New Name for the Next Era

The journey to our new name has been a long one, and we are first and foremost grateful to our fans for their patience as we land this process and bring it home. No professional club can create a new name overnight, and this new name had to fit with our mission, vision, and core values - a commitment to fierce competition with the ambition to establish a generational legacy of winning and the humility to understand that you make history through the grit of day by hardworking day, mile by unrelenting mile. This is a club where everyone should feel welcome, where we embrace the whole city, where we build something bigger than ourselves.

The first step the club took was to listen to fans and catalogue as much of that reaction as possible. In an initial public survey, which was taken by 1,500 fans and soccer brand professionals, we gathered over 500 name suggestions and feedback from social media, survey respondents, and respected advisors, including people with deep experience in the women’s soccer community.

From that initial survey, we sent out invites to over 400 people who indicated they would be interested to attend smaller listening sessions, where they could go into more detail about their feedback.

From the initial list of 500 suggestions, we collaborated with brand leaders in the women’s soccer community to whittle down those 500 responses to a shortlist of 14 names. This was an iterative process, beginning with clear eliminations, then going back to the new list and cutting it down again, and again. Many names - some popular - were unavailable for legal or trademark reasons, while others missed the majority of our guiding criteria.

With our shortlist in hand, we turned to quantitative testing. Testing was done through an external analytics and market research firm which surveyed upwards of 1,000 including all subgroups, with 400 in the core testing group, a statistically significant number of respondents with a low margin of error for our population size and purposes. These respondents were all 18+, had displayed interest in Boston women’s soccer from a previous survey, and contained subgroups such as LGBTQ+ sports fans and Hispanic Boston sports fans.

Among the respondents, our new name was a clear winner in every single category by a statistically significant margin. Concurrently, we ran feedback sessions with our 31 brand advisors, including Kati Fernandez, Senior Director of Development at ESPN; Molly Goodwin, assistant coach of the Boston Renegades; Allison Feaster, former WNBA and Vice President of Team Operations & Organizational Growth for the Boston Celtics; a.t. furuya, Director of Education at Athlete Ally, Chanel Keenan, intersectionality consultant and disability in sports advocate; and Jasmine Robinson, managing partner at Monarch Collective. Our advisors consistently ranked our new name in their top three names.

With our new name emerging as the winner amongst all testing groups, we ran final trademark searches to make sure the name was clear for use and did final rounds of listening sessions with select fans, stakeholders, advisors, and team members to note any last-minute flags and to gauge its reception surrounded by additional storytelling.

We hope that the information in this blog helps to convey just how seriously the club has taken this process, with the hundreds of hours and myriad emotions that have been poured into this decision. And we hope that our fans will take our name with them into the future, where we’ll build a club and a shared history together, for all of Boston.