This year marks the 100th anniversary for Madison’s iconic Breese Stevens Field, and the first for the city’s new women’s soccer team, the Rally Madison FC, which will make Breese its home stadium.
Breese Stevens Field, which occupies prime space on East Washington Avenue, has a long history as the central hub for sports and events in Madison. The field has played host to major league baseball players such as Warren Spahn and Satchel Paige and is known for serving at different times as a soccer field, circus ground and concert venue. It continues to evolve as it heads into its next century, with Rally FC launching at the stadium this spring.
Throughout the 2026 season, Breese Stevens will host a series of events to celebrate its anniversary, including a Ferris wheel and petting zoo the weekend of May 15 and 16, and fireworks on July 4.
“Breese Stevens Field has a long and vibrant history that includes a wide variety of sports, community and entertainment uses over its first 100 years,” said Tristan Straub, the stadium’s general manager. “We are excited and grateful to continue that history in 2026 and beyond.”
The property was owned by former Madison Mayor Bruce J. Stevens; his widow, Mary Elizabeth Farmer, signed a contract to sell the property to the city for $35,000.
Breese Stevens, now mainly known as a soccer field and concert venue, originally started as a baseball stadium. It also hosted NFL games, including a matchup between the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Red Jackets in 1929.
The field has seen just about everything in its first 100 years, from lacrosse tournaments and cricket matches, to religious ceremonies, the Shrine Circus, drum corps performances, and minor league baseball tryouts and games. Straub said the Madison Blues, a minor league team that fed into the Chicago Cubs, played at Breese Stevens, and the field also hosted tryouts for the St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies.
Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens even ran in three exhibitions at Breese Stevens Field.
“Stevens Field has a mind of its own in that way; notorious events from having marble tournaments, strong man competitions and demolition derbies,” Straub said. “This field has seen it all.”
While the field started as a dual-use facility, it eventually moved toward service as a local soccer and football field, Straub said. High-rise apartment buildings now tower over the field and its low-lying buildings, giving it the feel of a bigger stadium.
“The open-air piece just isn’t done that much anymore, and certainly not in the north cusp of the tundra,” Straub said. “It gives you a little bit of that, as Wrigley feels with the apartment seating that goes on outside the stadium there.”
Now the stadium and field are best known for hosting Forward Madison FC, which started as a fan-focused project in 2018, with fans picking the name and colors. The team has developed into a leading club in USL League 1, two tiers below MLS.
Rally Madison FC will debut in the 2026 season as an inaugural team of the USL W League, a national preprofessional women’s soccer league. Kyler Donovan, general manager for Forward Madison FC, said the club held focus groups to get a feel for what supporters wanted in a women’s team, as well as to gather ideas for the brand and its iconography.
“We’ve always wanted to bring women’s soccer to Breese Stevens Field. That’s something that's been missing. Madison has such a great community for it,” Donovan said.
With some of the Rally players coming from Milwaukee and Madison, including Kayla Budish, Delaney Cox and Abbey Stanton, Donovan says having a professional atmosphere and training environment provides a good experience for the athletes and their teammates.
Madison Forward will play its first game of the 2026 at home on Saturday, May 16, against Detroit City FC. As for the women, Rally FC will kick off its first season at home on May 15, playing against Chicago House AC in a friendly preseason match.
