The Maryland Charm and California Palms meet Saturday at 5 p.m. ET at Subaru Park in Chester, Pennsylvania, for the first standalone championship game in Women's Lacrosse League history. The game airs on ESPN and the ESPN App.
Maryland clinched its spot in the final on the field first, closing the regular season on July 17 with a 21-17 win over the Boston Guard. California needed one more step: the Palms beat Boston again, 21-9, this past Saturday to claim the second championship berth. California midfielder Ally Mastroianni reportedly called her shot back in April, telling her coach during training camp — held on the same Philadelphia Union grounds surrounding Subaru Park — that the team would be back there in August. She was right.
It's a fitting rematch either way. Back in May, the Charm outlasted the Palms 18-17 in overtime at Loyola's Ridley Athletic Complex in Baltimore, the first overtime game in WLL history. The two teams entered that game from opposite directions — California coming off a runner-up finish in the winter Championship Series, Maryland having been eliminated in the round-robin round of that same event. Both losses, in different ways, fed directly into the seasons that brought them back to this point. Philadelphia's own ties to the sport run deep through this matchup, too: of the WLL's four rosters, 18 players and two coaches have connections to the region, and city officials marked the occasion with a kickoff event ahead of the game.
There's individual stakes on the line as well. The WLL will hand out its first Most Valuable Player award next month alongside the PLL's end-of-year honors, and Saturday's game doubles as one last audition for several of the league's front-runners.
Maryland's Case
The Charm's captain is Alex Aust Holman, and the roster around her is loaded with Terps ties — Grace Griffin, Aurora Cordingley, and Megan Douty-Marino all played collegiately in College Park. But the season's real story has been a wave of newcomers stepping into featured roles alongside them: rookies Jenika Cuocco, Sam Forrest, and Brigid Duffy have all been significant contributors, and Sam Apuzzo, the No. 1 pick in this year's Supplemental Draft, has carved out a role on the attack.
Ashley Humphrey made her presence felt immediately, scoring nine points in the May 29 season opener, and has kept it up all year — she and Duffy have each reached 20 points this season, tied for second in the league behind Boston's Rachel Clark. Duffy's biggest moment came July 11 against New York, when a replay review upheld a late goal of hers with under two minutes to play, turning what looked like a non-score into the winning margin in a 16-15 win. Sydni Black has been steady all year too, leading the team with 14 goals across four games.
Defensively, Abby Bosco leads the entire league in caused turnovers with 12, and figures to draw the primary defensive assignment against California's top scorers Saturday — arguably the most important individual matchup of the game. Maryland also runs a two-goalie system, with Caylee Waters getting the bulk of the starts.
California's Case
The Palms' path here included a scare of their own. After trailing by four at halftime in a June 6 loss to Boston in Charlotte that put them in danger of an 0-2 start, California has outscored opponents 41-22 since. Coach Maddy Buss leaned into her scheme of playing exclusively two-way midfielders rather than reworking it, betting that the team's depth — six players finished the regular season in double-digit points, a league high — would carry them even on nights when top scorers went quiet. That's roughly what happened in the May overtime loss to Maryland, when both Mastroianni and Jill Smith were held without a goal and the Palms still nearly won anyway.
Attacker Emma LoPinto, a second-round pick in the Supplemental Draft, leads the team with 19 points from the X-attack spot, working as something close to a point guard for a California offense built to play in transition. Ellie Masera leads the team in goals with 15 and has talked about the group's depth as its defining trait — nine different Palms players scored in the regular-season finale alone. Several California players, including defender Jordan Dean, spent the week before that finale representing their countries at the World Championship in Tokyo, adding a layer of difficulty to preparation that the team managed largely through group chats and late-night video calls with coaches.
What to Watch
Beyond the individual matchups, this is a game between the league's two most complete rosters, and the May overtime thriller suggests it won't be decided easily. Whichever team controls the draw circle and limits turnovers in transition is likely to have the edge — both squads can score in bunches, which was exactly the story of their first meeting. For a league playing just its second season, Saturday is also a genuine milestone: the first time a WLL season has built to a single winner-take-all final of its own, rather than sharing a stage with the men's PLL championship series earlier in the year.
Where to Watch
First draw: 5:00 PM ET at Subaru Park, Chester, Pennsylvania
TV: ESPN and the ESPN App