Link: https://www.theixsports.com/the-ix-soccer/maine-wilderness-usl-w-team-is-poised-for-success/

By the time the last of the supporters have filed out of Fitzpatrick Stadium, Hannah Sirois still has hours of work ahead of her.

As the vice president of fan experience for Portland Hearts of Pine, a USL League One men’s team, Sirois is usually the last person to leave the stadium on matchdays. When kickoff is at 7 or 7:30 p.m., she sometimes doesn’t leave Fitzpatrick — or Fitzy, as locals call it — until 12:30 or 1 in the morning. Fitzpatrick is a multi-use facility, meaning that nearly everything that makes a Hearts of Pine game truly feel like a Hearts of Pine game — the local vendors’ kiosks, the kids’ activities and the other matchday attractions — has to be set up before kickoff and then packed away afterward.

It might sound like a tremendous amount of work for a third-division soccer club in Portland, Maine, because it is. But the results have been extraordinary. Since beginning play in 2025, the Hearts of Pine has become something of a local phenomenon, attracting thousands of supporters on a regular basis to Fitzy and building a following that extends well beyond Maine (at a recent match, American soccer legend Landon Donovan was in attendance, taking oyster shots with the club’s owners). The game-day atmosphere feels less like a typical lower-division sporting event and more like a spirited community gathering, with supporters showing up week after week regardless of how the club is faring.

And now, Sirois and her colleagues are preparing to do it all over again next spring, when the Maine Wildness, a women’s team, makes its debut in the pre-professional USL W League. The new club will exist under the same umbrella foundation as Hearts of Pine but will be looking to build an identity and audience of its own. And if the early response to the Maine Wildness is any indication, the appetite for the W League will be even greater than the club anticipated.

5000 season tickets is absolutely wild (pardon the pun) for pre-professional women's soccer, but there's no how they're getting past the mighty Salmon Bay when the time comes

Within an hour of the opening sale for Maine Wildness season tickets, 5,000 packages were sold. And an even more revealing number emerged — 80% of those buying the ticket packages were not already men’s season-ticket holders, but were new fans. The Maine Wildness isn’t simply inheriting the Hearts of Pine loyal following, it would appear. Instead, it seems ready to bring a different, but equally enthusiastic, audience into the fold.