KANSAS CITY, Mo. — At 10 a.m., fans of the Kansas City Current professional women’s soccer team can place a deposit on 2024 season tickets, reserving their place in the team’s new stadium along Berkley Riverfront Park in Kansas City, Missouri.
The team plans to break ground on the new stadium Oct. 6. It will open in the spring of 2024 in time for the NWSL season. The $117 million, 11,500 seat stadium is the first ever built specifically for a NWSL team. Current owners say it will be the only stadium in the world “built for an active women’s professional sports team.”
Information about how to reserve season tickets is available on a specific website the Current created for the stadium.
The stadium comes as enthusiasm for the Current swells. The team is currently in first place. During a match last month, the club set a new attendance record for a home game, attracting 10,395 fans to Children’s Mercy Park in Kansas City, Kansas. The Current will play the 2023 season at CMP, which it shares with professional men’s soccer team Sporting KC.
In June, the team unveiled its own training facility in Riverside, Missouri, calling it the country's first professional women's soccer specific training facility.
The Current hasn’t lost since May 25; going 9-0-4 in that stretch. The team’s overall record is 9-4-5. Four matches remain on the 2022 regular season schedule.
Katelyn DePenning remembers seeing Kansas City’s first NWSL team play at Shawnee Mission North High School in 2013. Now she’s a principal and project manager for Lenexa-based Henderson Engineers. She’s a member of the primarily female team helping design the new stadium. The firm made the conscious choice to make its Current stadium team more than 60% female. Nearly half of Henderson’s engineers based in the KC-area are female.
“It’s exciting for other females within our team to get to work with other females on such a big project,” DePenning said. “It does’t really change how we approach projects, we’re all engineers first, but the fact we get to work together and support the first-of-its-kind stadium focused on women’s professional sports is an exciting thing to share together.”
DePenning is sharing the experience with Andrea Mulvany, Henderson’s principal-in-charge of the KC Current stadium. Mulvany admits the historical nature of this project is hard to ignore.
“Knowing just how important it was to women’s sports and women’s history as the first dedicated stadium for women’s professional sports - not just soccer - we knew we wanted to have our strong women leaders, and as many as possible, involved in this project,” Mulvany pointed out.
The KC Streetcar’s riverfront extension will not open until 2025, about a year after the stadium opens.
