Screengrabs show that David Laxer, Darryl Shaw and Jeff Fox are bringing a USL Super League team to Tampa. Credit: Screengrab c/o Yurika Wheeler/RBLR Sports

This year kicked off with sad news for fans of women’s soccer who learned that expansion of the National Women’s Soccer League to Tampa Bay was a no-go. That bid was brought by Tampa Bay Rays and Rowdies owner Stu Sternberg, according to Sportico, but now two well-heeled and known men in Tampa apparently have plans to bring a different women’s team to the Bay area.

A leaked, since removed, website for United Soccer League’s Super League says that “a new chapter” of women’s professional soccer is coming to Tampa Bay, with the inaugural season kicking off in August 2024.

Super League will align with the international women’s soccer calendar and is one of five leagues run by USL where the Rowdies play in the USL Championship.

Yurika Wheeler, a producer on Tampa Bay’s RBLR Sports, took screengrabs while clicking around the site and found that BluePearl veterinary founder and developer Darryl Shaw—who’s building Ybor City’s GasWorx development on and around the former Tampa Park Apartments—is involved with the Tampa USL Super League team.

Shaw is also a past investor in the Tampa Bay Times, and leader of the Florida Aquarium’s new $40 million expansion campaign. He also owns the building that’s now home to Ybor City’s exciting new Kress arts collective.

The screengrabs show that Shaw’s other partners in the endeavor include David Laxer, owner of Bern’s Steak House, and Jeff Fox who recently retired as Chief Information Officer at BluePearl.

A rep for Shaw declined CL’s request for comment.

The website says Shaw, Laxer and Fox are three childhood friends with the simple goal “to bring the equal opportunity that women deserve, to the sport they love.”

Fox coached recreational and competitive U8-U14 teams according to the since-deleted website, which adds that Shaw’s motivation to bring the team to Tampa includes “his respect and admiration for the game, and witnessing his daughter’s efforts to find a female role model as a physicist in a man’s world.”

Laxer, for his part, spent years traveling to his daughter’s youth soccer games.

Wheeler wrote that everything he saw on the deleted website suggested the team is unrelated to Sternberg’s previous effort to bring the NWSL to Tampa Bay. One interesting wrinkle, however, is that Laxer—son of Bern’s Steak House’s founders Bern and Gert Laxer—was a member of a previous Rowdies ownership group. He also owns the Rowdies’ Tampa training complex.

Reps for Laxer and Sternberg have not yet returned CL’s requests for comment, but we’ll update this post if they do.

The USL Super League team joins the Tampa Bay Strikers indoor side in the ranks of local pro women’s soccer teams.

This is a developing story.