Field of dreams: Star intern shares experience of playing soccer at CPKC Stadium
When you enter the pitch at CPKC Stadium, what first gets you going is the tunnel.
It fills with the noise of other people — people cheering next to you, people booming over the speakers outside, people’s footsteps echoing around you from a river of red jerseys and yellow pennies.
On Saturday night, something electric and ineffable took place at CPKC Stadium. But it wasn’t the KC Current and Orlando Pride’s gritty battle for the top of the National Women’s Soccer League standings. It wasn’t Temwa Chawinga and Barbra Banda’s neck-and-neck race for the Golden Boot (most goals scored during the NWSL season).
It was the three-minute media game at halftime.
Officiated by recently retired Sporting KC veteran Roger Espinoza — who declared “No rules!” in the locker rooms beforehand — the annual scrimmage saw a showdown between over 50 journalists, broadcasters and other members of the media.
Also included: a youthful, spry, up-and-coming intern named Kylie Volavongsa.
Thankfully so. It’s one thing to sit in the stands of the world’s first stadium dedicated to a women’s professional sports team. It’s another to get to play on the field.
When I was almost outside, I saw the stadium lights peeking from over the tunnel’s exit. They’re installed in even spacing across the stadium’s partial covering, a series of pinpoint LED-whites that make you feel seen — even if no one’s probably watching. If you have astigmatism like me, they look a lot like stars.
“Be nice to the field!” someone yelled.
I was outside. It smelled like wet grass and wind. For context, I am a washed-up former high school soccer player. Years ago, as a kid, I walked on the field with FC Kansas City when they still played at a high school. I thought that was the stuff of dreams, once.
This was the stuff of dreams.
The stands blended into teal seats and the reds and whites of fans’ jerseys. But for a stadium that can host 11,500 at a time, you can still distinguish a good number of faces watching from the balconies — all designed with steep angles so that no seat would be more than 100 feet from the pitch.
From the field, those steep angles towering overhead are an easy reminder of how a rowdy home crowd can easily turn the place into a fortress. Especially when that crowd yells for a fifth or sixth Current goal, as they have at more than half the games played at CPKC.
If I were a Current player, I imagine standing here feels like an embrace. If I were an away player, a visiting player, I’d feel like that crowd was going to eat me.
With walls like that, it’s hard to imagine that even a player like Chawinga could launch a ball into the Missouri River, something less than 400 feet from the field itself. Bond Bridge loomed tall in the background, but I didn’t really think about the river.
I thought about how the grass expanded around me. How the field’s jumbotron seemed to look even clearer from below. How the scale of the running clock and the scores would’ve lit a fire under me if I still played real soccer.
Having a stadium of one’s own matters when you think about where the rest of women’s soccer deserves to catch up.
The Chicago Red Stars, a week after playing for a crowd of 35,038 at Wrigley Field in June, announced that they’d been given notice a punk-rock festival would replace their Sept. 21 home game at SeatGeek Stadium — though their game had been scheduled since January.
Across the pond, the Manchester United women’s first team and academy will relocate from their training facilities into portable facilities in order to accommodate the men’s squad, whose usual complex is being renovated over the 2024-25 season.
To say that CPKC is special is to state the painfully obvious.
For those of us who don’t really get to see CPKC from the ground, being on that pitch involves a lot of neck-craning and looking up — more than I originally thought. I’ve been to my share of soccer fields, but something about that stadium invites you, urges you maybe, to take it all in while you’re there.
I jogged and looked around for a total of three minutes, realizing by the end that I hadn’t touched the ball yet. Espinoza blew the final whistle.
I didn’t want to go.
