Utah Royals give homegrown BYU soccer stars a new dream

Stanford midfielder Maya Doms grew up playing soccer at a complex just outside of Sacramento that looks like it might have been shrugged off the shoulder of Interstate 80, next to a fruit stand known for its walnuts, almonds, and sun dried peaches. Like many young players who grew up outside the big-city hubs, Doms’ early sporting memories are filled with long car rides to the Bay Area, where the heart of the competition was. She’s the kind of player who knows what it means to take up space when in a game: hot pink boots, a signature headband, and big goals in big games.

So when Doms received a ball in the middle of the park at the NCAA College Cup semifinal, maneuvered it past a BYU defender, and launched it into the back of the net from well outside the penalty box, there was no doubt she’d seize any opportunity to prolong the moment. She sprinted toward the sidelines hollering “Let’s [expletive] go!” and slid to her knees, pulling to a perfect stop in front of her riled-up teammates on the bench.

Doms’ goal came less than three minutes after the Cardinal’s first against BYU. The Cougars’ efforts to respond were ultimately fruitless in the 2-0 loss, but they produced one of the most aesthetically pleasing performances of the tournament, filled with hypnotic passes and streaking runs at high-altitude pace.

The two teams had 13 seniors and graduate students rostered in that semifinal match, with Doms among them. Had it taken place a decade ago, those players might have considered the slim options available to them as professional footballers. Five years ago, and maybe they’d have confidently entered the NWSL draft, though not without a respectable backup plan. But it’s 2023. For top NCAA athletes, playing professionally is no longer a lofty daydream, nor just a tangible reality, but a reasonable expectation. And as the league expands, there’s an additional element that’s becoming increasingly realistic — to be homegrown superstars who carve up the pitch and knee slide to crowd rapture in the same environments where they grew up.

With the additions of Bay FC and the Utah Royals, the NWSL grows to 14 teams, presenting new professional opportunities in Northern California and Utah, respectively.

“I think there’s going to be a strong incentive for more players to come through the Bay Area universities to be able to play for the Bay Area teams, because it already seems like they want to be pulling former collegiate players from the area,” Doms told The Athletic. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens.”

Laveni Vaka, a central defender at BYU, was more explicit.

“I plan on going pro and entering the draft after this season’s done,” the senior said ahead of the Cougars’ game against Stanford. “I’m open to going anywhere, but I would like to play for the Utah Royals if I could.”

Vaka’s teammate Brecken Mozingo echoed both the plan and the desire. And why not? Mozingo and Vaka share the same Sandy, Utah, hometown as the Royals. (They also share Mac Hermann trophy honors this year; Vaka was named a semifinalist, while Mozingo is a finalist.) Traffic notwithstanding, America First Field, where the NWSL team will play next season, is a 33-minute drive away from the Cougars’ South Field. Stanford — as well as Santa Clara, the alma mater of all four Bay FC co-founders and the head coach — and shares a similar neighborly connection with its NWSL counterpart.

These geographic pairings between top-flight collegiate programs and professional clubs aren’t new to the NWSL; there’s North Carolina and Duke with the North Carolina Courage, and more recently, UCLA and USC with Angel City FC. But as the tectonic plates of the American soccer landscape coalesce into localized youth club-to-pro pipelines, the Utah Royals and Bay FC appear particularly well-positioned to reap the benefits of what Stanford and BYU have been building as college programs, and the link they can provide in that lineage.

Though BYU’s footprint in women’s soccer is smaller and fresher than Stanford’s, the timing of the team’s growth could be advantageous for a newly returned NWSL team — especially given the relationship the two institutions had built in the Royals’ last stint in Utah as part of the NWSL. The club dissolved in October 2020 following reports by The Athletic that detailed a spate of allegations of racist and sexist comments made against then-owner Dell Loy Hansen, who was also accused of creating a toxic work environment. Hansen sold his holdings of the team shortly thereafter.

“When the Royals were here, because soccer is so popular and there’s so many kids playing in our state, they were very well-supported,” BYU head coach Jennifer Rockwood said during a press conference ahead of the College Cup. The Royals were second only to the Portland Thorns in attendance in 2019, averaging 10,899 people at their games that season.

“Obviously it was disappointing for all of us fans and players when we didn’t have the Royals anymore so I think there’s momentum and excitement that they’re coming back to Utah.”

Rockwood added that her players also had a chance to train with the Royals in the past through a development program that gave them critical exposure to pro-level football. She specifically cited midfielder Mikayla Cluff (then Colohan) and forward Cameron Tucker, both of whom have signed with the Royals, as beneficiaries of that partnership.

“We have had players play on the Royals when they were here before, and we had a good connection. My seniors on the team, some of them played for Laura Harvey and Amy (Rodriguez) when they had their Royal Reserves, and so that’s an amazing opportunity and experience for usually my top five players during the summer to train and to compete and play in that sort of environment. That certainly adds to our program when they have that experience.”

Utah’s support of women’s soccer filtered down to BYU, too. In 2019, they led NCAA women’s soccer with an average crowd attendance of 2,945, and they’ve largely maintained that energy. The support for all of BYU’s teams is rooted in faith — around 98% of the university’s student body belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — but Vaka told The Athletic she’s noticed a growing contingent who aren’t LDS members.

“I’ve met fans who aren’t members of the church who have started to become fans just because of the style of play that BYU cultivates,” she said, citing the notoriety that their national championship run in 2021 gave them.

But that support hasn’t always yielded entirely positive results. In August 2021, USC players alleged that people in the crowd of their game at BYU targeted them with racist chants as they knelt for the national anthem. Players recalled an announcement being made at the game reminding fans to be respectful, shortly after they brought their concerns to Rockwood, according to a report by the Guardian, who first covered the incident.

Mozingo added that BYU’s move from the West Coast Conference into the Big 12, a more competitive Power Five conference, at the start of the season might have further boosted attendance. “I’m sure everyone was interested to see the new competition and how we did, and to see the new pressures that were gonna be put on us,” she said.

The pantherine winger transferred to BYU in the fall of 2020 from UCLA and was initially apprehensive about the crowd energy of her new school.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t really want to play in front of that many people. I get nervous,’” she said, “but I have ended up loving it and, in fact, absolutely craving that type of energy on the field. It’s a different dopamine that the fans give you instead of, you know, your energy drink before the game or your own adrenaline.”

Like many collegiate soccer players, Mozingo and Vaka help facilitate youth ID clinics at their school in the offseason, which has allowed them to witness up close the explosive potential of women’s soccer across the state.

“I already thought there was a lot of talent being produced in Utah, but now I think there’s even more,” Mozingo said, “especially watching and training girls, seeing their skill level and how much work they’re putting in, and seeing their parents trying to get their kids to training younger, sooner, faster. Utah is hopping on the trend that other states like California have been on.”

Indeed, California’s soccer scene has trended for so long that it’s crystallized into a norm. In the absence of a Bay Area women’s professional team since 2010 when FC Gold Pride last took the field in the Women’s Professional Soccer league, in many ways, Stanford and Santa Clara have stepped in as the dominant forces of women’s soccer in the region. At Stanford games, the sea of Cardinal red is offset by the clusters of young players migrating around Cagan Stadium in navy blue and white, the colors of the equally dominant Mountain View-Los Altos Soccer Club nearby. The club’s alumni roster glistens with talent that spans generations, from UCLA head coach (and former Stanford assistant coach) Margueritte Aozasa, to San Diego Wave and U.S. women’s national team defender Abby Dahlkemper, to Stanford midfield standout Jasmine Aikey, another Mac Hermann semifinalist this year.

Another notable alum is Bay FC head coach Albertin Montoya. The MVLA product and Santa Clara alum-turned MVLA coach and technical director also managed FC Gold Pride when it had players like Marta and Christine Sinclair on its roster. His leadership is embedded in the history, present and now the future of Bay Area women’s soccer.

The legacy of Stanford’s program has meant its players aren’t often hard pressed to find places to take their talents after college, but head coach Paul Ratcliffe noted the importance of Bay FC as another notch in the continuation of the Bay Area’s foothold in women’s soccer at large.

“Albertin Montoya’s a really good friend of mine, and a fantastic coach and person,” he said during a press conference ahead of the College Cup. “I know he’s going to do an incredible job, so anything we can do to work together to help develop women’s soccer in the Bay Area and around the country, I’m all in.”

Doms sensed that an NWSL team coming to the Bay was inevitable, but was surprised by how quickly it happened given the nationwide competition for expansion teams, and the recent Southern California additions of the San Diego Wave and Angel City.

The Royals seem keen to capitalize on the values of playing at home. Cluff, formerly of the Orlando Pride, was the club’s first signing, and former Portland Thorns player Michele Vasconsuelos was announced less than a week after that, followed by Tucker just ahead of the expansion draft. Bay FC, meanwhile, acquired Santa Clara alum Alex Loera from the Kansas City Current as its inaugural signing, along with San Jose native Joelle Anderson and Katelyn Rowland, who grew up in Vacaville, California.

If the burgeoning movement toward cultivating homegrown players in the NWSL becomes a trend, it could prompt important questions about whether the league should serve a role in accommodating or encouraging it. And while they’re yet to begin the professional chapters of their careers, Stanford and BYU players have already seen enough in the possibilities that surround them to articulate the changes they want to see in their hometowns — changes the future of the game demands.

“We’ve seen a lot of our friends on the (Stanford) men’s soccer team become homegrown players on the San Jose Earthquakes,” Doms said, “but I think that would be such a cool concept for that to happen on the women’s side. I think as the league grows bigger and bigger, there’ll eventually be a point where the NWSL has youth teams and then they could grow into becoming homegrown senior players.”

Mozingo expressed a similar sentiment about friends from Utah who came up through Real Salt Lake’s academy and its MLS Next Pro team, the Real Monarchs.

“I pray for that to happen one day. I wish it had happened 10 years ago so I could have been a part of it,” she said of a women’s academy system coming to her home state. “I have some guy friends on that team and they just love being part of that upbringing and having that opportunity to get naturally released onto the Monarchs and onto the (senior) team.

“(The goal is) not just college anymore within Utah. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I wanna play D1.’ We have a pro team in our backyard for young players to push for. That’s huge not only for me — it’s in the grasp of young players who, growing up, are able to be like, ‘Yo, I wanna be on this team playing for my state.’”

— This article originally appeared in The Athletic.