The North Carolina Courage announced Mak Lind as the team’s new head coach on Saturday.
Lind, 37, joins the Courage from Swedish club BK Häcken Women.
He told ESPN that North Carolina’s possession-based style of play attracted him.
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“I don’t believe there is only one way of playing football, but you need to be aligned from a club perspective and coach perspective,” Lind told ESPN.
“Courage want to play possession style football, and that aligns with how I want to play football today and add direction on it. I like to play line-breaking possession-based football, meaning that everything we do has purpose. We have the ball with purpose.”
North Carolina has been without a full-time head coach since firing Sean Nahas in August. The Courage eventually finished ninth, missing the playoffs by one point.
Lind is the third head coach of the franchise since it moved to North Carolina in 2017. (The Courage franchise was previously known as the Western New York Flash, which played in Rochester, New York, and won an NWSL title in 2016.)
BK Häcken won the 2025 title in the Damallsvenskan, Sweden’s top flight. Lind also helped the team make it to the quarterfinals of the 2023-24 UEFA Women’s Champions League.
“Our search was comprehensive and global in scope, and we are confident Mak is the right person to lead our technical efforts and help return this club to the championship standard it is built upon,” Courage chief soccer officer Ceri Bowley said in a statement.
Bowley also cited Lind’s experience as a professional player as something that “gives him a unique ability to connect with athletes.”
Lind said he had his eye on coming to the U.S. and the NWSL, and that he had other potential opportunities in Europe and one conversation elsewhere in the NWSL.
He arrived in North Carolina on Friday, which was the team’s first day of preseason. Sources previously linked Lind with the job last November, when Swedish media also reported his impending move to the Courage.
In North Carolina, he takes over a team with a storied history on the field — winning NWSL Championships in 2018 and 2019, and three straight NWSL Shields from 2017-19 — and that for years led the NWSL in possession.
Last year, however, the Courage struggled. They made a blockbuster offseason move to acquire United States international Jaedyn Shaw, but Nahas & Co. struggled to fit her into the scheme. North Carolina transferred her again in September, to Gotham FC for an intra-league record $1.25 million. Shaw thrived at Gotham, who she helped win the NWSL Championship.
North Carolina is still in search of a proven goalscorer up top, although Manaka Matsukubo filled that role among others to near-MVP form in 2025.
Lind said he is “almost obsessed with scoring goals,” and he also doesn’t believe that burden falls on one player.
He added that he has a track record of developing goal-scoring forwards, and that he thinks he has that answer already.
On Friday, the Courage announced the acquisition of Swedish forward Evelyn Ijeh from AC Milan for what a source with knowledge of the deal said is a $450,000 transfer fee. Ijeh is signed through the 2029 NWSL season.
At AC Milan, she was one of Italy’s top attacking players, finishing third in the Golden Boot race in 2024-25 with 12 goals.
Bowley said that Ijeh is “a player that we came incredibly close to signing in the summer who remained one of our priorities for this offseason.”
