A little over a month before the 2020 NWSL preseason kicked off, Shea Groom was nearly 3,000 miles away from her club, the Tacoma-based Reign FC.
In New York City for an offseason internship with Budweiser, the midfielder had just finished a rooftop game of pickup soccer and was walking the streets an hour before midnight when she received career-changing news.
“I’ll never forget,” Groom says.
Groom was informed that she, along with teammate Megan Oyster, had been traded to the Houston Dash. For the third straight offseason, Groom would need to uproot her life, moving across the country to join her fourth professional team since being drafted into the NWSL out of Texas A&M in 2015.
Four teams in six years is hard on any athlete, let alone ones in the NWSL, where annual salaries start at only $20,000. But for Groom, this trade also meant leaving a club that was coming off its second straight playoff appearance for one that had never even played in an elimination game.
Through six years in the league, it was no secret that the Dash’s history was rough: 40 wins, 63 losses, 26 draws, four different head coaches (including one interim) and annual major roster turnover.
“I was actually really upset and really sad. … It was a lot of tears,” Groom says of her initial reaction to the trade.
“It ended up being a way happier story than that.”
