Northern Super League, Vancouver Rise

Vancouver Rise starting to hit their stride after 2-1 win vs. AFC Toronto

The Vancouver Rise picked up their most important result of their inaugural season to date on Thursday, as they defeated the Northern Super League’s leaders, AFC Toronto, 2-1 at Swangard Stadium. 

Despite going down 1-0 early on in the game, the Rise did well to respond with two goals before half-time, and then managed to hold on the rest of the way to pick up consecutive wins for the first time in 2025. 

Coming off their last performance, a landmark 6-0 win vs. Halifax Tides that set the league record for most goals in a match, it was encouraging to see Vancouver build a bit of momentum from that game, too, as it can be tough to follow up a performance like that with another result. 

To this point, that’s been their big struggle, hence the lack of back-to-back wins, as they’ve not been able to find the consistency they’d like from game to game, no matter the performances or results. 

In this one, they found that consistency, and that allowed them to grab their first victory against one of the league’s big 3 teams, AFC Toronto, Montréal Roses and Ottawa Rapid, who have been fixtures at the top of the table since the beginning of the year, with Ottawa never dropping out of the top four, Montréal never lower than second, and Toronto currently sitting in first place after a recent hot streak. 

What this shows, however, is that the Rise might be finding their footing at the perfect time, setting them up to push higher up the table in the weeks to come. It’s not just their results that are improving, either, but also their performances, as they’re showing good organization on both sides of the ball. 

Unfortunately, despite that, they conceded a goal they’d want back to start this game. Coming on a routine sequence when building out of the back, goalkeeper Morgan McAslan had her pocket picked by Toronto’s Victoria Pickett, and Pickett found Kaylee Hunter for the goal, helping the former Whitecaps academy product continue a strong start to her season. 

Despite that, the Rise did well to pick themselves up from there and not dwell on the error, as they’d been having a good performance up to that point, with that McAslan mistake proving to be a bit of an outlier in the grand scheme of this game. 

“We all knew we had Morgan (McAslan’s) back, and when a teammate feels like they let us down, we want them to know that it’s okay, we have their back.” Rise midfielder, Nikki Stanton, told reporters afterwards. “That’s been one of the big changes since we’ve had since coming back from the (June international) break is that we have each other’s back, if someone misses a tackle, we have them (covered), if they lose the ball, we’ll win it back, and that’s been a real big turning point in our season.”

Instead of letting Toronto take a foothold in the match, they managed to respond rather quickly, as Samantha Chang curled a shot into the bottom corner with a great strike in the 20th minute, tying things up with her first NSL goal. 

Then, she ended up giving her team the lead 15 minutes later, as she got on the end of a perfect through ball from Josie Longhurst, before firing home another shot from distance to add another tally to her account. Unlike her first goal, which came on a quick sequence, Chang had the time to pick out a shot on this one, too, taking a calculated risk to do so with the red-hot Holly Ward also open for a pass on the play. 

“I actually heard her call for it,” Chang said afterwards. “But I thought with the momentum that I had from a good touch forward, it’s about confidence, and I had already scored.”

“Sometimes, that gives you luck, and that was one that I just put in, but she very well could have scored, too.”

From there, the Rise did well to protect their lead the rest of the way. Toronto had some good opportunities to break them open in the second half, as they got on the ball and forced them back as they chased an equalizer, but the Rise stood strong in their 4-4-2 defensive block, doing well to defend their box. From there, they had a few chances of their own to extend the lead to 3-1, but then realized late on that it was in their best interests to get on the ball more and slow the game down, instead of pushing for a late goal. 

Against a Toronto team that has scored a league-high 21 goals after this game, that proved to be the right call, too, as it allowed them to get a break from some of the pressure that they were under for the early part of the second half, where there was a moment when Toronto seemed close to breaking them and finding an equalizer. Sometimes, the best way to defend can be to get on the ball, and the Rise managed to do some of that passive defensive play at the right time. 

To that point, however, something like that once again shows how much this Rise team has been growing lately – in all facets of their game.

AFC Toronto @ Vancouver Rise at Swangard Stadium (Courtesy of Vancouver Rise)

After struggling to score goals from open play to start the year, the floodgates are starting to open in that regard, and they now sit third in the entire league with 18 total goals, not far behind Toronto. Then, defensively, they’re starting to tidy things up at the back, sitting with just two goals conceded from their last four games, after conceding 15 goals in their first nine games. 

Plus, on the ball, they’re starting to show some impressive versatility, too, which they certainly flexed in this game. Instead of building up with a back four, as they did earlier in the campaign, they used a back three in this game, and their wing backs caused a lot of problems for Toronto, who plays with an aggressive back three on the ball and a back five off it. 

With Toronto’s wing backs flying up and down the pitch, there was room in behind them to exploit for anyone quick enough to target that space, and the Rise managed to expose that on a few occasions, including on both their goals, which originated from that side of the pitch. 

“Toronto is an aggressive team when they’re out of possession, but also a player-marking team, so we could move players around,” Rise head coach, Anja Heiner-Møller, offered afterwards. “We talked about these opposite movements, and we practiced these patterns of when we have the ball going into specific spaces on the field, and having specific runs, and we’re seeing those patterns now, the players know what to look for and what happens on the other side of those runs, which is great to see.”

Now, the Rise will look to continue to further develop on the ball, especially in the final third, as they’ll want to turn more extended possession into high-quality touches in and around the box, something they could’ve done a bit more of in this game, but this is a good start. 

Given that they matched their goal total from their first 10 games (9) in just their last three matches, they appear to be hitting their stride offensively and will just look to keep improving on that. 

Certainly, this seems to be a good time for the Rise to catch form, though, as they’ve now reached the halfway point of their inaugural campaign, having played 13 out of 25 regular-season games. 

Despite their up-and-down start, they’re now third in the table with 18 points, now sitting seven points behind first-place Toronto, who they have a game-in-hand on (and will play twice more). 

If this last stretch is indeed a sign that they’re finding their feet as a group, they’ll be in a good position to push up the table and challenge first-place Toronto and second-place Montréal, especially if they can pick up some more wins against them and fourth-place Ottawa. 

Fittingly, the schedule will now put them to the test in that regard – four of their next five games are either against Ottawa (twice), Toronto or Montréal, with a clash against a Halifax Tides team they’ve already beaten three times sandwiched in there, so this next stretch will be a chance for them to really ‘sink or swim’, so to speak. 

“Today was a really big win, because we were able to go and win against a top team and prove to ourselves that on the day, when we play a good 90 minutes, we’re able to beat anybody,” Chang said. “Today should give us a lot of confidence moving forward into the second half of the season.”

After this recent run, they feel equipped and ready to tackle what’s ahead, so look for them to show further signs of growth as they continue to find their identity in year one of existence. 

“I think with our tactics and our work rate, everything’s coming into play the way that it should be,” Stanton finished. “It took us a little bit (of time) to get here, but now you can see we’re a really fun team to watch and a really hard team to play against.”

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