He’s Vlatko: How a Kansas City treasure will represent Kansas City at Tokyo Olympics
With a slew of U.S. Olympic trials impending this month, including swimming in Omaha, track and field in Oregon and gymnastics in St. Louis, we’ll soon have a thorough sense of the local athletes who will personalize the Tokyo Olympics for the Kansas City area.
But we already know perhaps the most high-profile figure who will represent the region at the games scheduled next month:
A man with the improbable backstory of being born in the former Yugoslavia … who came to the United States 21 years ago to play a game he’d never heard of before (indoor soccer) … for a team that soon folded (the Wichita Wings) … and made Kansas City his adoptive home … and reached the pinnacle of his career by coaching females — whom he’d never so much as seen play the game until he came to the U.S.
Best of all, even as Vlatko Andonovski sets about coaching the intergalactic rock stars of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team, he’s still the ever-pleasant, thoughtful and humble guy who feels entwined with the city where he took the oath of U.S. citizenship in 2015.
So in a certain sense he’s unfazed by the attention that came with the job he took in late 2019 — not to mention that has come with steering his team to a 17-0-1 record (the best start for a head coach in USWNT history) mostly since the advent of COVID-19 challenges and complications.
The recognition “has changed. But I feel like I constantly remind myself that the position is what gets the recognition,” he said Saturday in an interview with The Star’s Blair Kerkhoff and yours truly for this column and a podcast coming soon. “It’s not me. I don’t deserve that. I’m Vlatko.”
As such …
“I still want to go to Sporting (KC) games. I still want to go to Kansas City (NWSL) games,” he said. “I want to go to lunch with my friends, and I want to do a kickaround with the Comets boys. And I want to be out with my family (in Kansas City). It’s not like any of that is going to change, because that’s who I am.”
Just the same, part of his identity now is enmeshed with the most prominent of teams on one of the grandest of stages at a peak time: It seeks to extend such success as winning the last two two World Cups and three of the last four Olympics but also avenge fizzling out and failing to reach the semifinals at the 2016 Rio Games.
That blemish may figure as a point of motivation in the weeks to come. But at least entering the team’s camp in Houston, where it will play Portugal on Thursday night in the first of three “Summer Series” matches there over the next week, Andonovski seemed dazzled by the constant evidence of dedication he’s seen since taking the job.
No matter the circumstances, he said, “They don’t want to be in the right lane … They want to be in the speed lane.”
Including at times when he felt like it might be best to slow the pace.
“For them, it’s like, ‘We’re wasting time, we’re wasting time; we’ve got to get better,’ ” he said.
What he called “interesting dynamics” forced him to get better himself “so I can serve the players the best way possible,” said Andonovski, 44, who coached FC Kansas City to NWSL titles in 2014 and 2015.
Only months into a job he considers a privilege with profound responsibility, Andonovski, his staff and team faced the precarious ground of contending with the pandemic while trying to improve and grow together.
As if the new role itself, which he said initially left him nervous and maybe stressed, wasn’t daunting enough.
But even through the months when he couldn’t see players in person and the Olympics were in limbo, that morphed into excitement.
“It’s almost like when you’re falling in love,” he said. “There’s not a moment when you say, ‘OK, from now on I’m going to be in love with someone.’ It’s a process. It’s one thing after another …
“Now, looking back, I don’t know when it happened. But I know that I’m excited about it.”
Part of maximizing the time in between was realizing it would be prudent to embrace what the pandemic enabled: time to focus on individual development and a revamped fundamental structure of the program going forward.
And even different sorts of approaches to team-building through the video-conferencing world. During the months they were apart, they’d vary topics and elements of the calls, from broader tactical ones to time spent working on culture and chemistry to sessions dedicated to motivation and inspiration.
So by the time they were able to all gather in person again last October in Denver, he said, “it was weird, a little bit, but at the same time not that much” because they’d seen each other so often and had such engagement all along.
Now, part of the reason for it all looms just ahead … assuming ongoing issues in Japan related to the virus don’t lead either to further postponement or cancellation.
Any possibility of that isn’t on the mind of Andonovski, though.
With a smile, he said USWNT staff is sharing just enough to keep him in the loop but not be bothered by anything as he looks towards Tokyo — where he can already anticipate the butterflies and goosebumps that will come with the job.
The team, which Andonovski said will be reduced to the 18-person Olympic roster after the games in Houston, is scheduled to travel to Japan soon after playing two friendlies in early July against Mexico in Hartford, Connecticut.
Between now and its Olympic debut July 21 against Sweden, the team that knocked the U.S. out of the quarterfinals on penalty kicks in 2016, Andonovski figured he’d be back in Kansas City for only a few days with his wife, Biljana, and children Dragana, Luka and Daria.
With any luck in that span, he’ll also get to attend another Sporting KC or Kansas City NWSL game or two.
“I’m a Kansas Citian,” he said. “I love everything about Kansas City. So anything I can do to support Kansas City teams, I’ll be there.”
And then he’ll go honor Kansas City, and both his adoptive and native countries, in a position that gets the recognition.
But it’s also animated and distinguished by the person.
He’s Vlatko, after all.