Kansas City plans the U.S.’s first soccer stadium built for women : NPR
Kansas Metropolis, Mo., may be on its means towards changing into the capital of ladies’s soccer.
The homeowners of the Kansas Metropolis NWSL, town’s resident girls’s soccer workforce, announced on Tuesday their intention to construct the primary stadium created particularly for a Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League workforce. The brand new stadium is predicted to price round $70 million — supplied by the homeowners — and will likely be constructed on a seven-acre plot of land within the Berkley Riverfront space in Kansas Metropolis, M0., in accordance with the discharge.
At the moment, there are a dozen soccer stadiums that NWSL groups use, however none of them had been constructed particularly for the ladies’s groups. The brand new KC stadium is predicted to seat 11,000 and is slated to open someday in 2024, in accordance with The Kansas City Star.
“From the start, our imaginative and prescient has been to create a player-first expertise, and amenities for our workforce that match not solely the elite stage of those unbelievable athletes, but in addition the passionate assist of the Kansas Metropolis metro and our followers,” Chris Lengthy, one of many founders and homeowners of the KC NWSL franchise, stated in Tuesday’s information launch. “We imagine this important funding and dedication will form a stronger future for our total area and our athletes.”
The homeowners purchased the workforce lower than a yr in the past, throughout which period they’ve ushered in quite a few modifications, workforce officers stated throughout a news conference this week. One such massive transfer was their announcement final month to construct a $15 million coaching facility, with two soccer fields in it, in Riverside, Mo.
The brand new stadium is greater than only a constructing; it represents town’s dedication to supporting its girls’s soccer workforce, co-owner and co-founder Angie Lengthy defined throughout Tuesday’s press convention.
“This transformation goes simply past this constructing and this challenge,” Lengthy stated. “It is actually a press release of how a lot we imagine in Kansas Metropolis and it is how a lot we imagine in these athletes.”