Team president Jill Ellis is leaving the San Diego Wave FC, and that looks like good news.

A fresh start seemed worth a try. Litigation roiled off the field. Underachieving soccer defined the past season. Ellis’ actions involving coach Casey Stoney — signing her to a fat contract extension, then firing her five months later — backfired and called her own stewardship into question.

The Wave announced Tuesday Ellis has taken a job with FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.  The team’s statement didn’t say whether club ownership precipitated her departure.

Whatever the impetus, it was a strange and chaotic year. As the team’s top executive, Ellis deserved some blame for the plummet — much as she got substantial credit for the franchise’s strong attendance throughout and the playoff berths in 2022 and 2023.

Until more is known, set aside the merits of the legal complaints by former employees that a toxic work atmosphere developed under Ellis, who filed a countersuit. But the publicity had to be distracting, and it led Wave star Alex Morgan to say the organization had work to do in employee relations.

On the soccer side, Ellis had a bad year.

In January, she extended Stoney’s contract through 2027 with a mutual option for 2028 only to fire her in June with the team one point out of the final playoff spot and 12 matches left.

The ensuing results stunk.

The defense went from good to bad, the offense scored at the roughly same rate as it did under Stoney, and the Wave — a year after winning the regular-season title — finished 10th of 14 teams and missed the playoffs.

If reaching the playoffs was the most important factor, Ellis should have allowed Stoney to try to lead the Wave to the eighth and final spot. She had earned a mulligan by guiding the 2023 team out of a similar rut and taking the expansion Wave to the 2022 playoffs, earning her the league’s coach of the year award.

After Stoney’s dismissal, the Wave went from being media darlings with the NWSL’s broadcast partners to drawing sharp critiques from in-game analysts, some of which seemed to have been aimed at Ellis.

The strongest comments came from analyst Heather O’Reilly, who played under Ellis with the U.S. National Team.

O’Reilly didn’t mention Ellis by name, but seemed to refer to her in the July 5 match at Portland. The Wave were coming off a 3-0 loss at home in their first match after Ellis fired Stoney and were headed to a 1-0 defeat against the struggling Thorns when O’Reilly went on a big-picture riff.

“If the front office thought that the coaching change was what was going to spur on San Diego, my, my, my, they got that very wrong,” said O’Reilly, who played on the first of Ellis’ two World Cup-winning teams in 2015. “Three-nil loss, now looking at a 1-0 loss since the sacking of Casey Stoney.

“This is a team lacking leadership, lacking direction, lacking confidence not to mention lacking goal scoring,” O’Reilly said.

Landon Donovan, the team’s second interim coach of the summer, would take over the team before its next match.

Eyebrows were raised soon after Donovan’s hire when the Wave posted a video interview with him on the team’s website. In an attempt to strike an optimistic note, Donovan said he noticed “bad habits” among Wave players that he also said could be fixed quickly.

If bad habits were indeed fixed, it didn’t result in improvement upon Stoney’s 3-5-6 record.

The Wave, who’d gone 0-2 under Paul Buckle, the first interim coach, went 2-6-1 under Donovan before winning the season finale in a match between two clubs that had been eliminated from the playoffs in their second-to-last match. Despite the presence of world-class players in defender Naomi Girma and goalkeeper Kailen Sheridan, Donovan’s Wave allowed almost twice as many goals per match as they had under Stoney.

The Wave didn’t make Ellis available for an interview at season’s end when the Union-Tribune sought her thoughts for a season review.

In June, when she answered reporters’ questions soon after firing Stoney, Ellis said she sought a style based on attacking. Indeed, the Wave effected an attacking style under Buckle and Donovan, who were attackers on professional men’s teams. As more players surged forward, the offense became more interesting to watch. However, its scoring rate didn’t improve over the 11 matches in which the team was in playoff contention.

A season of turmoil will recede faster with Ellis elsewhere.

Ahead comes the Wave’s first offseason under general manager Camille Ashton, whom Ellis hired 12 days before Stoney was fired.

Originally Published: December 3, 2024 at 3:21 PM PST