From girls on boys’ teams to Current situation, look how far KC soccer has come

Heather Ladish couldn’t help but marvel as work-travel took her past the soccer stadium rising next to the interstate.

And reminisce.

Marvel at the idea the structure — CPKC Stadium — is the continent’s first built specifically for a women’s professional team, her hometown Kansas City Current of the National Women’s Soccer League. The $117 million venue and vision of owners Angie and Chris Long and Brittany Mahomes debuts with Saturday’s NWSL season opener.

And reminisce over the role that she and other women played during a time when opportunities on the pitch were limited — and even required permission.

Those were the years when the girls had to play with the boys’ youth teams, because girls youth teams didn’t exist for them. The story was the same in most public high schools.

College programs and soccer scholarships largely weren’t an option for women’s soccer players in Kansas City in the 1970s and 1980s. Ladish, 56, who lives in Mission, Kansas, believes she was among the first, if not the first, from the area to earn a full ride to play major-college soccer (at Rutgers).

Now: An entire stadium, constructed for a women’s team.

“How cool is this?” Ladish said. “I couldn’t be more happy and proud that it’s happening in Kansas City.”

From women’s soccer pioneer to becoming a KC Current season-ticket holder, Ladish shakes her head when she contemplates how much the sport has grown here. She remembers kicking a ball with the boys in elementary school in the 1970s and wanting to play on a team of her own.

“That was the time of women’s lib,” Ladish said. “But there were no girls teams. I had to play with the boys.”

Ladish’s family found a boys team, and she fell in love with the sport. Sometimes the sport didn’t love her back. Once, her dad brawled with an opposing youth team’s father/coach after hearing him tell an official to “get that little bitch off the field” because Ladish was playing hard.

“You needed to be better than the boys, and you needed to be tough,” she recalled.

The boys she played with and against as kids encouraged Ladish to try out at Shawnee Mission East, and she made the team. But the coach made no locker room accommodations for her. “He told me, ‘There’s the bathroom, figure it out,’” Ladish said.

The moms were more supportive.

“The moms on the other teams cheered for me,” Ladish said. “They thought it was great. Not to toot my own horn, but I was good. I was the main player on the team and the moms loved it. Sometimes it made their boys upset.”

Men’s soccer long had a presence in Kansas City. The Spurs of the North American Soccer League played three seasons here starting in 1968 and won a league championship. One of those players, Janos Hanek, had two daughters who became the first girls to play on the boys team at Shawnee Mission North.

Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt promoted soccer, too. He was the original owner of Sporting Kansas City, a charter member of Major League Soccer and winner of two MLS championships. Hunt is enshrined in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

And the Kansas City Comets became a popular indoor team, drawing large crowds to Kemper Arena in the 1980s.

Women and girls? They were playing catch-up nationally, and especially in Kansas City. The NCAA first sponsored a women’s soccer championship in 1982. Kansas didn’t introduce the sport until 1996, Missouri a year after that.

Women’s soccer at William Jewell was in its infancy when Chris Cissell was hired as coach in 1999. He found recruiting to be a challenge.

“There weren’t a lot of options for girls then,” said Cissell, now the coach the Grand Canyon University women’s team in Arizona. “And there weren’t a lot of teams. Programs were just starting around Kansas City, and at some of them coaching wasn’t a full-time position ... more like a side job.”

A 1978 story in The Kansas City Times quoted Robyn Ford, who helped organize a four-team recreational league for women that played at Swope Park: “Kansas City is behind (the rest of the country) as far as growth is concerned ... We need players, teams, coaches, sponsors, everything.”

Girls soccer programs were started at Olathe North, Olathe South, Blue Valley, Blue Valley North and Bishop Miege in 1987, and the Shawnee Mission schools soon followed. Until the mid-1980s, girls’ soccer was the domain of private schools. The Star’s 1985 All-Metro team forwards played at St. Teresa’s and Pembroke Hill.

UMKC debuted women’s soccer in 2009, when the university opened Durwood Soccer Stadium on campus. (The men’s team started in 1987.) That became one of the homes of FC Kansas City, a founding member of the NWSL. The NWSL is the third iteration of a U.S. women’s pro league, the first of which launched after the 1999 World Cup.

Vlatko Andonovski coached FC Kansas City to two NWSL championships and eventually become the U.S. Women’s National Team’s coach. He’s back in KC as the Current’s new coach, and even in the early 2000s, Kansas City struck Andonovski as a region that followed — instead of playing a leading role — when it came to women’s soccer.

“We were doing things, but we were always following trends,” Andonovki said. “We wanted to see what people in Chicago were doing. Or in St. Louis ... New York, California or Texas. There was always someone we wanted to be, or someone we wanted to follow.”

“And now we don’t have to follow. We’re at the point where people have to follow us.”

Last weekend, Ladish took a tour of CPKC Stadium and saw where she’ll sit for Current games. And on Saturday afternoon, she’ll be cheering on the Current at the historic season opener.

That evening, Sporting KC will play its first home match of the season at Children’s Mercy Park, where the Current played home games the past two years while CPKC Stadium was being built.

A women’s game in one pro soccer stadium, a men’s game in the other. In Kansas City, no less.

Playing to a draw never seemed more appropriate.