KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As one of 50 women competing to be Travis Kelce’s girlfriend, Lauren Schwab Donahue wore a red T-shirt that said “Missouri” the first time the Kansas City Chiefs tight end laid eyes on her.
They met after a long, exhausting day of filming the 2016 reality show “Catching Kelce.”
“The craziest roller coaster of my life,” he has called the experience.
Kelce stood at the 50-yard-line of a football stadium in Los Angeles and watched contestants, one from every state, walk toward him one by one from the end zone. One woman did deep squats and lunges across the field to impress him. The one from Georgia handed him a peach.
Donahue, her heart pounding, skipped the theatrics. “I felt like I was walking toward my best friend,” she told The Kansas Star recently.
She remembers Kelce wrapping both arms around her like a 6-foot-5-inch bear and “we just fit together like two puzzle pieces,” said Donahue. “Once we hugged, I did feel that connection, that electricity.”
In the end, Kelce did not choose Donahue, who made it to the final four. But now, seven years later, she still considers him a catch. And she is hardly alone in that.
“He hasn’t lost his boyhood fun, charm,” she said. “But he also has this stature that is very attractive. And swag to the max.”
Raise your hand if your partner has given you a hall pass when it comes to the ruggedly handsome offensive lineman.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever left a comment about him online with a fire flame emoji.
Or messaged him every day for a year. Yeah, some woman did that.
Fawning fans have been wondering if he’s dating anyone. The rumor mill is running hot.
And they’ve been binge-watching “Catching Kelce.” The reality dating show aired on E! and is available on streaming services.
Kelce was asked about the show in interviews leading up to The Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory last month. The show propelled him onto a national stage, setting him up as the team’s most eligible bachelor. A case could be made he still is. (We’ll get to that in a bit.)
The women on the show were clearly impressed with the eight-time Pro Bowler. “Even his shadow is sexy!” one contestant declared in a promo.
Kelce says he doesn’t regret doing the show. But he has sworn off doing any more reality TV because of it.
“I don’t think I got portrayed as myself,” he said on The Pivot football podcast in January. “And there were a lot of things that just made me uncomfortable about the show.
“I don’t really necessarily want to talk about it because I don’t want to say anything about the ladies or any of them. But I was asked to do more than I wanted to. … That doesn’t always work out great.
“I don’t necessarily say I regret it but it was definitely a learning experience.”
Gasp! Reality TV isn’t real?
Viewers never saw that Donahue’s mother met Kelce’s mother, Donna Kelce, and the moms hit it off during a shopping spree on ritzy Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
“I think it was the most real part of the show,” Donahue said. “I think that they didn’t show a lot of the realness and a lot of the deep conversations. I think they had a storyline and they wanted to keep it.”
Donahue is still single and a free agent.
“It was extremely awkward because I really didn’t have much to say about what we were doing on the show,” Kelce told The Pivot. “It was just kinda, E! took it.”
Possibly the women from Missouri and Kansas, both Chiefs fans, were too normal?
“You could tell they were looking for fun girls … very high energy, very fun-loving. They weren’t looking for wallflowers,” Kara Tolbert, who grew up in Overland Park and represented Kansas on the show, told The Star.
“I don’t even see myself as super high-energy. I think I was just so excited … that I was having a good time and not taking it too serious.”
Tolbert’s brother, Tanner Tolbert, encouraged her to go on the show. He met his wife, Jade Roper, the mother of their three children, on the ABC reality show “Bachelor in Paradise.”
“I did not have quite the same success,” said Tolbert, a Blue Valley West graduate living in New York City and working as a graphic designer. She makes jewelry on the side, too, under the name KindCult. She turned 34 on Super Bowl Sunday.
She’s a longtime Chiefs fan, mostly through her dad and brother. “And (Kelce) has a special place in my heart because of what the Chiefs are today,” she said. “So he still has a presence in my life for that reason.
“And also because any time the Chiefs start doing well I have a whole slew of friends that make a comment about me not catching Kelce.”
‘Biggest Chiefs fan’
Here are the lasting impressions Kelce left on Donahue and Tolbert.
He is more handsome in person than on camera. Has a kind of Gerard Butler in the movie “300” thing going on, said Donahue.
His swagger is confidence, not cockiness.
He smells good. No easily recognizable cologne. He just smells good.
The contestants didn’t know who the bachelor would be when they signed up for the show. They were told only they would be competing for the affections of a professional athlete. An NBA star? A Major League Baseball player? They learned just days before filming began that it was Kelce.
Can’t blame the women from Missouri and Kansas for thinking they had an upper hand. At least they knew who he was.
“I’m the biggest Chiefs fan and you are my dad’s favorite player,” Donahue told Kelce when they met on that L.A. football field.
Kelce’s face lit up as he gushed: “You are absolutely gorgeous.”
They spoke briefly, and as Donahue walked away, the TV camera zoomed in on the rear view of her exit.
“Missouri,” Kelce said aloud. “Dad’s already a fan, huh?”
Tolbert scored an invite to the mansion where the finalists were to live, and later to a downtown L.A. bar with the other women. Kelce’s brother, Jason, who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles, showed up for wingman duties.
She remembers two things about that evening.
Producers encouraged the women to do body shots. “It’s not my style,” she said.
And she can’t forget Kelce’s shoes — red, high-top sneakers that “had more rhinestones on them than I’ve ever owned in my life.”
Tolbert thinks the “fun girls” that producers wanted for the show indicated where Kelce was at in his dating life — he wasn’t looking for a wife.
“I think at the time Travis Kelce was not ready to be caught,” Tolbert said.
Actually, he was there for the money.
Kelce has said he rebuffed E! multiple times over several months before he agreed to do the show. When his manager told him it would involve 50 women, one from each state, he was mildly intrigued.
“And finally they came to me with … an offer financially … all right gotta do this,” he told The Pivot.
“I was so bad financially my first couple of years … I literally went through my first couple of checks like it was nothing. … There were times in the offseason I was avoiding the rent lady. It was that bad.
“So I heard about this situation where I could make six figures in two weeks and I was like ahhhh … and 50 ladies? I’m like this is actually starting to sound a little better.”
‘You’re so normal’
Donahue, who is 36, lives in Marina del Rey, Calif. At the time she was on the show she owned two gyms in California. Today she hosts retreats and runs a coffee company named Laleigh — in honor of her grandfather, “who was my best friend” and who had Parkinson’s disease. He died about a year and a half ago.
Though she competed as Miss Missouri, Donahue grew up in Valley Center, Kansas, just north of Wichita. The producers really liked her but had already tapped Tolbert to represent Kansas.
The producers had seen her work on a 2014 reality show called “Opposite Worlds” where she lived inside a Louisiana cave for two months. So they had her represent Missouri because she had lived in Kansas City for a while before moving to California.
“We think you would really like this guy,” producers told her before she was told it was Kelce.
She decided going in that she wouldn’t fake or pretend anything, just be herself. Competitive. Christian. A non-drinker.
She felt like she connected with Jason Kelce, who is now married with children, when he was on set with his younger brother. “I like dad jokes, I like humor,” she said. “So Jason, Travis and I really connected around humor and not taking life so seriously.”
During a private conversation, Kelce asked Donahue, “you’re so normal, what are you doing here?”
She told him, “Same to you. You’re normal, what are you doing here?”
“After that, the producers kind of wanted to keep us apart,” Donahue said. “Because I think the connection was real. After that, I think there were times he wanted to invite me to things, and they weren’t letting him.
“He told my mom, ‘I would have been spending a lot more time with your daughter.’ ”
After the two attended a Jessie James Decker concert, Kelce told the country singer that “Lauren is wifey material.”
“And I think at that time, I don’t think he was looking for wifey material,” Donahue said. “For me, the connection was real.”
She said after she left the show the producers called to apologize, telling her “we didn’t want it to end up being the Lauren and Travis show.”
How to catch a Kelce
Kelce hasn’t shied from offering details of his private life on social media.
He and Maya Benberry, the Kentucky woman he chose on “Catching Kelce,” were both active on social media and reportedly split before the show even aired. He told The Pivot that “she shares a lot of the same personality traits that my ex carried.”
Five months later, he began a relationship with Instagram model and on-air host Kayla Nicole. They dated on and off for five years before splitting up last year.
But he’s been relatively circumspect this season, leaving his admirers and keepers of sports and gossip blogs to speculate. Is he dating? Who could it be?
“I’m in the free market right now, man,” he told the podcasters of The Pivot. “I’m out there just enjoying life, focused on my profession, got my feet up outside of football.”
“He needs Catching Kelce 2,” Tolbert said.
Anyone who has designs on Kelce needs to keep a few things in mind, Donahue and Tolbert said.
“I think that you would have to mirror his swag, be unapologetically yourself and shoot your shot in your DMs,” said Tolbert
“I would say he has a very, very special and close relationship with his mom, Donna,” Donahue said. “So I would get close to Donna. I would get to know her. Make sure family is first and that you know his family.”
It wouldn’t hurt, either, to play sports, said Donahue, “because he’s probably looking for a breeder. The next two brothers to play against each other in the Super Bowl will be his.”
