Washington Spirit may be the No. 2 seed, but after two seasons of failing to make the NWSL playoffs after being crowned champions in 2021, recent years of underperformance have left scars. With expansion side Bay FC coming up on Sunday (streaming live on ESPN+), the Spirit are determined to make up for lost time.

This season the team has broken numerous records. The Spirit completed their best regular season since its founding in 2012, winning 18 games, scoring 51 goals and collecting 56 points – all team records. Such impressive numbers should make them favorites to win the NWSL Championship, but the players are taking nothing for granted.

“I think we’ve continued to improve every game,” Washington Spirit and USWNT star Trinity Rodman told ESPN. “I think that not only do we have strong players and a strong staff, but our base, our environment, is built very well. So even when players were injured, we still performed, and I think that’s a good sign .”

That foundation has emerged from the culture of continuous learning created by head coach Jonatan Giraldez, who joined from Barcelona ahead of the season.

Giraldez arrived with an impressive resume – having led Barcelona’s women’s team to multiple titles, including two Liga F titles, one Queen’s Cup, two Supercopas and one Champions League – and a 50-match winning streak in the Spanish league. The 32-year-old coach has brought a winning culture to the Spirit locker room. But with a mentality anchored in continuous improvement, even victory is not enough for him.

“I never like to say that if you win, you did a good job,” Giraldez told ESPN. “When you win, you have to analyze what you did badly and focus on that. It’s my method, I think it’s the best for the team. We are here to win, but we have to improve the individual performance and team performance always.”

As the team continues to improve on the field, so does the number of fans in the stands off it. In just their second year at Audi Field, the Spirit blew a regular season attendance record of 150,000 in September after just 11 games, reflecting a 45% increase in attendance across the NWSL.

Against Bay FC in March, the Spirit had the highest attendance for a home opener in history (11,734); in June they had their highest single-game attendance (19,897) against San Diego; and between June and August they had the highest three-match attendance (52,744).

“It’s so much fun to play in front of the DC fans,” midfielder Hal Hershfelt said. “I feel like even friends from other teams who play on our field say, ‘Ah, you have a great atmosphere.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I know. It’s our home field.'”

One of the reasons for the increase in fans is due to 22-year-old forward Rodman, who signed a four-year contract worth $1.1 million in 2022, making her the NWSL’s highest-paid player. She hasn’t disappointed since: this season she is the team’s co-top scorer with Ouleymata Sarr (8 goals) and her six assists rank second behind Croix Bethune (10).

Rodman is an entertainer. “I think the emotional part of my game is what makes me entertaining, and I think it makes me Trinity,” she recently told The Athletic. “I never want that to change. I never want to be a robot… I always want to be the player (that people ask), ‘What is she going to do today?'”

But despite beating them twice in the regular season, Rodman and the Spirit will have to be at their best to get through Bay FC. In May, things looked ominous after Bay lost seven of their first nine games and suffered a five-match losing streak to finish in second place while having the worst defensive record in the league (20 goals).

But the San Francisco outfit then turned things around with NWSL’s second-best record since early June (five wins and two draws from eight matches) to seal a spot in the play-offs. And the team will be powered by their African duo Asisat Oshoala and Racheal Kundananji, the latter of whom became the most expensive women’s player in the world when she joined Bay FC from Madrid CFF in February for $787,600.

“We know Oshoala’s talent; I know her quite well from Spain,” Spirit assistant coach Adrian Gonzalez, who acted as interim before Giraldez’s arrival, told ESPN. ‘She’s so powerful. Once she starts running, it’s so hard to stop her.”

Gonzalez was in charge when Spirit beat Bay FC 2-1 at Audi Field in March, and says his team rose to the challenge of stopping Oshoala well, even though they were fortunate that Kundananji missed the match due to injury.

“Our two central defenders did very well,” he added. “We needed good communication between them, to always try to cover each other and be physical with her (Oshoala), because we know that when she starts running, one against one, she is very strong. As a team we defended Oshoala very well and I was happy about that.”

Ultimately, if they want to make any progress in the playoffs, the Spirit will have to focus on the theme that has been ever-present all season: continuous improvement.

“I’ve been part of seasons where in the middle you’re the bottom half of the table, and at the end you’re the top half and vice versa,” veteran Andi Sullivan, who scored one of the goals in the 2021 championship match. final, told ESPN. “So we have to remind ourselves every day what’s important, focus on the details and focus on being a cohesive group and being a strong team. And I don’t think that has changed this summer.

“We were excited to do that in the regular season and now, going forward, get back to the usual guns blazing every day (of the playoffs).”