Montreal Roses come home to sold out debut match against the Ottawa Rapid

Montreal Roses FC co-founder Isabèle Chevalier is excited to bring the Montreal Roses home for the team's first NSL game in Laval.

The Montreal Roses FC will play the team’s first home game in Laval against the Ottawa Rapid on Saturday in front of a sold out crowd at the Boreale Stadium.

The newly formed Northern Super League squad screamed out of the gates in their debut season beating AFC Toronto 1-0 and the Vancouver Rise 3-1 to start the year 2-0.

“From the beginning that’s what we wanted,” said Roses co-founder Isabèle Chevalier. “We believed that the communities and the people were there and we wanted the girls to be able to be celebrated at home because all these girls have been abroad all their careers; they couldn’t play here and now their friends, families are able to see them come home for the first time.”

The Roses first game in Toronto was in front of over 14,000 fans at BMO Stadium and Vancouver’s first game at B.C. Place Stadium also had over 14,000.

The excitement to watch the women’s team play after the success of the Montreal Victoire’s PWHL team, shows, for Chevalier, the appetite to see women play at a professional level.

“People have been wanting this,” she said. “We’re Canadians. If there’s a place equality lives, it’s here, and to have Montreal, Quebec with no women’s pro team or league made no sense.”

Chevalier said the team is already heading towards a successful first season among the six teams in the league. Calgary and Halifax are the two other teams.

“That fact that everybody’s embracing it shows that they’ve been longing for this, and so finally! And that’s the kind of feeling that you see: ‘Finally we can go on and cheer them,’” she said. “Everybody’s got sisters and daughters right, and so everybody’s feeling the void of that kid who has that aspiring dream or desire and they’re like, ‘sorry. Not for you.’ It’s about time that we don’t have to say, ‘sorry not for you. Yeah! You too can do and you too can dream and you can have these role models, these real models that you can go cheer on and wear their jerseys.”