Bay FC just proved that new leadership can completely change the energy of a team. In their season opener against Denver Summit FC on Saturday, the Bay Area squad absolutely dominated with a 2-1 victory that felt like watching a completely different team compared to last year’s frustrating campaign.

Forward Alex Pfeiffer got things started in just eight minutes with a confident left-footed strike into the bottom corner. The 18-year-old, who became the NWSL’s youngest goal-scorer at 16, hadn’t found the back of the net in nearly two years, so this early goal was huge for her confidence. Just 23 minutes later, Pfeiffer set up Joelle Anderson for Bay FC’s second goal, and suddenly the team had accomplished something that felt impossible during stretches of 2025: scoring multiple goals in a single half.

Last season was brutal. Bay FC finished with just 26 goals, the lowest in the entire NWSL, and managed to score more than one goal in a game only five times all season. They went eight months without scoring twice in a match. So yeah, this win is a big deal.

Newly hired coach Emma Coates, who previously coached England’s U-23 women’s team, has clearly brought a different tactical approach to PayPal Park. The team controlled possession for 63 percent of the match and took 14 more shots than Denver. Most importantly, Coates seems to have figured out how to get this team attacking confidently.

“Getting a win right off the bat is huge for us, it’s huge for the locker room”, said Anderson, a San Jose native who scored her fifth Bay FC goal on Saturday. Even Coates herself wasn’t totally satisfied after the match. “We probably should have had another one. At least two more today”, she said.

The tactical shift is real too. Coates is moving away from the long-ball approach that characterized the Albertín Montoya era. Instead, she’s focused on building possession through the midfield, which creates sharper transitions and more methodical attacking play. Claire Hutton, the team’s biggest offseason pickup and a rising U.S. women’s national team star, anchored the midfield beautifully and completely changed the flow of the game.

Look, it’s just one game, and Denver was playing as an expansion team with 10 players for over 60 minutes after a red card. You can’t write the entire season narrative based on this. But what we saw on Saturday was a team that finally has a coherent attacking identity, a midfield that knows how to control the game, and players who believe they can score goals again. That’s a massive shift from a year ago.

Bay FC broke a 15-game winless streak that completely derailed their 2025 season. Whether they can sustain this is the real question, but at least now there’s actual reason to be excited about what’s coming next.