Dreams come true in KC for Iowa girls soccer team

ANKENY, Iowa — If you can see it, you can be it. “When watching her on the field she was really good with her foot skills,” said Ankeny girls youth soccer player Peyton Vorri. Her teammate Reagan Fors loves the sport of soccer and said, “I’ve been playing it since I was very little. My whole family has played soccer.”

In June former Ankeny High School girls soccer coach Rhonda Housken took twenty-three ten-year-old girls to watch the Kansas City Current NWSL pro soccer team. Reagan Fors said, “I just couldn’t wait. I had to tell people.”

They didn’t just see the game. Housken’s granddaugher, Reagan, Peyton and their teammates were able to walk out onto the field with the athletes they dream to one day become. Peyton said, “I loved it so much. I got to walk out with the captain and on the field. It was so cool.” Reagan added, “It was pretty amazing to meet all the players walk on the field. It was the best doing it with all of our friends.”

The future of soccer with present day heroes on the pitch. “Yes, I told her I play midfield and forward, and she said ‘me too,” said Peyton describing her experience walking with KC Current forward Bia Zaneratto. “I got to walk out and grab the ball and put it in the middle of the field. I walked out with the referees,” said Reagan.

The trip is almost a full circle moment from when Housken began the all girls Ankeny soccer teams in 1991. Housken said, “I hung up a piece of paper on the door to see if anyone wanted to be on an all-girls team.”

That was seven years before girls soccer became a sanctioned high school sport in Iowa in 1998. “From the first time I started the high school program we had girls that didn’t even know what side of the field to start at a kick off and so to see those girls go from knowing how the soccer game works, how you do a kick off, how you do a corner kick, how you pass the ball just to see it expand from there.”

The importace in what soccer could become for girls and young women in Iowa helped build Ankeny into a power house. “I was the first female coach at a high school in the state of Iowa to get 100 victories, and so that’s one of my accomplishments. I just can’t believe how we took it from nothing and not very much skill to be ranked one of the top two or three teams in the state,” Housken said.

Like the blood sweat and tears that helped propel soccer in Iowa and Ankeny specifically the fight for resources in women’s sports led to the Kansas City current having the first stadium built solely for women’s sports. Housken said, “Everybody is so excited to see where soccer came and where it is today so it’s just been exciting to see the growth over the last 33 years.”

It was a dream come true for the girls and a dream thirty-three years in the making fulfilled for Housken. “I got to walk on the field with a pro soccer player which is one of my dreams,” said Peyton. Housken added, “Just see that what their goals would be if they wanted to keep playing soccer through their high school, through their college and beyond.”

With parents and kids there were seventy-five tickets provided for the group to see the Current defeat the Seattle Reign on June 9th 5-2.

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