Hello, this is full-time with Meg Linnehan. That's me.

The NWSell Challenge Cup is a wrap, and the

Houston Dash are your champions of the summer tournament. Today, I'm joined by three players

from Houston on the pod that makes that a new record for our segments. But Rachel Daly,

Christy Mewis, and Chey Groom have survived the bubble. They've survived the Challenge Cup,

and they have survived the celebrations.

Then, co-executive director of the NWSL Players Association, Brooke Elby, is on to discuss the

success of the tournament as a whole. We're recording this episode on Tuesday, July 28th, so let's

get into the news this week. There's some more good numbers on the Challenge Cup front.

The ratings from the final are in, and there's another bump up from the opener back in June.

The game between the Dash and the Chicago Red Stars average 653,000 viewers on CBS,

which is a 14% rise from the 572,000 viewers for the opener,

and now stands as the new record for NWSL

viewership. The Challenge Cup also concluded without a single positive COVID-19 test for a player

before the final, the league honored all of the people behind the scenes who helped ensure

that results from their medical task force to the cleaning crews in Utah.

Finally, we still don't exactly know what's next for the end of this cell in 2020, but in an email

to the players sent by Commissioner Lisa Baird, she gave the players a date to return to their home

markets and also said that any post-challenge Cup season would conclude by October 17th.

You can read more about that story at the

athletic. That's one that I reported out with my coworker Pablo Marr. So let's actually start

with this segment with the Houston Dash. We've talked a lot about celebrations.

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