How I Voted in the NWSL Awards Race
/Today is the day! We’ve got our NWSL awards finalists in place, and fan voting is open until 8pm ET on Wednesday November 11th. Every race is pretty tight, and no clear favorites exist. Ballots can be found here.
How will you vote? I can’t know that. I’m not your conscience. I am a voting member of the NWSL media, however, so I can at least share how I put together my ballot.
In case you don’t know, NWSL awards balloting consists of two rounds. The first, conducted last week, weighted each voting body thusly:
Players: 50%
Head Coaches / GMs / Controlling Owners: 25%
Media: 25%
These votes determine the finalists for each category, five in each except for Rookie of the Year and Goalkeeper of the Year, which each get three.
The second voting round brings in the fans, plus another vote for the aforementioned. Things are weighted a little differently:
Players: 40%
Head Coaches / GMs / Controlling Owners: 25%
Media: 25%
Fans: 10%
That’s how the process works. Now, onto my ballot!
Most Valuable Player
Temwa Chawinga, FW, Kansas City Current
The only reason Chawinga probably won’t win is the playing time. Otherwise, her candidacy for a record third MVP trophy is airtight. Nobody impacts her team the way Chawinga does. Nobody has ever impacted her team the way that Chawinga has. Adjusted for red cards, Kansas City’s npxGD/96 with Chawinga in the starting lineup and playing a full half was 0.85. Without her? 0.35. Small sample caveat here, but we actually have a somewhat decent sample size to work with, as Chawinga missed 13 starts due to injury and WAFCON duty. That’s close to half the season without Chawinga in the starting XI and going at least 45 minutes.
She has that kind of impact going forward, too. Kansas City’s odds of winning the NWSL Championship decrease twenty percentage points when Chawinga is removed from the lineup. I’m not sure Lionel Messi ever swung his team’s fortunes that much by his very presence.
She’s not just an élite attacker, but somehow an elite defender, too. The Current conceded the second-smallest amount of g+ in the left-sided zones of the final third, aka Chawinga pressing territory. She also generated the most on-ball defensive g+ in the defensive half of any forward in the league. I’m sorry, WHAT?! She can press like a banshee, score at will, and also track all the way back to make critical defensive interventions alongside her back line? There is simply no one like this woman, period.
Even the playing-time argument falls apart in Chawinga’s case, given the whole WAFCON of it all. It was CAF that decided to pull the plug on the March tournament at the last minute, pushing it to July. Given Chawinga’s injury recovery in the first month of the campaign, she likely would have gained 600-700 minutes in July and August without losing more than expected in March and April. I don’t like penalizing players for things over which they have no control. She played 86% of the minutes for which she was available, so it’s not like she took it easy when her number was called.
That third-place ranking on total Net g+ is three one hundredths of a point off the top spot. Think about that: Chawinga played 700 fewer minutes than Croix Bethune, and 900 fewer minutes than Sophia Wilson. She still essentially tied them on overall contribution to her team. It is simply unreal.
Need a viz to drive it home? You’re welcome.
I understand that people might have Chawinga fatigue, or hold the lost minutes against her. Maybe you somehow believed that Ashley Sanchez, Trinity Rodman, or Sophia Wilson was better this year. I can’t fault you for casting your vote another way.
But remember this when the dust of history settles: we have never seen the likes of Temwa Chawinga before, and we may never see her like again. Treasure these moments while you have them, because like all the defenders Temwa Chawinga has ever faced, you’ll be forced to live with the truth that those moments are gone in an instant.
The Rest of My Ballot
Temwa Chawinga
Trinity Rodman
Sophia Wilson
Ashley Sanchez
Janine Sonis
Rookie of the Year
Jordynn Dudley, FW, Gotham FC
The first thing that must be said is that Trinity Byars should be eligible for this award. The San Diego Wave striker essentially missed all of 2025 after signing with the club out of college, thanks to an ACL tear. She was plugged into garbage-time minutes in the Wave’s quarterfinal loss to Portland last November, and had been named to the bench in their season finale the week before. Because of that, she was no longer considered a rookie in 2026.
Boooooooooo! She had a banger of a season, and hit the playing-time threshold to qualify, too. In her absence, we thankfully have an equally worthy candidate, but like Croix Bethune’s 2024 win, she will likely be picking up this honor while on the trainer’s table. Dudley fractured her foot in September, and missed the final few games of the season.
She was an absolute dynamo when she was available, however. She was the beating heart of Gotham’s attack for much of the summer, and though the raw goal and assist totals might not show it, her underlying performances spoke for themselves.
Dudley is going neck-and-neck with Houston Dash no. 10 Kat Rader, who bagged 10 goals and might be the soft favorite to win. But Rader’s 10 goals were underpinned by a couple penalties and 5.3 non-penalty xG. Dudley was and remains the stickier player, and Gotham surely wish they had her skills available to them in the playoffs.
Rest of My Ballot
Jordynn Dudley
Mimi Van Zanten
Kat Rader
Midfielder of the Year
Croix Bethune, AM, Kansas City Current
I hate that this has mostly become the “best attacker we can count as a midfielder” award, but this year, Bethune was simply undeniable. She took a minute to find her place in a new team with a new head coach as the year started, but once things began to cohere (and especially once Ally Sentnor shipped off to Angel City), Bethune became the best lock-picker both off the dribble and with the pass. She also happened to be the best defending midfielder in the league relative to her role. In other words, she did it all. The fact that she wasn’t an MVP finalist is a bit of scandal, frankly. (I voted her 2nd for MVP in my first-round ballot.)
I would understand if one wished to honor Kenza Dali’s progressive passing and positional discipline, or Rose Lavelle’s Rose Lavelle-ness, or Jaelin Howell’s Jaelin Howell-ness. Mina Tanaka is a big reason the Utah Royals made the playoffs in the first place. Worthy candidates, all.
None of them touched Bethune’s two-way greatness this year, it’s as simple as that.
Rest of My Ballot
Croix Bethune
Kenza Dali
Rose Lavelle
Mina Tanaka
Jaelin Howell
Defender of the Year
Kennedy Wesley, CB, San Diego Wave
This award is always the toughest, and the one where data-driven evaluation can drift the furthest from scouting/eye test evaluations, not to mention fan narratives. I personally don’t like folding attacking elements of a defender’s game into the equation, either. Nowhere else among the outfield awards is the work of defending put front and center. Shouldn’t we recognize that in the voting process?
I actually voted Wesley’s center back partner Kristen McNabb my top choice in the first round, but it’s hard to go wrong with Wesley, even if she got more of the spotlight thanks to her age and U.S. women’s national team profile. The 25-year-old formed with McNabb the best defensive center back pairing in the league. On and off the ball, even after adjusting for the relatively small number of on-ball defensive opportunities they had, Wesley was close to peerless. A berth on the plane to Brazil next summer feels more and more likely, largely due to her 2026 with the Wave.
Janine Sonis’s goalscoring got the attention, and it will probably lock her up for this award. But she was defensively excellent too, in fairness. So were Kate Del Fava and Tierna Davidson. Sonis is likely to win, but any of those four would be deserving of the trophy. For me, it’s Wesley all the way.
Rest of My Ballot
Kennedy Wesley
Kate Del Fava
Janine Sonis
Tierna Davidson
Sarah Gorden
Goalkeeper of the Year
Jane Campbell, Houston Dash
Nothing like a good-ol’-fashioned blitz to get you back on top. Campbell was under siege all year thanks to a fragile Houston defense, facing over five-and-a-half shots on target per game. Only Katie Atkinson and Jordyn Bloomer faced more. While the quality of those shots shook out to about average when all was said and done, Campbell stood on her head to ensure that the Dash’s defensive record looked a lot better than it deserved to. She kicked in neutral-to-decent passing and box control performances, on top of it.
It was the shotstopping that separated her from the pack, in the end. Campbell could win her second GoY statue this year, and would join the likes of AD Franch and Aubrey Kingsbury as multi-time winners.
Silkowitz and Berger would both be fair shouts; Berger’s won it before, and is probably the best keeper in the league across a large, multi-season sample. Silkowitz had a breakout campaign with Bay FC, and is firmly in the USWNT pipeline. Silkowitz was a bit worse on her passing and handling punches and parries, while Berger had a couple of dicey moments sweeping outside her box. From a descriptive, “what you did” point of view, Campbell held it down in basically all areas of the box. She’s a worthy winner.
Rest of My Ballot
Jane Campbell
Jordan Silkowitz
Ann-Katrin Berger
Coach of the Year
Jonas Eidevall, San Diego Wave
Coaches don’t matter as much as we think they do, and whatever success came the Wave’s way almost entirely came down to the players. This is the dumbest of all sports awards, and winning it is a Schrödinger’s box: you did and did not deserve it in equal measure.
Every team has a case. Juan Carlos Amoros has overseen a goat-to-GOAT transformation of the Gotham franchise, and the team won its first-ever Shield this year. The Utah Royals earned their first-ever playoff berth, and given the lack of superstars in the lineup, perhaps Jimmy Coenraets’s player management and motivational techniques helped get them over the line.
The Wave overperformed their preseason projections the most, both on raw points and expected points, and while the breakouts of Kimmi Ascanio, Lia Godfrey and Trinity Byars have the most to do with that, coaches can have an impact on defensive tactics, so Eidevall seems as good a choice as any. (Even there, he got lucky by having his back-four stay healthy from beginning to end, IDK)
Rest of My Ballot
Jonas Eidevall
Jimmy Coenraets
Juan Carlos Amoros
We’ll break down Best and 2nd XI’s at a future date, but here is the Best XI and Second Best XI according to net g+.
