Two years ago, she was selling medical supplies. Now, she’s a key piece of soccer in KC

Scrolling down her Instagram feed, Jordyn Listro would catch snapshots of friends living out their lives as professional soccer players — former college teammates, or friends from her youth, posting training and game clips.

Then she’d put down her phone, put on her game face and prepare for her next meeting with a surgeon to whom she hoped to sell her company’s sports-medicine products.

She loved her job. It’s what she studied in college for. But seeing those clips of her friends living out her dream made Listro sad, too.

“It was really hard,” Listro told The Star.

She had played professionally once before. But at this point in her life, she was back in her hometown of Toronto and working a regular day job, balancing a hectic work schedule while trying to grind for the future she really wanted.

This phase of life wouldn’t last forever. In fact, it lasted for less than two years.

Now, Listro is an integral part of Kansas City’s National Women’s Soccer League team, having joined the club in March. She made her full Canadian Women’s National Team debut just a month earlier.

But her road to becoming a Canadian international and an established NWSL player wasn’t easy.

Trying to fit in

Listro would walk the north side of Tenerife, a small island 200 miles off the west coast of Africa, exploring coffee shops and whiling away the day until practice at 8 p.m.

There were only so many times she could go to the beach, and the downtown area of Tenerife reminded her too much of home.

Those were long days, and often lonely ones, too. But unable to speak much Spanish and having no close family or friends around, there wasn’t much else she could do.

In June 2017, Listro signed her first pro contract with UDG Tenerife, which competes in Spain’s Primera División. Despite a successful collegiate career at South Florida, she went undrafted by NWSL teams in 2017.

A defensive midfielder, she struggled to stand out from the crowd. And with no women’s league in Canada and the NWSL disinterested, her options were thin. That’s when she turned to USF volunteer assistant coach Iban Lopez.

Lopez began coaching at South Florida during Listro’s senior year when his wife took up a research position at the university. He landed in the Sunshine State with a UEFA Pro License and 20 years of coaching experience in his native Spain.

Having seen Listro play, he helped her secure her a pro contract with Tenerife.

“It was great to have him on board,” Listro said. “Because I really don’t know where I would’ve played afterward if it wasn’t a straight path to Spain.”

But her time in Spain wasn’t great. She loved the soccer side of her life there. Coming from America and playing in the NCAA, Listro possessed loads of athletic ability, but the Spanish game was much more technical.

“They focused a lot on technical ability, which was amazing to see some of the players do that I could never do,” she laughed.

Practices were short, 8-10 p.m., and games were played on weekends. The club was recently established, in 2013, and therefore had to share its facilities with other local teams and organizations. Listro couldn’t go to the gym or the field at any old time of the day, as she was accustomed to doing in Florida.

And when she was on the field, she found it hard to communicate with her teammates. She began taking Spanish classes, but it was taking time. She couldn’t learn a new language with the snap of her fingers.

“It did get a little bit lonely,” Listro admitted.

She terminated her contract with Tenerife before Christmas 2017, having made just five appearances. She’d negotiated a clause that in her contract that would allow her to leave during the Christmas break if she hadn’t settled in. Ultimately, she decided to trigger it.

“It was just really hard to live there away from the soccer,” Listro said.

Job in sales

Listro returned to Canada with no set plan of continuing her soccer career. She wanted to, but didn’t know how.

Putting soccer on the back burner, she took a job with Stryker, a medical technologies corporation, as a medical sales representative. She would visit orthopedic surgeons in hopes of selling them products to assist in surgery.

“I really enjoyed it and I think I’ll do it post-soccer again,” Listro said.

But she still longed for that pro career. She continued to train by herself, working out around her hectic work schedule.

“Trying to fit in my training before, during, after, was difficult,” Listro said. “But I think it just made me grow as a person, and then coming back to it makes me appreciate playing the sport so much more.”

She remained in her sales job for almost two years until, late in 2019, she got a break. Throughout her college career, Listro had played multiple times against the Orlando Pride, Florida’s NWSL team.

On a visit back to USF in 2019, her former college coaches connected her with Pride coach Marc Skinner. Listro attended a two-day tryout and was promptly invited to join the team for its preseason preparation.

“That’s where I wanted to be from the start,” she said.

Less than a year later, Listro made her NWSL debut for the Pride in the Fall Series. Within a year, she’d gone from working a regular day job and dreaming about a return to the pros to a starting job as a player in the most competitive women’s league in the world.

“It was just so nice to be doing what I feel I was put in this life to be doing,” she said.

Listro signed a one-year deal with the Pride ahead of the 2021 season but was traded in March to Kansas City’s new NWSL team.

She made her Kansas City debut three weeks later and played 57 minutes in KC’s regular-season opener against Louisville on Saturday.

“I think this was a really good stepping stone for me to be in the league,” Listro said. “Maybe it’s uncomfortable — I’ve never lived in Kansas or never even been to Kansas, (but) I think this was the right step for me for right now and I’m excited that they wanted me.”

A month before her arrival in KC, Listro was called up to the Canadian Women’s National Team for the SheBelieves Cup. She played 61 minutes in her senior international debut, a 1-0 win over Argentina.

These days, her memory almost skips over her days as a medical sales rep. She goes straight from Spain to the Orlando Pride, and now KC, in her mind.

“It definitely sometimes feels surreal, but at the end of the day, if I were to look back at being 15 or 16 years old, I knew that this is where I wanted to be,” Listro said of the past couple of years. “... I’m just happy that it played out exactly the way that I hoped for when I was younger.”

This story was originally published May 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Two years ago, she was selling medical supplies. Now, she’s a key piece of soccer in KC."