The NWSL has never had a Black woman as a permanent head coach. Yolanda Thomas just became the first.

The Orlando Pride named Yolanda Thomas their head coach on Thursday on a multi-year contract, making her the first Black woman in the history of the National Women’s Soccer League to hold the job permanently.

Thomas, 42, has led the team since August, when the club fired Seb Hines and promoted her from assistant. The club says she was already the league’s first Black woman to serve as an interim head coach. Now the interim tag is gone. She is the fifth permanent head coach in Orlando’s history.

The Pride’s release credits her with a central role in the most successful stretch the club has had since she arrived as an assistant ahead of the 2023 season: an NWSL Shield and an NWSL Championship, Orlando’s first major professional sports title. She also ran two U.S. Under-23 women’s national team camps in 2025.

Hines, the man she replaced, was the first full-time Black head coach to win an NWSL championship. The club that won its title under a Black head coach has now put a Black woman in charge of what comes next.

Thomas was raised in Uppsala, Sweden, by a Swedish mother and a Kenyan father. She played seven years in Sweden’s top division and was a two-time Big 12 Player of the Year at Oklahoma State. She has said, as Andscape reported, that as a teenager on Sweden’s national team she watched Hope Powell, the first woman, first Black person and youngest manager to lead England’s national team, coach from the opposite touchline. “Well, I could do that,” she recalled. “To me, that meant an actual career in coaching.”

She knows what the picture does for the next person. “More than anything, if you can see her, you can be her, and I know what that means,” she said, according to Andscape.

Owner Mark Wilf said Thomas was “the strongest individual to lead our club moving forward” based on her “leadership, experience and character.” Caitlin Carducci, the club’s vice president of soccer operations, said she had “earned the trust and respect of our players and staff.” Thomas called it “a deeply meaningful moment.”

The club got there by promoting from inside, after she had already run the team for months. That is the lesson for the rest of the league. Black women coaches do not lack the credentials. They have too rarely been handed the job without a qualifier in front of the title. Thomas has now had hers removed, and the rest of the league has her example to answer.

Her first full offseason as the Pride’s head coach starts now.