Reign FC announces program offering free tickets to kids under 12: ‘We want to be that first love’

Reign FC has announced a program offering free tickets to kids under 12 encouraging new fans of the game. (Credit: Maddy Grassy/Reign FC) Maddy Grassy As the summer arrives, parents start to look for cost-effective ways to keep their kids entertained. Seattle Reign FC is offering an easy solution: Bring your kids to a game for free. On Thursday, the team launched a unique initiative, “Kids 12 & Under Free,” which allows families to bring their kids to the rest of the Reign’s home games at no additional cost. Through the promotion, families can get up to five complimentary tickets for children who are 12 or younger with the purchase of an adult ticket. In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Sports, Reign Chief Business Officer Maya Mendoza-Exstrom said that the promotion was part of a deliberate effort to invite more families to be fans. “One of the core opportunities we saw in our market, and just even more broadly in women's sports, were families — the opportunity to bring young people and families into our experiences in a greater number,” Mendoza-Exstrom said. Fans can take advantage of the promotion for six of the team’s final nine matches of the year, beginning with the Reign’s return to the field against rival Portland Thorns on July 12, after the World Cup break. The promotion is step one in a plan to grow the team’s fanbase over time — with what Mendoza-Exstrom and team call “future fans.” “Fans form attachment in a large degree by the time they're 14 years old. We want to be that first love for this next generation of fans, and that has long-term lifetime value for us,” Mendoza-Exstrom said. “When you come and fall in love with something, you're more likely to come back.” As a result, she and the club expect the promotion to continue boosting the Reign’s base in the years to come, as those kids grow up. “It's not about comps. It's about making sure that we are building our entire ecosystem of events to attract that next generation of fans,” she said. Timing is also a crucial piece of that effort. Seattle’s Lumen Field will be hosting six World Cup matches in June and July; that gives the Reign a window this summer to try and embrace the soccer fever after the tournament. “With the World Cup being here, it was important for us to provide families with a place to direct their energy, post-World Cup,” Mendoza-Exstrom said. From the start, families have been a consistent piece of the NWSL’s fan base, especially during the summer. But even in what Mendoza-Exstrom calls a “family-forward experience” in the NWSL, the costs are still a barrier to a lot of families with young kids who might want to join that experience. “The expectations and the opportunities for families are shifting, right? It's expensive to have young people and take them out to events,” Mendoza-Exstrom said, adding that she has two young children of her own. From there, she said that the team wanted to create “points of accessibility” for more families to be able to overcome that barrier in an era where ticket prices for sporting events are higher than ever . “I always look at our season in sort of three chapters. Spring, summer, and fall all behave differently,” she said, “but I think this sort of investment and commitment is an opportunity to invite families in at all of those parts of the year.” The promotion seemingly also takes advantage of one of the Reign’s disadvantages: game timeslots. As a co-tenant of Lumen Field alongside the Seattle Seahawks and Seattle Sounders, the Reign often play their games in what Mendoza-Exstrom diplomatically calls “interesting broadcast windows” — often Sunday afternoons or Friday nights. But Sundays, she said, offer a new opportunity to take advantage of days that often work well with families’ typical schedules. “That Sunday opportunity is one that aligns all year round, in the spring, in the summer, and the fall,” she said. “It is a unique opportunity for us to sort of own Sundays if you will, in our market.” The Reign also made an effort to try to maximize the team’s sometimes-awkward Friday night windows as well, starting games a few hours earlier (5 or 6 p.m.) than a typical 7 p.m. start time. (That also fits well with balancing with East Coast broadcast windows; the league’s history of starts at 7 p.m. Pacific Time have often led to what fans affectionately call “NWSL After Dark.”) Still, Mendoza-Exstrom and the team are going all-in on those afternoon weekend games for the promotion: Of the Reign’s remaining home games, the five Sunday games and lone Saturday game are all eligible for those free tickets. The three Friday night games are not. Mendoza-Exstrom said that it was important for the team to not only give out free tickets, but to make it into a “curated experience” for families to join. There will be match activations designed specifically for younger children at those matches, and kids who come to the Reign with those free tickets will automatically join the Reign’s Kids Club, a free program for children ages 5-12. “We want to build a program that meets families' needs, and so it has to be a long-term strategic commitment. It can't just be a free ticket to one match in 2026,” Mendoza-Exstrom said. Mendoza-Exstrom said that this project was one that evolved as the Reign entered its second year of new ownership. The Reign were absorbed into the Sounders’ organization via a sale in 2023 . (Mendoza-Exstrom was a veteran of the Sounders’ front office before taking on her new role with the Reign.) “I think we spent the first 12 months or so, like any new purchase, unpacking what was there, and we spent the last 12 months trying to figure out where we go next,” Mendoza-Exstrom said of the ownership transition. The Reign’s connection to the Sounders means it’s not a coincidence that the promotion holds several similarities to the MLS club’s First Match on Us program , an initiative that the Sounders launched last year to give free tickets to new fans. “This is the benefit of being inside of one sporting enterprise, to get the lessons learned. The architecture of the program, it maps exactly the same,” Mendoza-Exstrom said of the similarities. “I think the difference is with First Match on Us, it really is that first match. It's a different growth investment for the Sounders to solve. We really want to habituate behavior, and so one of the unique differences that we architected into the Kids 12 & Under is that there's no limit on coming back.” Similar to First Match on Us, the promotion will apply to tickets sold in multiple parts of the stadium, from the supporters’ section to the club seats, with different price points available. Season ticket holders will also have a chance to access a season-long version of the promotion starting in 2027. “It's both an opportunity for us to drive more attendance and more eyeballs this year, to accelerate how we are widening the aperture for fans to find us and come enjoy a Reign match,” Mendoza-Exstrom said. “This is a long-term commitment, so this program will show up again next year. We'll learn a lot from this year and take those learnings forward.” While some NWSL teams have continued to grow their crowds, the Reign is one team that has seen an attendance decline over the past few seasons. In 2025, Seattle dipped below 8,000 fans per game — which, in the cavernous Lumen Field, can look particularly sparse.  In terms of growing the team’s attendance, Mendoza-Exstrom said it’s an issue they’re approaching from multiple sides — improving the match-day experience, retaining loyal season-ticket holders, etc. “It's not one play, it's going to be multiple plays, right?” she said. “We have to build a new framework for how fans can experience Reign on their terms. And so it's not one move, it's gonna be several, and all of those are opportunities for us to engage more people, more often. We want that. We want people to feel like they belong at Reign FC, and belonging looks different to different people.” Bringing in these new, young fans, though, comes down to the understanding that they’ll come to one match, and fall in love with the game. “It's about understanding where our fan base is, a fan base we know we want to grow with, and then building an accessible entry point for that fan base to experience an NWSL match if they've never experienced one,” Mendoza-Exstrom said, “and then, you know, we're pretty confident that when they do, they're gonna want to come back.”