■ Orlando Pride players reflect on five years since massacre.
What Orlando Pride defender Toni Pressley remembers most about the day after Pulse is the quiet.
On the morning of June 12, 2016, the Pride were a thousand miles away from Orlando, fresh off a road match against the Western New York Flash the night before. They awoke in their hotel rooms to early reports of the nightclub shooting that took 49 lives.
News filtered to players in a blur, suspended for several hours as the team flew back, then pouring in a rush as they checked their phones for updates upon landing at the airport.
On the drive home, Pressley said, the noise felt sucked out of the city.
“The roads just seemed empty,” Pressley said. “It was a very eerie feeling. I don’t know, it just didn’t seem real. I wish it wasn’t.”
Captain Ashlyn Harris can’t remember any moments on the pitch from that week. She knows she trained and knows she played in a match just six days later.
But her focus revolved around making calls and sitting in meetings, searching for a way to ease the community’s pain — and her own.
“I don’t know if that pain will ever go away,” Harris said. “You never forget that feeling of just emptiness inside and really not knowing what to do. That’s something that’s so vivid. I can still almost feel it and smell it . ... It just felt like a storm. I was just spinning in this storm.”
The tragedy shook the city, transforming what it meant to be LGBT in Orlando.
The Pulse shooting remains the deadliest attack on the LGBT community in the history of the United States, a terrorist attack second in scope only to 9/11.
Five years after the massacre, Pulse continues to carve its legacy into the fabric of the Orlando Pride.
“It definitely was a moment of reckoning for me,” Harris said. “This is a time when you need to step forward and you need to really push for acceptance and understanding. We had to create a safe place in our stadium for fans and supporters to feel that.”
In the wake of the loss, Harris and Pressley watched their community change almost overnight. The outpouring was
purposeful and pronounced.
Orlando Strong stickers were plastered in business windows. Rainbow flags flew outside of homes and strung up around Lake Eola. Streets flooded for memorial ceremonies and candlelit vigils.
“I just think people had to realize, ‘If I’m not doing anything, I’m continuing to be a part of the problem,’ “Harris said. “I do feel like there was this massive shift in Orlando, and I do feel like we’ve grown through that struggle as a community . ... It’s now a part of our DNA in Orlando. We protect each other and we realize that we have to create a safe space for everyone.”
Orlando City and the Pride changed, too.
The Lions were scheduled to play a match six days after the shooting. The club debated whether to carry on with the game, fearful of another planned attack. Instead, the team became a center of gravity for a city in mourning.
The club and its players understood their place in the community as catharsis, distraction and support.
Harris credits club founder and Orlando City Foundation president Kay Rawlins for leading the club’s advocacy for the city, creating annual projects and initiatives to support survivors and memorialize the victims.
In 2017, Orlando City installed a set of 49 seats in rainbow colors in the 12th section of Exploria Stadium to memorialize those lost in the shooting.
This year the Pride and the Lions will wear rainbow numbers on their jerseys in June matches, auctioning items to benefit the Pulse memorial.
Both players feel the club’s response to the loss built the beginning of the team’s current identity — tight-knit and family-focused, a group that vocally advocates for the LGBT community.
Although these memorial matches happen once a year, Pressley said the team carries the memory of Pulse onto the pitch for every match.
“Every time I walk onto the field, I look at those rainbow seats and I know what they mean,” Pressley said. “I know how important they are as such a strong visual statement. It’s something I don’t take lightly. I look at those seats every time I walk past and it’s something I’m really, really proud of and I’m really proud of the club for going the steps further and really making it a permanent part of who we are.”
These purposeful shifts across Orlando transformed the city into a place where Harris could envision a future for herself and her family.
In the past, Harris said, Florida was always a place she escaped. She loved her hometown of Satellite Beach and her role on the Pride, but she never saw Orlando as a city where she could be her authentic self.
In 2016, Harris and co-captain Ali Krieger weren’t formally out as a couple. Krieger still played for the Washington Spirit, and neither player felt confident of how a future as an LGBT couple was supposed to look.
Five years later, Harris and Krieger are married and entering their fourth month as parents to their adoptive daughter, Sloane. The keeper said she’s confident this new version of Orlando — forged on a memory of homophobic violence — has become a safe home for herself, her wife and their daughter.
“I feel that this is a wonderful place for my community and to be married to a woman and to be raising a Black child,” Harris said. “If I didn’t feel those things here, and my wife didn’t feel those things here, we would never create roots and a foundation and continue doing everything we possibly can for this club and this city.”
Last summer, Harris organized a trip for the team to tour the Pulse memorial, which recently earned a unanimous Congressional vote to become a national memorial. The captain wanted to make Pulse feel tangible to new coaches and players who weren’t in Orlando in 2016.
Coach Marc Skinner said it felt like a trip to a “sacred site,” helping him to understand the weight of the shooting in Orlando’s history. The team will repeat the trip next week once players return from international duty.
Pressley believes visiting the memorial is a key part of preserving the memory of the night.
“I remember seeing the bullet holes on the outside of the building and it made it very real,” Pressley said. “I can’t even imagine the fear that people felt that day, that night.”
For both Pressley and Harris, the deepest legacy of Pulse left within them a shared conviction to fight harder for their community — especially as federal and state legislation continues to target trans youth.
The five-year memorial of the Pulse shooting falls on the 12th day of a Pride month riddled by anti-LGBT action by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who started the month by signing legislation to ban trans girls from competing in women’s sports.
Krieger and Harris spent the Friday night before the five-year anniversary at a candlelit vigil hosted by the Zebra Coalition, a local organization that provides housing and support to LGBT youth in Orlando.
Funding for the organization was recently slashed by DeSantis, who vetoed a bill including $900,000 of funding for LGBT causes including a new affordable housing unit for the Zebra Coalition and mental health services for survivors and family members of the victims of the Pulse shooting.
As she looks back on the five years since the tragedy, Harris said she’s determined to use the memory of Pulse to push herself forward into future activism.
“We need everyone to understand that these people in our community need to feel seen and need to feel safe,” Harris said. “I am so sorry that we are coming up with laws that are not protecting our trans community, our children. I’m very fired up about it and I’m very angry, but I have to put that anger into action . ... We have to keep showing up for each other. That’s what creates change.”