When the NWSL announced that Denver would become the league’s sixteenth franchise starting in spring 2026, Nytes added another dimension to her dream. She'd already met with NWSL teams in other cities, but the idea that she could play professionally near her family and the community she’s built during college gives her extra motivation.
“I want to play in the NWSL for sure next spring, and being in Denver would probably be my top option,” Nytes says. “It would be super cool to bring the success I've had from CU and bring that to the professional team. Being one of the first signees or goalkeepers at that program would be super awesome.”
Nytes speaks for the scores of young, talented women who have risen through the ranks of Colorado’s excellent soccer development at the youth level who want to compete as pros. Before this, those gifted players have always had to leave the state. Advocates for bringing a team to Denver argued that they deserved a chance to stay and play at home — and now they have it.
The team can start signing players in July for the 2026 NWSL season that will likely kick off in March. Before then, Denver NWSL is building a temporary stadium and permanent training facility in Centennial, while pushing Denver City Council to allocate $70 million in public funds for a marquee stadium in the city center.
While some residents are debating that price tag, most fans believe this state should have had a major women’s professional sports team a long time ago. In soccer, Colorado has consistently sent athletes to the U.S. Women’s National Team. When it won Olympic Gold last summer, three Colorado players were on the team: Lindsey Heaps (formerly Horan), Sophia Wilson (Smith) and Mallory Swanson (Pugh).
Colorado’s excellence in women’s sports doesn’t end there. Athletes like swimmer Missy Franklin, skier Lindsey Vonn, WNBA coach Becky Hammon, golfer Jennifer Kupcho, and alpine skier and Denver NWSL co-owner Mikaela Shiffrin have elevated the state's profile for years.
Now Denver NWSL’s presence, coupled with teams in the Women’s Elite Rugby league and the Western Ultimate League in pro Frisbee, shows that the state could finally be ready to support a thriving women’s sports scene. Fans even have a place to cheer on those athletes at the 99ers Sports Bar, Denver’s first sports bar dedicated to women’s sports.
“It's nice that we get to live in this era where we get to see it come to fruition, and we get to see people support a women's team in Denver like they support a men's team,” says Jordan Angeli, who grew up in Lakewood before playing professional soccer on the East Coast in the early 2010s.
These days, Angeli works as a soccer analyst and broadcaster, including for the NWSL; she helped bring the NWSL team to town as a leader of For Denver FC, a booster group formed to show how desperately Denver wanted a team.
The league got that message loud and clear: At the announcement of the Denver franchise, Commissioner Jessica Berman said she'd received thousands of letters from girls in the state asking for a team.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman, team owners Rob Cohen and Mellody Hobson and Colorado Governor Jared Polis kicked off the new professional women's soccer team.
Catie Cheshire
According to Millet, Denver is a vibrant market with a strong chance to be successful; she points to the record 13,000-plus season ticket deposits already made by fans as proof. “It's clearly a place where people are behind women's soccer, and the talent that the market is creating and cultivating is a real big signal for that as well,” she says.
Those who have worked to cultivate Colorado’s soccer talent say the state’s concentration of successful women’s soccer players is part luck, part geography and part culture.
Jared Spires, CEO of Real Colorado Soccer, a club that’s been around since 1986 and now serves 5,000 players with both boy's and girl's programs, says that part of the job of youth soccer is to make sure generational talents like Wilson and Swanson — who both played for the club — love soccer more than any other sport.
In turn, those success stories inspire more kids to play soccer.
“Where the clubs come in is that grassroots effort, creating those little soccer programs for the three- and four-year-old kids to get them exposed to soccer,” says Jonni Thordsen, executive director of Skyline Soccer, which serves 3,000 kids just down the street from the proposed NWSL stadium site off South Broadway. “Clubs in Colorado are absolutely important to the future and the growth of soccer in general, especially with girls. Our club is almost 50/50 when it comes to boys and girls. So the excitement and desire is there.”
According to Spires, Colorado’s geographical location in the middle of the country, along with the state's talented athletes, makes it a competitive environment.
“If you're on the West Coast or the East Coast, you can drive an hour and play all these amazing clubs because the population is so big,” he says. “In Colorado, you have to fly everywhere. The natural result of that is that we have a state association that brings everybody together. Even as young as U9, you're playing in a state league and you're playing against all the other players.”
Athletes in metro Denver will regularly play teams from Fort Collins, Grand Junction and Colorado Springs through the Colorado Soccer Association, which has member clubs across the state. That connection means great players and teams don’t just beat up on the same players in the same city over and over again; they compete with more far-flung teams.
“Iron sharpens iron and good teams make good teams better,” Spires says.
The rivalry between Colorado Real and Colorado Rush, long two of the highest-level club teams in the state, helps with competition, too, Spires suggests, because players learn how to play with fire and buy-in on team culture from a young age.
Nytes, who played for Real, says that growing up playing against Colorado Rush’s elite teams — and those across the state — made her the player she is today because of how competitive the teams were. The vast majority of the players on the CU women’s soccer team are locals like Nytes who grew up competing against each other and now find success together, reaching the national championship tournament the last two years.
Erik Bushey, who currently coaches the Rapids 2 developmental squad for the Major League Soccer team in Colorado, was the technical director at Colorado Rush for many years and has served as an assistant coach for U17 and U23 U.S. Women’s National Teams. Having been in Colorado for 24 years, Bushey can document how the culture contributes to the successful athletics pipeline.
“There's a balance between this outdoors component, this adventurous component. We have a myriad of different kinds of people,” Bushey says. “If you go to the mountain towns, if you go into Boulder, you go into the city, you're going to have a different makeup. But I do generally believe that there is a hard-working and blue-collar element to Colorado.”
Players not only develop skills but a work ethic, Bushey points out, using Heaps as an example. He coached Heaps for many years before she skipped playing in college despite earning a full-ride athletic scholarship, and she headed straight to the Paris Saint-Germain women’s team as a professional out of Colorado.
“You're going to see hard work,” he says of great athletes like Heaps. “You're going to see tenacity. You're going to see consistency: consistency in effort, consistency in performance. You're going to see a real drive to be better, you're going to see people who are willing to get out of their comfort zone, who are brave. …We are developing arguably the best players in the world in our country.”
Experts like Bushey believe having a pro team in Denver will only help young athletes grow. Angeli, who played for the now-defunct Women’s Professional Soccer league before it disbanded in 2012, says that when she played in college from 2004 to 2009, there wasn’t as clear a path to professional soccer as there is now.
Players then would dream of a spot on the national team, which has limited roster spots, or try to play overseas. But until the NWSL played its first season in 2013, there wasn’t a sense that domestic professional opportunities were as viable. “Some of the kids that were in college didn't even get through their full college experience without seeing a league rise up and fall,” Angeli recalls. “The longevity of this league has allowed players to pursue something.”
Chasing a dream is impossible if there isn’t a place to direct the dream, says Russell Finch, girl’s academy director for Colorado Rush.
“It was so much harder ten years ago, five years ago,” he says. “Now the pathway to be a professional soccer player and have that dream, to get to make a living from something that you love, is way more achievable.”
In a literal sense, having an NWSL team in Denver increases roster spots so that more people can live their dream. But its also inspirational for young athletes to see professional role models succeeding. “It's probably the most proven way for the next generation to arrive,” Spires says. “Professionally, now that it's becoming real, it gives kids the opportunity to see their heroes, to want to mimic their pathway. Now that reality got a little bigger and a little closer.”
Ava Priest, who grew up in Boulder and now plays at CU, says that seeing Heaps and Alex Morgan play when she was growing up is part of what makes her believe in her potential now. “They've been big role models and idols for me,” she says. “It gives you a path and shows you how you could do something, and it is attainable.”
Mayor Mike Johnston is a major supporter of the incoming NWSL team. He has a banner of Mallory Swanson hanging on the wall of his office, and says part of his motivation for bringing the team here is to inspire young people, especially girls like his daughter, who is an athlete herself.
“She wants to have heroes in her own hometown who are people that are the absolute best in the world at their sport,” the mayor says. “There is a culture of excellence that comes with that, whether you are a soccer player or not. Maybe you play hockey, or maybe you are an entrepreneur starting your own small business, or maybe you love chess, but what you see are people who look like you, who've dedicated their life to being the best in the world and have succeeded. That is great for every kid to see.”
For girls, having role models who are their same gender makes an impact, Bushey says. In the past, young female athletes with potential would be told they could be the girls’ Lionel Messi. Now Denver’s young athletes will have local role models who are female. “There's one thing of viewing something on TV or through social media," he says, "but to go out and experience it firsthand, you see the numbers come out in droves wherever the national team comes and plays.”
Even for those who aren’t looking to go professional, seeing athletes persevere or playing sports as a kid has benefits. “One thing this sport does that I think is so underappreciated, is it helps kids find their voice,” Spires says.
Kids gain confidence, social skills and supportive communities through sports. Nytes is an example of that, he says: She’s had ups and downs in her soccer career starting at Real, but is now well-spoken, accomplished and skilled in more ways than just on the field.
She is “a kid who has gone through adversity but always had people to go through it with her where she wasn't alone,” Spires explains. “Sport is invaluable for that.”
Since the clubs know the vast majority of kids won’t go pro, Finch says they tend to focus on turning them into great people along with great athletes. “We're always judging you by your character and how you conduct yourself off the field,” he adds. “If you go on to be a nurse or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or you work anywhere, how you conduct yourself is going to be how people remember you.”
Right now, kids in Colorado have plenty of ways to learn those life lessons, especially through emerging leagues like Women’s Elite Rugby or the Western Ultimate League where, despite being paid to play, all the athletes have day jobs.
The WER is in its first season right now and the Denver Onyx is already dominating with just one loss and a lock for the championship. On that team, athletes serve in the Air Force, fight fires and work in hospitals, among other things.
Nick Donnelly, senior general manager of the Onyx, calls Denver the “heart of rugby in the United States.”
“Looking back at my playing career, whenever we came to the U.S. or when we played American teams wherever we were in the world, what stood out the most were the teams from Colorado,” he says. “There was always a little bit extra in the tank. It might be due to the altitude or just for the love of the game, but they always had a little bit more to give, and you could tell very quickly that they were from Colorado.”
During the 2024 Olympics, breakout U.S. women's rugby star Ilona Maher led the sevens team to a bronze medal — the first United States medal in the event — before launching a world tour that included becoming a finalist on Dancing With the Stars.
“Because of players like herself and her teammates, there's a real opportunity to integrate this sport as a main sport in the United States, rather than just a foreign sport,” Donnelly says. “It's great to see that there is a growing interest in the sport. Thankfully, Colorado is very aware of rugby as a whole and has embraced the Onyx.”
Infinity Park in Glendale, which is where the Onxy plays, is owned and operated by the City of Glendale; it's part of what makes rugby in Denver great, Donnelly suggests, because it was designed for rugby and had a grass field rather than turf.
According to Donnelly, all of the league's goals for its first season have been exceeded, especially in terms of attendance in Colorado.
The women’s version of the game is as hard-hitting and competitive as the men’s, he says: “There's hard hits, there's fast pace and it's a team sport."
He believes Denver will continue to be a strong market for WER as more people recognize the excitement of the game. And he isn't alone in his faith in Denver as a women’s rugby market. Johnston says that he plans to work with Glendale on a bid to host the 2031 Men’s Rugby World Cup and the 2033 Women’s Rugby World Cup, both of which are slated for the United States.
Though the sport has a smaller following, Ultimate Frisbee has found a home in Colorado with both a men’s and women’s professional team; the Colorado Alpenglow is the first pro women's sports team in the state, having started play in 2023.
Betsy Basch, a founding player who now manages the team, says that many people have learned about professional Ultimate and become fans of the Alpenglow just in that short time. Even before applying to be part of the league, founders sent out a survey asking residents of metro Denver how they felt about a women’s pro ultimate team; they expected forty replies and got nearly 400.
“Their response was overwhelming, 92 percent of our community wanted this team and wanted to support this team,” Basch recalls.
The team has partnerships with many youth organizations, including the Boys and Girls Club, and hopes to decrease the cost of playing sports so that more kids can participate. The Alpenglow would also like to see more women's sports in the area. “Continuing to maintain the idea of celebrating all athletes and that we're actually not in competition with each other, that there's room for all of us, will be an incredibly important future piece,” Basch says.
Johnston agrees. Building on the current momentum, he sees the potential for an even bigger boom in women’s sports. Bringing a Women’s National Basketball Association team to the city is still one of his goals.
“This is going to be a great market for women's sports,” Johnston says. “We would love to make sure this is just the beginning of women's sports franchises.”
When the Professional Women’s Hockey League played an exhibition game in Denver in January, fans showed up in record numbers; 14,000 attended the event at Ball Arena.
For Jennifer Anderson-Ehrlich, it was moving to hear all those fans chant that they wanted a team. Anderson-Ehrlich is the executive director of Sportswomen of Colorado, an organization that works to promote, honor and empower women’s athletics in the state. “Finally, people are feeling like women and girls are getting their roses,” she says.
One place where women and girls always get their roses is the 99ers, which opened on East Colfax Avenue in December. The owners hosted events surrounding the PWHL match and have already had a celebration for the NWSL team. Each day, women’s sports play on the bar’s TVs.
“They are an example of seeing the momentum of a real, increased fan base, an increased appetite to watch and cheer on and be a part of women's professional sports,” says Johnston, who did a stint as a guest bartender at the 99ers.
The momentum for women's sports is increasing not just in Colorado, but around the nation. When Anderson-Ehrlich’s organization started in 1974, it was the first group in the country dedicated to honoring female athletes. The advent of Title IX in 1972, ensuring equality between sexes in college athletics, helped propel the movement; high-level female athletes could now play beyond their youth.
“While we've made great leaps, there's still lots of barriers that exist: cost, transportation, additional opportunities,” Anderson-Ehrlich says. “Even now, gaining visibility for some of our athletes who are doing really stellar things is challenging.”
Even the terrible Colorado Rockies will make headlines over girls' high school athletics, even if those athletes take home high honors, Anderson-Ehrlich points out. Sienna Betts, sister of UCLA women’s basketball standout Lauren Betts and the number two -ranked prospect in the country, won Gatorade Player of the Year at Grandview High School this year, but received little notice in the media.
The historic challenge for women’s sports, according to Millet, is that the lack of investment led to a lack of attention that then became a justification for the lack of investment.
“We've sort of said, ‘Oh, well, people aren't that interested in it,’ so it doesn't get the dollars to attract major talent. It doesn't get the visibility that other sports get in terms of prime placement and broadcasts,” Millet adds. “That's been a little bit mythbusted over the last three or four years as you've looked at what's happened within the WNBA and even women's college basketball.”
Both levels of the sport enjoyed a massive influx of support over the last three seasons as stars like A’ja Wilson, Sabrina Ionescu, Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers moved their games from college to the WNBA. Their star power raised both the fan base and financial value; the New York Liberty's recent valuation of $450 million is thirty times the team’s value in 2019.
On the soccer side, the NWSL earned a landmark broadcast deal in 2023, partnering with CBS Sports, ESPN, Prime Video and Scripps Sports to distribute games nationally over the next four years, which has led to more exposure for the league. Denver NWSL is also investing a record $110 million to bring the team to the league.
“If you invest in the sport, if you invest in athletes and the experience around the sport, fans will come,” Millet says. “It's not even that fans are going to come because they want to support women. They're going to come because they're getting value out of the experience. That has been a game changer over the last probably three or four years for women's sports.”
The media is finally catching on as well, Angeli says. “Social media probably helps, too, because you see companies individually invest in athletes and see more of female athletes’ personalities and people can identify with that,” she explains. “We've done a lot better job of being able to show that it's worth the investment. We have all those things, we just haven't been able to display them to the audience in the past. We have now.”
Though media companies and private investors are investing more in women’s sports, government investment isn't as sure.
Denver City Council, for example, has been hesitant to devote public dollars to the NWSL project. Soon after the franchise was announced, the team proposed building a stadium at South Broadway and Interstate 25 on the former Gates Rubber site, which has sat dormant for decades. The team wants to work with a metropolitan district to access $70 million in city funds to buy the land for the future stadium, as well as build infrastructure in the surrounding area. Though most councilmembers approved the idea in theory, the funds have yet to be appropriated and the councilmembers want to see the team's owners commit to certain community benefits during the rezoning process this fall before handing over the cash.
A few councilmembers expressed concern that there could be better ways to use that $70 million, and even worry that the team’s owners may not follow through with building the stadium, given the country's uncertain economy.
According to Millet, though, the stadium is essential to the team’s success. Bay FC shares a stadium with the MLS’s San Jose Earthquakes, and not being able to curate an end-to-end experience for fans is frustrating, she says.
Parking cars, public transit connections, ushers, security and concessions are just some of the factors Denver NWSL could control by having their own stadium instead of leasing another facility. Additionally, scheduling games would be easier. “That's really hard to navigate from the health and wellness of your players, the pitch quality and the fan experience,” Millet says. “The way we're going to get to parity in women's sports is this infrastructure investment.”
Even if all goes well with Denver City Council, though, the stadium isn’t projected to be ready until 2028. In the meantime, the team is racing to construct a temporary stadium in Centennial by the start of the 2026 season.
Denver NWSL is partnering with the Cherry Creek School District on the temporary stadium at the intersection of South Potomac Street and East Fremont Avenue across from the Denver Broncos training facility, splitting the estimated $20 to $25 million cost of the facility. Next to the temporary stadium will be a permanent performance center for team practice and training.
The City of Centennial purchased the land in 2011 intending to find a community use for the space, but nothing came together. For Centennial Mayor Stephanie Piko, the soccer agreement was a no-brainer.
Centennial doesn’t have a parks department, so it was logistically impossible for the city to operate a soccer facility or other public park in the space. Having the team and school district stepping in was a great solution, Piko says. Plus, the excitement around the NWSL team will bring excitement to Centennial.
“There's that intangible piece of good marketing,” she says. “It gives the nearby community a sense of pride. …It will bring an additional opportunity to the city of Centennial to focus that toward not just the I-25 corridor, where you see IKEA and where Lone Tree has Park Meadows, but now you've got a shift to the east and around Centennial airport that makes it something that is easily accessible for the community and then allows businesses to build around knowing that there will be traffic and access into those areas.”
According to Piko, Centennial actually reached out to the ownership group when city staffers heard about the possibility of bringing an NWSL team to Colorado, offering the land as a possibility for a stadium or training facility provided there could be a community element. Last summer, Centennial gave a tour of the space to the NWSL leadership team that was making the decision on where to award expansion franchises.
The resulting agreement calls for the new, temporary stadium to seat 12,000 people for the 2026 and 2027 NWSL seasons, and then be scaled back to seat 4,000 people for school use; Cherry Creek plans to use the stadium for football games, graduations and other events. If the team’s permanent stadium isn’t ready by 2028 as planned, the parties can re-up their agreement for another year up to five times.
Denver NWSL owner Rob Cohen (third from left) celebrates after breaking ground on the team's training facility in Centennial on June 9.
Catie Cheshire
“We're designing a facility that everyone can be their true selves in and get the services and functions that they need in the space,” she says. “It's amazing, too, I would say, to have a facility that's going to be shared by the larger community.”
In the last few years, Millet has toured many training facilities, including the brand-new, state-of-the-art Phoenix Mercury facility, the third in the WNBA dedicated to just a women’s franchise. The other two are in cities that don’t have a men’s team: Las Vegas and Seattle.
Millet jokes that the Mercury facility is so amazing even the Golden State Warriors would be jealous. More important, that level of design attracts players. “Beyond just the services that it affords the players, it signals to them that this is an ownership group that cares,” Millet says.
The ownership group for the Denver franchise is large, starting with team governor Rob Cohen, CEO of IMA Financial Group and a longtime sports booster. Other owners include alternative governor Mellody Hobson, who also owns a share of the Denver Broncos, and Jason Wright, former Washington Commanders president. There are other well-known names on the partnership team: Molly Coors, Mikaela Shiffrin and Peyton Manning, as well as For Denver FC Capital Partners and others.
Denver’s NWSL team not being owned by the same people as a men’s team, or any other team, is key, according to Millet, because the women’s team will always be the priority. The desire to build both a training facility and a stadium using mainly private dollars is evidence of that commitment.
It will be a big push to have the stadium and grounds ready by 2026, but Piko says that her town is all-in on getting everything done. “We've got a great team in place at the city of Centennial,” she says. “They are ready and able to get to it as a priority.”
Centennial’s excitement is mirrored by that of the team’s passionate fans, who have cheered on every step in the process, and are now waiting to learn the team name and logo.
The six options listed on a survey that the team sent out for community feedback are Denver Peak FC, Colorado 14ers FC, Colorado Summit FC, Denver Elevate FC, Denver FC and Denver Gold FC. Denver councilmembers expect the word "Denver" to be in there if the city is going to give $70 million to the cause.
“I'm really excited to see the brand and the reaction,” Angeli says.”I'll probably cry, because that's what I do. It's been such a dream come true, all of these stages. With every next step, it's just one more thing that feels like I can't believe this is really happening. Like, pinch me.”
Angeli’s mood is mirrored by many, says Bushey, who jokes that fans here are as fired up as those at a Champions League game — even though the Denver NWSL team has yet to sign a single player.
He’d love to see Denver become Soccer Town USA, with the Rapids and college and high school teams joining with the NWSL team to all be successful, as happened with hockey in 2022, when East High School, the University of Denver and the Colorado Avalanche all won championships.
But he cautions that the current energy could dissipate, so Bushey encourages fans to stay passionate.
"These women will need their support,” Bushey says. “I believe this club, this team, can be the best in the world because it's there to be had. …The club should be thinking, 'We can not only be exciting for Denver, we can be exciting for our country. Therefore, we can be the best in our country. And if we can be the best in the USA, it means that we can be the best in the world.' If the fan base did the same thing and really rallied around that, they, as much as the team, could be responsible for putting Denver on a world map.”
Even if she doesn’t play with Denver NWSL in Denver, Nytes expects her CU coaches to help her realize her dreams of playing as a professional.
“In the last year, it's definitely come more to fruition for me that it's actually going to happen,” Nytes says. “I get to stay here one more year and be an even better goalkeeper and hopefully learn a lot more, and then I know that that's the path I'm taking. And it's crazy.”
Crazy in a good way.
