Angie Long is co-owner with her husband Chris of the Kansas City Current, contenders in NWSL, proud occupants of the CPKC Stadium, built for the burgeoning world of women’s pro soccer.But on Friday night the venue will host a different sport, one Long fell for long ago.Rugby.“I think we might be sold out,” Long said, of the US Eagles’ match-up with the Australian Wallaroos in a Pacific Four Series double-header, New Zealand facing Canada first.“The numbers are incredible,” Long said, of expected attendance at a venue that held more than 10,500 for rugby just a year ago, when the Eagles faced Canada.

“I think this sport’s gonna keep growing in the US.Don’t you dare count us out, right? We’ve got the athletes to do it.We’ve just got to get more exposure to the game.”Like most Americans, Long wasn’t exposed to rugby as a kid.In Kansas City, she “grew up playing soccer, I played basketball, I played golf, I was a swimmer, I played American football in the backyard with my brothers and our neighbors.

We were always doing something.”Nor, at first, did she play rugby in college.At Princeton, she “played golf my freshman year and then part of my sophomore year.But I really missed a team.I missed being on a field.

And a lot of my friends played rugby.It was a huge sport.We had 80 people, an A team, a B team and a C team, and almost everyone was a former varsity athlete.I was the only golfer.Most of them were soccer, track, field hockey, lacrosse.

Almost everyone was new to rugby.”In America, it was ever thus.It was also ever thus that college rugby players take to the game like ducks to water, or perhaps lions to hunting gazelle.Long did.“I played fly-half and inside center … I was a goalkeeper from age four or five, all the way up through high school, so I’ve got good hands, I can kick a ball really well, and obviously I was used to playing field sports.

I think everything about rugby suited me.It is the ultimate team sport.You literally cannot move the ball without your team.”In the 90s, that was just as well.Women’s college rugby was an outsiders’ sport.

Regardless, at Princeton Long and her team-mates “decided that they wanted to win a national championship, and from that point on it was very serious, very focused, with a mission to be the best team in the country.I happened across this group of fantastic women in a sport that really fit.I love being part of a team.I love building it together.And we were building it together figuratively and literally, off the field, on the field, all of it.

”They won national championships in 1995 and 1996, Long twice an All-American.She didn’t play on after college but she did go into finance, eventually co-founding Palmer Square Capital Management, which she still leads.Eventually, via the pathways of private finance and public passions, she found her way to women’s pro sports in KC.Chris Long played basketball for Princeton.He and Angie have two daughters and two sons, “a big athletic family.

Sports are important to us and we were also huge fans, like we had [Major League Soccer] season tickets to what was the Wizards when they played at Arrowhead, then to Sporting Kansas City, and also to the women’s [WPSL] Union.”“I’m actually, at my heart of hearts, a soccer person.That is a sport that I grew up with and loved.I just wasn’t good enough to play for my college … But [years later], Kansas City had FC Kansas City and I heard about it: ‘Oh, there’s a professional women’s team, and, oh, by the way, they’re playing in a high school football stadium.’ It was very much not what we now think of as professional, in those early days.

“And then all of a sudden [in 2017] the team was gone.They moved to Utah.And Chris and I were upset, because we’d lost this team … But then we went to the World Cup in France in 2019.We were there, our daughter was playing some friendly matches, and … you could literally see the change that was happening at a global level.To me, like the light bulb moment went on, of ‘OK, we thought 99’” – when the US won the World Cup at home – was when everything was going to change, and actually, nothing changed.

But something is different now,Now it’s not just the US, it’s the rest of the world that is getting onboard with what women’s soccer means and can be,’ We started thinking: ‘OK, we’re gonna figure out a way to get a team back to Kansas City,So that’s when we started in earnest,”It’s been a whirlwind since, the team brought back from Utah in 2020, renamed the Current, the stadium going up with investment from Kansas City royalty, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and his wife Brittany , and last year the Longs buying another pro club, HB Køge Women of the Danish top flight.

Whirlwind is apt, too.This is the Midwest – in the build-up to Friday’s rugby at CPKC, the Australians were obliged to shelter as tornados whipped past their hotel.“This time of year, those types of weather patterns can happen,” Long said, matter-of-fact, more interested in previewing a night on which she hopes that in terms of attendance at least, lightning might strike twice.Last April, USA-Canada attracted 10,518, a clear record for a women’s rugby game in the US that only stood until July, when more than 16,000 showed up to another soccer stadium, Audi Field in Washington DC, to see a World Cup warm-up win over Fiji.Much of that interest was fueled by Ilona Maher, the Eagles’ Olympian center and social media star turned reality TV Femininomenon.

A year on, Maher is not playing.Long detects no adverse effect.“We’ve not had a teeny, tiny bit of drop off in interest,” she said.“We weren’t sure last year, how much is it [Ilona]? But maybe she was just the gateway and now people know a little bit more, right? She gave us all a little bit.She’s absolutely fantastic.

But people do also love the sport.”If the Eagles are to keep bringing in crowds, statement wins will help.In Sacramento last week they lost their Pac Four opener to the mighty Black Ferns of New Zealand, 48-15.But the Australians also lost, 24-0 to Canada, and the Eagles had positives to take, a team packed with debutants fighting hard, the starting XV unchanged for game two.A contest to match the US and Australia’s thrilling 31-31 tie at the World Cup in England last year could be on the cards.

Long is confident the fans will lap it up: “What was it, 2022 when women’s basketball still wasn’t part of March Madness and didn’t have the broadcast deal? The whole argument was, ‘Well, the men are driving the viewership, not women.’ And who drives more viewership now? Actually, the women do.So a lot has happened even in the time since we bought” the KC Current.“Our thought was, ‘Let’s just study the model of professional sports.What works, what grows sports? What grows fandoms? What makes a city important? And we’ve really been fortunate to see in Kansas City the growth of Major League Soccer … What did that take? Facilities were a huge part of it.

So that’s been a focal point for us.“It’s not like we reinvented the wheel.We just said, ‘This makes sense for women too,’ right? This is just what makes sense for sports: a strong belief that the reason women’s sports hadn’t grown, it wasn’t at all the product.It was how you were showcasing it.[Soccer or rugby players] don’t look really good in a high school football stadium, right? Put them in our stadium, and it just elevates everything.

Sports is entertainment and you need to put on a good product for the fans.“All we had to do was look at tennis, look at the Olympics.When you put women on an even footing, you showcase them, the way you broadcast them, you talk about them, the way you tell their stories, there’s every bit as much interest to watch women’s sports as there is in men’s.”The emotion and drama of pro sports can be found in US women’s rugby, semi-pro though it remains via Women’s Elite Rugby stars like lock forward and captain Erica Jarrell-Searcy and full-back Alev Kelter paid to play overseas.Looking back again, Long said members of her Princeton team would be in the stands on Friday night, many having flown in for the Canada game last year.

That night, she said, “was overwhelming.It moved me on so many levels, from the players being there, from their eyes when they saw the facilities and they walked on the field and they saw the crowd, it was everything that frankly, as a female athlete for the prior 30 years, I never knew I was missing until I had it.It’s not that I didn’t think we deserved it, but it just was so much not an option that you didn’t even consider it.You’re just happy that you’re able to play, right? To see [the US women] living through that, [I thought], ‘Oh my god, this is what it can be like.’“Rugby isn’t where professional soccer is in the US yet, but seeing what it could become, what it means to play in premier facilities and have fans there honoring you … I was really moved by the power of these athletes.

”Martin Pengelly writes about rugby in the US on Substack, at The National Maul.