By OkayGoal 
Five former Spokane Zephyr FC players have told RANGE Media that the club systematically undercounted their working hours, leaving players unable to claim unemployment benefits after the team folded in May 2026. That matters because the alleged misreporting was not merely an administrative oversight, it had direct financial consequences for professional athletes who were suddenly out of work, often without a next contract lined up.
The hours dispute is more damning than it first appears
Washington State requires workers to have logged at least 680 hours over four of the previous five calendar quarters to qualify for unemployment benefits. According to Connor Tobin, executive director of the USL Players Association, no Zephyr player topped 321 hours for the entire season, less than half the threshold required.
One anonymised player described flying across the country for two away fixtures in February 2026, with the squad reporting at 7:30am on the day of travel and not returning to the hotel until 12 hours later after connecting flights. The club’s records, however, showed she had worked just 16 hours across those two weeks. She estimated the actual figure at around 70 hours when travel time was included, more than four times what was recorded. The US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division guidance states that overnight travel overlapping normal working hours generally counts as work time.
Gonzaga law professor Dallan Flake noted just how murky this territory can be for athletes, who rarely have a formal clock-in system the way factory workers do. He pointed to activities like reviewing game film alone at home, or attending a “voluntary” workout that may not really be optional, as exactly the kind of grey area that makes hours disputes like this one so difficult to resolve cleanly.
Two-time Super League Goalkeeper of the Year Hope Hisey, who set a single-season save record of 86 stops with the Zephyr, received a pay stub logging the same 16 hours for those identical two weeks. Hisey said the numbers were clearly flubbed, adding that there were days when the squad was visibly on the field longer than the totals being reported, without even accounting for other professional duties. Hisey has since found a new club, joining fellow Super League side Carolina Ascent FC.
Welfare failures ran deeper than the paperwork
The hours dispute sits on top of a wider pattern of under-resourcing that players described to RANGE. The club ran through three head coaches in two seasons and went without a goalkeeper coach for roughly half of its second campaign. An equipment manager was reportedly let go this spring for working too many hours, and medical provision was shared with the Division III men’s side, Spokane Velocity FC, another club under the same ownership group, Aequus Sports.
Hisey pointed out that the women’s team, playing at Division I level, was fed two to three times a week, the same as the men’s team, while comparable Super League clubs fed players daily. The framing matters: equal treatment of an unequal situation is not equity. That fits a wider pattern She Kicks has been tracking around player welfare standards in women’s football, where the gap between what clubs promise and what players actually receive remains a live and urgent problem.
Five ACL injuries across two seasons prompted Hisey to attribute the injury toll to player load mismanagement. One anonymous player said the physical therapy clinic affiliated with the club initially capped visits at twice weekly, the maximum covered under Washington’s Labor and Industries programme, only raising that to three sessions after two months of player pressure.
A CBA could not come soon enough
Players were left in a particularly exposed position because the Super League has been operating without a ratified collective bargaining agreement. Former defender Madelyn Desiano, now an assistant coach at Pepperdine University, said she understood the business decision to fold but was clear that the club’s communication failures compounded the harm. She said she would rather have had honesty than another year of questions, non-answers and ghosting, but the way it ended still fell short of what players deserved.
According to RANGE, co-owners Katie and Ryan Harnetiaux declined to comment on both the closure and the hours dispute, while vice president of soccer operations Carrie Taylor did not respond to interview requests. The league’s office made no contact with players after the closure, according to Desiano, who said she reached out directly to league president Amanda Vandervort and did not hear back.
In late July, the Players Association and the league reached a tentative agreement on key CBA terms including minimum salaries, two athletic trainers per team and leave protocols. The Spokane case will now serve as the starkest possible argument for why those protections cannot come quickly enough, and why financial instability in women’s football, as seen elsewhere across the game, so often ends up landing hardest on the players themselves.
