’s professional soccer league in America, the NWSL is now in turmoil. But Lohman is optimistic. She says she thinks the NWSL is headed in a healthier direction now that players have found the courage to speak up, and are working with the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association, the union representing players.

“In the past, the players have had no leverage. The contracts, the way the league is structured, players are just pawns in the game with owners and with coaches,” Lohman says. “We’re at a point now where the player’s association is very unified and they are renegotiating a collective bargaining agreement where the players will take the power back.”

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