Why Sunday’s regular-season home finale could be extra-special for the KC Current
The Kansas City Current could’ve clinched a playoff spot on Wednesday night if results around the National Women’s Soccer League had fallen their way.
They didn’t.
Asked earlier in the week whether he’d be scoreboard-watching that night, Current coach Matt Potter shook his head no. Instead, he said, he’d be “going out to dinner with my wife.”
“That’s not something we can control,” Potter said.
Focusing on what’s directly ahead — and what you yourself can control — has characterized the Current all season long. And this continues to be the case during an end-of-season playoff push that’s as chaotic as the NWSL has seen in its decade of existence.
The Current sit in fifth place right now, and that won’t change by the time they take the field Sunday against the Washington Spirit for their final regular-season home match at Children’s Mercy Park.
By the end of that night, though, they could drop to sixth or be in first place — quite a wide range of possibility, to say the leads. So the message of “controlling what we can control” continues to ring louder than ever.
“It’s so easy to say, but it’s so hard to actually do,” Potter said.
This season, especially, teams at the bottom of the league table aren’t much worse than those at or near the top. Upsets happen, and some teams end up with some surprising results.
If you think of the NWSL, everything that’s happened doesn’t surprise you,” Potter said. “So once you kind of take that through the process and now flip that to say, ‘OK, what is it you can control?’ ... now you can start to separate the emotion from the occasion, and that’s what we’ve tried to do.”
So what can the Current control? First off, they’d clinch a postseason berth with a win Sunday. Earlier in the season, the Current took care of Washington 1-0 in a match that included a massive penalty stop at the end from goalkeeper AD Franch.
The Spirit, the NWSL’s reigning champions, have just three wins this year. Until last month, they’d gone 18 games without a victory (they claimed two of those three in just the past month). The results haven’t gone their way, Potter said, but that doesn’t mean they should be taken lightly.
“Their roster is incredibly deep,” Potter said. “They’ve gone through a coaching change, and sometimes that can inspire. And they definitely have the talent.”
The Current, meanwhile, roared to a 13-match unbeaten streak and have lost just one league game at Children’s Mercy Park this season. A win on Sunday would give them five wins and five draws in 11 NWSL home games this year.
The KC players and staff are hoping they can thank the fans for their support with one more regular-season home victory.
“It’s about saying thank you to those folks that have come out,” Potter said, “because we’re so excited and energized by them when they’re there.
“I got to see some of the (fans’) faces in pictures, videos, and it’s just so cool to see people of all ages, people of all genders. It’s really exciting to see that the product that we’re putting out there is being supported by the community.”
This story was originally published September 23, 2022 at 2:58 PM with the headline "Why Sunday’s regular-season home finale could be extra-special for the KC Current."