Mired in a slump and plagued by a lack of scoring, the ninth-place San Diego Wave announced Monday they have parted ways with coach Casey Stoney.
Assistant Paul Buckle will serve as interim head coach while the team looks for a long-term replacement.
The only coach the club has ever known, Stoney was hired by Wave President Jill Ellis ahead of the club’s first season in 2022. Six months ago, the club and Stoney agreed to a contract extension through 2027 with a mutual option for 2028. Financial terms of the deal, including any potential buyout figures, were not made public.
Stoney went 24-16-18 as the club’s head coach. This year’s team is 3-5-6.
“We are immensely grateful to Casey for her commitment to our club and the positive impact she has had both on and off the pitch,” Ellis said Monday. “Over the past seasons, Casey has guided us to significant milestones, and her contributions have been instrumental in laying a strong foundation on which to build. The decision to part ways was very hard and not made in haste, but given the ambition of this club, and where we are in our season, we felt a change was necessary at this time.”
A year after posting the best regular-season record in the National Women’s Soccer League, the Wave are tied for ninth place in the 14-team league. The Wave are winless on the road through eight matches.
Following Saturday’s scoreless match in Houston, capping a trip in which the team played three games in eight days, the coach criticized the NWSL’s scheduling as “extremely unfair” to her players.
The parting with Stoney, 42, comes 12 days after the club announced it had hired sporting director and general manager Camille Ashton, who held a similar job with the Kansas City Current.
The Current are having a highly entertaining season, having scored a league-high 37 goals in 14 matches. They are tied for first place.
By contrast, the Wave’s offensive struggles have produced soccer that’s not highly evocative of the beautiful game. Only twice has the team scored more than once in a match. The Wave have scored 12 total goals in 14 contests, a figure that ranks 12th in the league.
The scoring punch expected from three veterans hasn’t materialized. The Wave have yet to receive a goal from Alex Morgan, the 34-year-old striker who scored a league-best 15 goals in 2022 and seven goals last year. Morgan was sidelined for a month by a left ankle injury sustained April 19 and missed Saturday’s match due to an excused absence. Also scoreless this season are María Sánchez, a forward obtained in an expensive trade with the Houston Dash in April, and midfielder Savannah McCaskill, an offseason free agent signee who was Angel City’s top career scorer with 11 goals over the past two seasons.
Opposing coaches and players have often praised the Wave as well-organized, especially on defense, while also expressing some surprise this year at the results.
“We know that San Diego was a great team,” Spirit interim coach Adrián González said after a recent 1-1 tie between the clubs in D.C. “I don’t know why they don’t have more points because they have a pretty good roster with great players and lots of national team experience. They are competing very good.”
Stoney entered 2024 as the longest-tenured coach in the league. She led San Diego to its first two trophies, the 2023 NWSL Shield and the 2024 Challenge Cup. Stoney’s 2022 and ’23 clubs reached the NWSL semifinals, losing each match on a shutout.
Stoney joined San Diego from Manchester United, where she served as the first-ever head coach of Manchester Women in 2018 following a professional career as a central defender.
Her endorsem*nt of Naomi Girma was instrumental to the Wave selecting the former Stanford star first overall in their first NWSL draft. Under the guidance of Stoney, who captained England’s national team and played the same back-line position, Girma has won the NWSL’s Defender of the Year award in both seasons and become a mainstay for the U.S. National Team.
Since joining the Wave at age 17, midfielder-forward Jaedyn Shaw has evolved into one of the NWSL’s top players and a rising force for the U.S. Women’s National Team.
Buckle was a member of the coaching staff for Wave FC in 2022 as an interim assistant coach, when he helped the club to a 10-6-6 record as the Wave became the first-ever NWSL expansion team to reach the playoffs. Buckle was the former head coach and technical director of Sacramento Republic FC for three seasons (2015-17). He led the club to playoffs each year, including winning the Western Conference in 2016. He holds a UEFA Pro Coaching License and U.S. Pro Coaching License.
The team said it has begun a global search for a long-term head coach.
