Seventy-six days. That’s all that remains before the whistle blows and the Northern Super League kicks off its first match, one that will mark the arrival of Canada’s first-ever professional women’s soccer league—and for Halifax, the first pro women’s soccer team in Halifax Tides FC. The weeks, days and hours are bleeding away so quickly that, at the Tides’ Burnside office, it seems like every day has come with some other feat of planning Jiu-jitsu: A new signing announcement, a new player arrival, a new mascot reveal. (One Tides staffer joked in an email with The Coast that head coach Lewis Page and sporting director Amit Batra have been “in meetings till the end of time.”)
It’s hard to believe that it was scarcely 14 months ago when six women, including Halifax Tides co-founders Courtney Sherlock and Miriam Zitner, met in a room to sketch out the possibility of bringing a pro women’s soccer team to Halifax—the first professional women’s team of any kind to call Nova Scotia’s capital home.
“I realized that we really just needed someone to take the reins on signing the team and committing some money to it,” Sherlock told The Coast last April, “and I had the capacity.” The allure was already there, she said. Despite Canada’s women’s national team having won gold at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, Canadian women who wished to earn a living playing soccer had, until the NSL’s arrival, had to leave the country. With the Northern Super League—then named Project 8—former national team legend Diana Matheson had a plan to change that. The former Canadian midfielder had been pitching investors, with a goal of getting a new league off the ground by 2025.
“How incredible is it to be involved with something like that?” Sherlock said.
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“Never been done before”: Meet one of the women bringing pro women’s soccer to Halifax
In less than three months, the Halifax Tides’ season will begin. A moment in history. And that moment means something different to each of the team’s players—from the veterans returning for one last dance, to the homegrown kids who never imagined they’d be playing in their backyard.
The veteran
Erin McLeod has seen and done it all. In her storied 20-year career, the 41-year-old goalkeeper from St. Albert, Alberta has won two Olympic medals and made 119 appearances for Canada’s senior women’s national team. (Atiba Hutchinson, Canada’s most-capped men’s national team player, suited up 104 times before his retirement.) McLeod has worn Canada’s red and white at four FIFA Women’s World Cups. Won six CONCACAF medals. She was named to Canada Soccer’s all-time women’s starting XI in 2012. And so it shouldn’t surprise that, after two decades in the sport, she was feeling “ready to hang up the boots,” as she tells The Coast.
She and her wife, soccer player Gunny Jónsdóttir, were expecting a baby. They had been living in Iceland for two years. McLeod had retired from the national team and started to pursue her coaching licenses. Life was comfortable. And then, the Tides came calling. She’d heard “whisperings” about the team for a while, every time she’d visit Halifax to spend time with her sister—who lives here—and the Halifax City Soccer Club, where she’d taken on an occasional consulting role.
“I wasn’t sure if [the Tides] wanted me as a coach or a player,” McLeod says. It turned out to be the latter.
That conversation marked “this wild kind of turning point” for the veteran keeper, who debuted for Canada as a 17-year-old and spent the bulk of her career playing between the US, Sweden and Germany. Not only did the Tides’ offer show a belief that McLeod could still perform on the pitch into her forties, it would give her an opportunity to do something she’d rarely done: Play in front of her family. She thought of her nieces and nephew, who had visited McLeod in Iceland, and what it would be like to see them in the stands. She thought of her soon-to-be-born son, and what it would be like to mark the first chapter of his life with cousins nearby.
“I’ve waited my whole career to play at home, in front of my family, in front of Canadian fans,” McLeod tells The Coast.
McLeod knows that in some respects, she is fighting a battle with time. When the Tides season begins in April, she’ll be 42—the oldest signing announced to date across the six teams in the Northern Super League. There are things age takes from all of us. (“I used to crush in the gym,” McLeod says, “and even though I’m trying, I’ll never get the numbers that I used to before.”) But time can be a gift, too: It has given McLeod perspective. Confidence. Thousands of hours of practice reps. Hundreds of matches of experience.
“I think when you’re younger, you want to be seen, and you want your presence to be known,” she says. Nowadays, she points to retired Spaniard Iker Casillas—considered one of the best goalkeepers of all-time—as inspiration. “What I liked about Casillas is you almost didn’t notice him on the field, you know?”
There’s a degree of “reading the game” that comes with soccer’s new era, she adds. “It’s getting your scans in. It’s your first touch, body position, creating the right angle… It’s the mental focus of being dialed in for the whole game.” Count age as an asset in that respect.
“It’s getting your scans in. It’s your first touch, body position, creating the right angle… It’s the mental focus of being dialed in for the whole game.”
There’s a new motivation for McLeod, too: Her “little man” arrived in October. She thinks about setting an example. Teaching him self-belief.
“I used to wake up in the morning, and all I wanted to do was play football,” she says. “And I think as the years have gone on, I still love the chase for mastery, but I’d been missing a bit of purpose… and before, that used to be football.
“I just have this picture of my wife going through labour and him in my brain… When you have your people, it feels wonderful. I just want to show up as the best version of myself for him.”
The rookie
Gianna Creighton is getting a crash course in Halifax winters. Born and raised in San Diego, the 23-year-old touched down at Halifax’s Stanfield Airport last weekend. The Southern California native had never lived anywhere with snow. And the weather? It hasn’t done any favours for dispelling the old tropes about life above the 49th parallel. Before joining the Tides, Creighton wasn’t sure what she’d be getting into when it came to her new northern surroundings.
“I thought it was an ice sheet—just the whole thing,” she laughs, speaking with The Coast. “I said that to Lewis”—coach Page—“on the phone, and he just started laughing.”
Sunny Californian or not, the weather should suit Creighon just fine. In five collegiate seasons at UC Irvine in California’s Orange County, the defensive midfielder earned a reputation for being ice cold on the soccer pitch. She never missed a match, from her rookie to senior season. By the time of Creighton’s graduation, she had set program records for appearances (87), starts (87) and minutes played (7,789) as an Anteater. In 2021, Creighton was named to the All-Big West First Team—an honour given to 11 players and chosen from 11 collegiate teams across the state.
“We had a look at her on tape, and then we got to meet her,” Tides head coach Page tells The Coast. “And the combination of her playing ability and her personality, we felt like she was someone who could really come in and contribute to our team.”
The Portland Thorns felt so, too. Last year, Creighton was invited to train with Canadian soccer legend Christine Sinclair’s former team during the international break, when some of the Thorns players were representing their countries. It opened Creighton’s eyes.
“I learned what competitiveness really means,” she tells The Coast, calling her Thorns training partners “the top of the top.” Once the players started practice, Creighton adds, “it was an intensity like no other.” Players shouted. Each pass needed to be perfect—not just the weight of the ball, but where it landed. Which is to say, on her teammate’s preferred foot. Never the opposite. The experience showed Creighton “how to perform at a level with other people who are more competitive than I am, more skilled than I am.” She also got to rub shoulders with Sinclair, whom she calls “the best.” The two sat together at every team meal.
“I’m like, ‘You’re literally Christine Sinclair, and you’re talking to me,’” Creighton jokes. “She’s obviously a leader, but she was really just humble and super welcoming.”
“I’m like, ‘You’re literally Christine Sinclair, and you’re talking to me.’”
Creighton knows she’ll be a rookie on this Tides squad—the year she was born, 2001, Erin McLeod was playing for Canada’s U-21 team in Norway—but the young midfielder’s ready to earn her place among the pros. “I want to be a starter,” she says. “Even if it’s not every minute of every game, that’s definitely my goal: To consistently impact the game for my team.”
She’s already made history as the first international signing for the Tides. (The club has since added American Kiley Norkus, New Zealand’s Milly Clegg, Japanese forward Meguri Nakamura and French defender Éva Frémaux.) What’s another first to check off the list?
The hometown hero
Halifax’s Saorla Miller was cleaning out her childhood bedroom not too long ago, when she came across an old school assignment from the fifth grade. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” it asked. Even then, she tells The Coast, there was only one answer: Professional soccer player. From the time Miller was four years old, she would race with the ball at Dalhousie’s Wickwire Field, looking for openings to score against her pint-sized opponents. Even in Timbits soccer, that competitive fire was there.
“I didn’t want to lose,” she laughs.
That hasn’t changed. The Halifax Tides’ first homegrown signing, Miller was 15 years old when she joined Team Nova Scotia as one of the youngest members on a squad that captured bronze at the 2017 Canada Games. (That summer in Winnipeg, Miller and her teammates, including fellow Tides signing Syd Kennedy, bested future Canadian national team star Julia Grosso’s British Columbia side along the way.) The Halifax West High School grad went on to spend five years at the University of Memphis, where she was named the American Athletic Conference Championship’s Most Outstanding Offensive Player in 2021—a solitary honour given to one player and chosen from 13 teams—and captained her team to a 20-2 record and a Sweet 16 College Cup run—the equivalent of basketball’s March Madness—in 2023, her final season. In those five years, she scored 24 goals and added 14 assists.
Still, despite Miller’s childhood dreams, the notion of playing professionally in Halifax was a thought as distant as the Atlantic shores from the Tennessee campus where she lived.
“It was a dream I didn’t know I had,” Miller says. “It was never a possibility.”
Even with the reveal of Canadian soccer legend Diana Matheson’s Project 8 in 2022—a venture that would become the Northern Super League—Miller remained “a little bit skeptical” that she might one day pursue a soccer career in her home country. Her disbelief was common at the time. Despite winning Olympic gold in Tokyo, the Canadian women’s national soccer team was still fighting its own governing body for the same budget as the men’s team. The puck had yet to drop on the Professional Women’s Hockey League, which would go on to smash attendance records and open the door to future women’s sports leagues in Canada.
“It was for sure in the back of my mind,” Miller says, “but it was always like, ‘Okay, we’ll see when they can really get this off the ground.’”
Miller went pro in Iceland, joining Keflavik in the women’s top-tier Besta deild kvenna (“Women’s Best Division”). There, she played against her future Tides teammate, Erin McLeod. It was a learning year for the 23-year-old: Miller’s club was fighting to avoid relegation to the women’s second-tier league, but it gave her an opportunity. “I played in every game that I was healthy,” she tells The Coast. The year also left an impression from afar on the Tides’ Batra and Page. They offered Miller a chance to return to Nova Scotia and play for her hometown’s new club.
“Saorla was one we talked about right at the very start, when we were thinking about putting our roster together,” Page tells The Coast. “She wants to get on the ball, she wants to get moving forward and create chances. She’s a tremendous athlete and a good technical player.”
Miller’s been busy settling back into life in Halifax. She misses its summers. She’s ready for the atmosphere of a fever-pitched crowd—and still a little bewildered that her childhood dream could come true.
Has she dreamt of anything new?
“I think I’d be crazy not to say bringing a championship to Halifax,” she tells The Coast. “That’s first and foremost. I would love to bring that to the city.”
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This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.
