Kansas City’s Soccer Star Is a Twerking, Goal-Scoring Late Bloomer

“I just think it brings a fun challenge to a game that should be fun,” LaBonta said.

The Current are riding high, led by LaBonta, whose first name is pronounced “Low-eh-ow” but who goes by “Lo.” Since last year, Kansas City went from being a recently sold and relocated franchise that finished last in the league to reaching this Saturday night’s NWSL championship game against the perennial power Portland Thorns at Audi Field in Washington, DC

LaBonta is living, dancing evidence of two emerging notions in the 10th-year NWSL: that investment in top-notch facilities and staff can make a tangible difference on the field, and that the league can create stars beyond players on the US women’s national team .

The founders of the Kansas City Current—Chris and Angie Long, and Brittany Mahomes, wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes—bought the former Utah Royals franchise, relocated it and quickly went against the grain of operating a women’s team on a shoestring budget. . They’ve spent or committed $145 million to the construction of facilities, Chris Long said, including an $18 million training complex that opened last June.

LaBonta said the facility’s opening “definitely changed our team in terms of, we’re able to recover, we weren’t having to drive to all these places.” She credits the players’ plush new home with helping them bond, making them comfortable—and sparking the Current’s 13-game unbeaten streak that helped it reach the playoffs.

LaBonta also credited the Current’s new sports-performance staff with improving her strength and helping make Kansas City “one of the fittest, if not the fittest, teams.”

When two of the Current’s stars went down with injuries—forward Lynn Williams and midfielder Sam Mewis, both US women’s national team veterans—LaBonta also stepped in to fill the scoring void.

“She took that role as a leader,” said LaBonta’s husband, Roger Espinoza, a midfielder for Major League Soccer’s Sporting Kansas City. “Once you take that role, all the pressure—good pressure, positive pressure—comes to you and you perform at your best.”

LaBonta wasn’t a can’t-miss prospect. Listed at 5-foot-1, she was drafted 34th overall in 2015 by the NWSL’s Sky Blue FC, now known as NY/NJ Gotham FC. She promised herself to try pro soccer for two years before parlaying her Stanford engineering degree into a product-design job at an athletic shoe or apparel company.

But she’s stuck with soccer, despite being waived, relocating from Kansas City to Utah and back again, and even going on loan to Australia for the Western Sydney Wanderers.

LaBonta has never been called up to play for the US women’s senior national team. She’s feisty enough about that ambition that she will name only retired players—Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy—as idols because she sees current national-team players as competition.

“It would be fun to be called in just to know, ‘Can I hang with these women?’ Can I compete here?’” LaBonta said. “But at the end of the day I’m focusing on the Current right now, because we have a big game. And I’m hoping if I do well then maybe that opportunity opens up. But, I’m not holding my breath.”

LaBonta was raised in a strict household in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., with a brother and a single father in the Los Angeles Police Department. Although she joked that growing up in an all-male household left her without decent shampoo and conditioner—”You got the all-in-one,” she said—she said her father’s discipline helped prepare her to become a successful pro athlete.

She’s gregarious enough to star in Kansas City’s promotional video for the $120 million stadium being built for the Current to open in 2024, but enough of her father’s daughter that she felt “super disrespectful” filming a scene where the current Kansas City, Mo., mayor arrives in his office to LaBonta in his chair with her feet on his desk. (“He’s a good sport,” she said.)

On the field, LaBonta’s goal celebrations have included staging a trust fall, mimicking a head-banging fan at a concert, forming a high-kick dance line with teammates, and integrating a field’s corner hardware for a golf scene. LaBonta pantomimed lining up a shot as a teammate lifted the corner flagstick, then fist-pumped her “putt” even though she was on the 18th hole at Pebble Beach.

The idea for her fake-injury celebration came from someone on social media sharing a video of a similar one by a player in Argentina—and daring her to do it, too.

“I said, ‘Bet,'” she said. And she did it.

In Kansas City’s playoff game last Sunday at Seattle’s Lumen Field, LaBonta envisioned a football-themed celebration for the home of the Seahawks. Her teammates would line up like an offensive line and she would hike the ball, then do Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott’s hip-twisting warm-up. She thought it would have been a crowd-pleaser.

“I think I had one shot that game, though,” she said, “so it probably wasn’t going to happen.”

Write to Rachel Bachman at [email protected]