How would you imagine the greatest individual season in NWSL history? Our hypothetical player would need to score a lot of goals, obviously. Breaking Sam Kerr's single-season scoring record (18) would certainly get plenty of attention, so let's put that at the top of the list. How about assists? Assists are important, too. Let's say this player has ... five of those. Five sounds good.
Let's go back to the goals for a second. We know that all goals aren't created equal, and that poachers and penalty specialists can often sneak their way to the top of the leaderboard. That just won't do—we're talking about the best season in history, here—so let's make sure our player didn't score any of her goals from the spot, and is out-performing her expected goals tally by two. We need more, though. Let's get crazy and say that this player is an NWSL rookie, and arrived from Chinese Women's Super League at age 25 to blitz the NWSL with the league's first 20-goal season. We'll need a fun, quirky statistic, too, so let's say this player became the first in league history to score a goal against every team. And we need moments. Like, what if the record-breaking goal happened to be a 25-yard strike that makes a convincing case for being the hardest a soccer ball has ever been struck by a woman in a professional match? What if that goal looked something like this:
That's Temwa Chawinga, scoring her 19th goal of the season in a win over Bay FC on Oct 12. Yesterday, her Kansas City current played the penultimate game of their regular season against the San Diego Wave. The Current won the game, 4-1, and Chawinga scored her 20th goal, making every hypothetical laid out above a reality.
So, has Chawinga put together the greatest season in NWSL history? It's hard to argue against that conclusion. Yes, she has played four more games than Kerr did when she set the scoring record in 2019, but Chawinga's season has been about so much more than just her goal tally. What stands out about Chawinga whenever she plays is not just her scoring prowess, but the force with which she dominates games. I have never seen a player so frequently make professional defenders look like they don't belong on the field with her. Watch that goal against Bay FC again, and instead of focusing on the ferocity of the strike, look at how helpless Kiki Pickett looks while trying to do something, anything, to keep Chawinga from striding away from her. That's the kind of moment that can speak to a player's greatness just as loudly as 20 goals can, and Chawinga has been producing moments like that every week.
Chawinga will have one more chance to pad her stats on Nov. 3, when the Current play the Red Stars in their final game of the regular season. Whether or not she scores, she'll leave the field having made another impression.
