Whenever friends from around the country ask me about Kansas City, I tell them it’s a welcoming and eclectic place with world-class attractions, such as the National World War I Museum and Memorial, the Nelson-Atkins, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and BBQ-mania.
But most of all I tell them that it feels like a city on the move.
To me, that sense is neatly symbolized in the form of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. As the most visible face of the city, his innovative game and engaging way speaks to the transformational tide of a modern Kansas City.
The landscape on the horizon includes the new airport on pace to open in March, impending preparation for the 2026 World Cup, streetcar expansion and likely a downtown baseball stadium and district in the course of the next few years.
The part of the emerging Kansas City that I find myself telling people about most, though, is the brilliant tale of the Kansas City Current.
Just months after completing the bold initiative to build a $19 million training facility for the National Women’s Soccer League franchise they’ve owned less than two years, visionary owners Angie and Chris Long and Brittany Mahomes earlier this month broke ground on an approximately $117 million, 11,500-seat ultramodern stadium on the Berkley Riverfront.
“Don’t you feel it?” Angie Long said that day as she stood along the banks of the Missouri River. “How special and amazing this location is?”
Yes, in fact, we did.
The multipurpose stadium is the first of its kind to be built exclusively for a NWSL franchise and is a virtually unprecedented undertaking for any women’s professional team anywhere. That seismic change in itself makes the Current somewhere between a happening and a phenomenon.
As if that weren’t enough, though, it turns out the organization was just starting on the unrivaled achievements.
Because now the Current is the first NWSL team to have gone from a last-place finish one season to playing in the championship game a year later.
And it’s less coincidence than pure poetry that the Current will be playing in the first NWSL title game televised live in primetime when it takes on the Portland Thorns on Saturday at 7 p.m. in Washington, D.C.
“I think (playing in prime time) is long overdue for the players in this league that way back when started out; it’s long overdue for the sport,” first-year coach Matt Potter said after the team’s training session on Tuesday morning at the gleaming new facility in Riverside. “There’s been much to celebrate in women’s soccer in this country, across the world, for a long, long time.
“And the fact that it’s now getting the stage that it deserves, I couldn’t be happier personally to be a part if. But I couldn’t be happier for all the players that have come before and for those who are playing now.”
Especially the ones right here, right now.
Win or lose Saturday, this season has made for a compelling chapter in this movement.
Their ascent, or #tealrising, as the motto goes, is attributable to dramatic offseason changes.
But it’s also because of a certain synergy stoked by the commitment that more reasonably might have taken years to catalyze.
“I would say the difference mainly from last year … is just the investment in the players,” Lo’Eau Labonta, who leads the Current with eight goals, said in an interview with The Star. “We’ve got a facility now; we’re not (operating) out of trailers. It’s just very professional now, and look what happened: We were able to produce a great product.”
One that reflects playing for ownership they believe in and a city they feel appreciates them.
That’s been demonstrated through some record-breaking crowds and the Blue Crew (even on the road) and teal lighting downtown (check out Union Station) and seeing more and more people wearing Current gear around the region.
What’s also abundantly clear, and quite appealing, is how much this team plays for one another and for all.
“There is a reason why none of us (was) nominated for MVP,” LaBonta said. “Because our entire team should be up for that award … (since) we play together as a group.”
You can see what that means in the exultation with which they play, their array of celebrations and the resilience after a number of potentially demoralizing injuries.
And if you were so lucky as to get behind the scenes with them on a plane or at a meal, you could go seat to seat or table to table and see the chemistry in another telling way among the pranksters and quipsters.
“I don’t understand how so many players are so good and actually are very funny as well,” said the ever-animated LaBonta, who acknowledged she’s typically at the center of the play.
She added, “That shows when we play, just the true joy, because it carries on from the locker room.”
A locker room of their own unlike anything they’ve experienced before, a place where 35-year-old Kristen Edmonds joked in June that the only thing missing was “a time machine for me to get five years younger.”
Fifty years after the passage of Title IX, it’s a place that was overdue. But it’s nonetheless part of a momentous leap forward for women’s soccer, women’s sports in general and this one special team in particular.
“They play with this energy and enthusiasm,” Potter said, “to represent something bigger than themselves.”
Under an increasingly global spotlight tracking the Current, the “bigger than themselves” includes being part of a Kansas City on the move toward creating another world-class institution.
