After a record-breaking regular season, Lexington Sporting Club plays for a title
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Lexington Sporting Club’s women’s team won Gainbridge Super League regular season title.
- LSC is now one of four teams in the Gainbridge Super League playoffs.
- Lexington hosts Dallas Trinity on Saturday at Lexington SC Stadium in a semifinal match.
Lexington Sporting Club is breaking new ground.
For the first time in the soccer franchise’s history, LSC has both won an on-field trophy and qualified for the postseason.
And Lexington’s women’s team, in only its second season, accomplished both feats.
This past weekend, LSC won the 2025-26 Gainbridge Super League regular season title. Lexington earned the Players’ Shield after going 14-3-11 (W-L-D) during the regular season, with the honor coming just one season after LSC finished in last place in its debut Super League season.
Now, after claiming the first trophy in club history, Lexington is in the mix to add another. As a result of winning the regular season championship, LSC has home-field advantage throughout the two-round Super League playoffs. Lexington is the top seed for the postseason, which features four of the league’s nine teams.
LSC hosts Dallas Trinity in a Super League semifinal at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Lexington SC Stadium. The match will also be shown live on Peacock.
Following its last-place finish in the 2024-25 season, wholesale changes were made to the LSC women’s side, including a new head coach, Masaki Hemmi, and a total roster overhaul.
The results were immediate, as Lexington went undefeated through its first 16 matches of the season.
The team underwent another coaching change during the Super League’s winter break when Hemmi was named the head coach of the Lexington men’s team in the USL Championship. Kosuke Kimura, who had been an assistant coach for the women’s team under Hemmi, became the new women’s team head coach.
Under Kimura’s direction, Lexington posted a 9-3-2 mark, eventually beating out Sporting Club Jacksonville for the Super League regular season championship on a goal-differential tiebreaker.
“We have the foundation of how we play. We have a foundation of how we defend. And then those are things that we can always rely on,” Kimura told the Herald-Leader on Wednesday at the club’s indoor practice facility. “... That’s been our strength. And we’ve been creating those identities, on the ball and off the ball, so we’ve just got to keep believing that’s going to work and then stick with it and then just keep going.”
Any way you slice it, Lexington’s regular season performance was impressive.
Catherine Barry, a 24-year-old forward from Massachusetts who is the all-time leading college goalscorer at South Carolina, led the Super League during the regular season with 16 goals. No other player scored more than 12 goals.
LSC also got significant offensive contributions from forward McKenzie Weinert (10 goals), midfielder Addie McCain (9 goals and 3 assists) and forward Sarah Griffith (4 goals and 5 assists), among others.
“I think that something I talk about often is how we have so many threats that it’s hard to defend, because if I get it, you can double-team me, and I’ll pass it to Addie, and then Addie can play to Kenzie, and so on,” Barry said. “And so, because we have so many different players that can score and hurt you in such different ways, that really allows us to kind of open each other up and I think that that’s been such an asset.”
This prolific offensive attack also helped lead to one of the most lucrative moments in LSC history. In April, Lexington transferred midfielder Emina Ekic to the Houston Dash of the National Women’s Soccer League for an LSC women’s club record amount.
Lexington’s goalkeeper, Kat Asman, had the lowest goals-against average during the regular season. Asman — a 26-year-old from Georgia who played collegiately at Penn State — allowed 0.86 goals per 90 minutes and was one of only two goalkeepers in the Super League to play all 2,520 minutes of the regular season.
Lexington Sporting Club preps for first playoff appearance
The challenge now for Lexington Sporting Club is to make sure its historic regular season showing can translate to the postseason.
Because only four teams make the Super League playoffs, Lexington is two wins away from claiming the championship, and the path to the title runs through the Lexington SC Stadium.
First, Lexington must get past Dallas Trinity in Saturday night’s semifinal.
The two teams faced each other four times during the regular season. Lexington claimed the first meeting in a 6-1 rout over Dallas in September in Lexington before the sides drew 1-1 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas in December. In March, Dallas won 1-0 in Lexington before. The teams played to a 2-2 draw 10 days later in Texas.
That’s about as even as it gets entering Saturday’s semifinal between LSC and Dallas Trinity, which went 11-10-7 during the regular season.
Lexington midfielder Taylor Aylmer said LSC’s 1-0 home loss to Dallas in March stuck out in her mind as a pivotal moment from the regular season.
“We all walked away from that game feeling pretty defeated, because it was a game that we absolutely dominated, and those are always the tough games to walk away from,” Aylmer said. “... But I think for our team that was a massive lesson that, unfortunately, maybe we needed, but we definitely grew from. Because especially going into the playoffs at the end of the day, you can be the best team on the day, but you have to execute in front of goal, and you have to put the ball in the back of the net to walk away a winner and that was a moment for us of learning that.”
Lexington is also hoping that a strong showing from its home crowd will factor into Saturday’s result. LSC averaged 2,274 fans per match across 14 home games during the Super League regular season. That was an average increase of more than 700 fans per home match compared to the club’s debut season.
LSC’s strong home support this season included a record-breaking crowd reported at more than 5,000 fans for the regular season finale this past Saturday. Fans were allowed free admission to that match if they claimed a ticket online.
The winner of Saturday’s semifinal between Lexington and Dallas will face the winner of the other semifinal between Sporting Club Jacksonville and Carolina Ascent in the Super League championship match May 30.
LSC would host the championship match if it advances to it.
“We know we’ve accomplished so much this year. Like, we have that, no one can take that away from us at this point,” Barry said. “So I think that’s what allows us to have that freedom to just go out there and be us. And then on top of that, I think we still have so much to play for... I think that that’s kind of the motivator for us going forward, and we want to continue to prove that we earned that and we deserved that.”
