Hi, Meg Linnehan here. I'm your friendly neighborhood staff writer at The Athletic

covering women's soccer, including the U.S. women's national team and the National

Women's Soccer League. I'm super excited to tell you that we're taking our coverage to a whole new level this month with a weekly podcast on women's soccer. Starting Thursday,

June 25th, on full-time with Meg Linnehan, and I promise at some point I will probably get used

to my name being in the title. I'll fill you in on the major stories every week, but my main goal

is taking my love of future

stories full of nuance and detail and bringing that energy to full-time. Plus, I'll have plenty of interviews with insiders from around the game, including my fellow writers in the soccer world. It's not just what's happening on the field either, even as the NWSL prepares to kick off the Challenge Cup in Utah at the end of the month. I've never shied away from the bigger picture and full-time will be more of the same as we tackle the culture, context, and conversations about the sport here in America and beyond. If you want to hear full-time ad-free, head to Theathletic.com or the athletic app. If you haven't subscribed yet, well, it's the perfect time for it to make sure that you catch all of our Challenge Cup coverage.

Plus, we have a great deal for 40% off a new annual subscription if you head to Theathletic.com slash full time.

Again, that's Theathletic.com slash full time.

You get the show ad free.

You get all of our women's soccer coverage, plus everything

else we have to offer. But no matter what, you can always listen to full-time with Megalindahan

every week on Apple, Spotify, or your podcast platform of choice. Hello everybody and welcome to the Total Soccer show. My name is Taylor Rockwell. Daryl Grove, not with me today. He is up in Boston. So instead, I'm going to be talking to

Kim McCauley of SB Nations All 411. Kim has written some great previews of the NWSL Challenge

Cup, which is kicking off this weekend. So we get into the favorites, the maybe not favorites,

the players she's most excited to see, as well as obviously some conversation about the Orlando

pride, about the pandemic situation as a whole lots and lots in the conversation so with that

introducing done I will say Kim thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today

yeah no problem how are you doing I am I'm I'm doing okay I think Manchester United just

destroyed Chef United and that made me feel better I'm slightly apprehensive about the NWSL Challenge Cup though. So maybe at the end of this, I'll feel even better. But I'm mostly excited that I've actually hit record at this point since I think last time we had you on in Chicago, I did not hit record. This time I started off by not hitting record because I'm the best. But I appreciate you putting up with it.

And now I hope you are ready to talk all things at NWSL. Absolutely. Sweet. So we're going to talk a bit

about the Orlando Pride having to remove themselves from the competition. But I kind of want to

...