THEY MAKE HISTORY: CPKC Stadium opened in March as the first purpose-built, professional women’s sports stadium. (Courtesy Team)
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CPKC Stadium |Kansas City, Missouri
In another milestone for women’s sports, CPKC Stadium opened in March as the first purpose-built, professional women’s sports stadium. The $117 million home field for the NWSL Kansas City Current was spearheaded by team co-owners Angie and Chris Long, funded privately by the team.
“It’s going to change the mindset for millions of young girls in this country and their potential; what it means to play professionally and what that’s like to be in a first-class facility with all the fans who are there cheering for you,” Angie Long said at the time of the opening.
Adding to the buzz and bringing some hometown starpower to the project were Super Bowl MVP and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and wife Brittany, co-owners of the team and serving as ambassadors of the stadium project. The March 16 opening match was nationally televised on ABC.
The 11,500-capacity stadium was branded after the Canadian Pacific Kansas City railroad. The success of the project has led to other teams looking into developing their own venues, which would allow them to take control of all revenue streams involved in stadium operations.
“Anybody that sees this place now and realizes the advantage you have for the fan experience, for the players, for the revenue model behind it — they’ll all be wishing they could do this,” said Scott Jenkins, the team’s former vice president of facility development, who left the Current a few months after the stadium opened.
The relatively inexpensive price tag compared to other stadiums at the highest level of soccer is a feather in the cap for project architect Generator Studio and the construction team of J.E. Dunn and Monarch Build, a female-owned general contractor owned by Courtney Kounkel. Venue industry pros were impressed and surprised at what the Current were able to pull off for the project cost, leading other teams to call Generator Studio asking how they did it, according to Tom Proebstle, the architecture firm’s co-founder and design director.
Jill Monaghan, Generator Studio’s senior project designer, said the priority was to support the Current in their endeavor and create inspiration for the team brand, paying careful attention to branding team spaces with graphics and team slogans, for instance.
“As a woman and someone who grew up playing soccer, we do them a disservice if we think about designing for women, because they’re professional athletes first,” she said. “That was the core driver of every decision we made under the Longs’ leadership. These are elite athletes that have never had an opportunity to play in dedicated facilities for them. They’re always secondary tenants in a men’s facility. The messaging here is they’re athletes and they expect to have better facilities.”
Proebstle said the whole idea was basically to keep it simple for the 7-acre site, make it MLS compliant, but with a fewer number of seats, and design it multipurpose to accommodate American football. At the same time, CPKC Stadium’s boundaries provided unique opportunities for a building that could potentially expand to 18,000 seats in the future.
For Kansas City as a whole, CPKC Stadium is a facility positioned to anchor riverfront development, including connectivity for the emerging neighborhood. It’s another element for NWSL teams to consider as they pursue new stadiums, the opportunity to connect an entertainment district beyond the sports venue itself.
“It’s about putting that bar out there everybody is going to have to leap over to be part of the best women’s soccer league on the planet,” Chris Long said. — Don Muret
