Why KC Current’s brilliant story is also about redemption for Vlatko Andonovski

Creating history all the more in this exhilarating season, the Kansas City Current clamped down the North Carolina Courage 1-0 on Saturday at CPKC Stadium in the first playoff game held at a stadium purpose-built for a women’s professional team.

Maybe someday before long all this pioneering stadium stuff will feel more like a given or an afterthought than a bold breakthrough you can’t emphasize enough.

But the visionary novelty, and its meaning, is still what resonates most as the club makes the unprecedented routine and establishes new standards for the NWSL and women’s sports … and reflects something intriguing about Kansas City itself.

Along with the Chiefs, after all, CPKC Stadium is a prime factor in numerous national and international must-see lists — and, for that matter, it’s one of the first things I show and tell people about Kansas City.

So once again an announced sellout crowd of 11,500 was “amazing” and “electric,” as Current coach Vlatko Andonovski put it. And as usual it was so loud here at the start of the game, he said, that “sometimes you feel like they’re coming down” to the pitch.

Beyond the atmosphere and amenities of the 11,500-seat stadium on the Berkley Riverfront of the Missouri River, though, something more and different and not-at-all automatic happened this season.

Something almost lost in the greater scheme of things.

Quite against the tide, the Current ascended from finishing next-to-last in the NWSL last year to advancing to the league semifinal next week at Orlando. Win there, on a date to be announced Sunday, and they’ll return to Kansas City to play for the title on Nov. 23.

Along the way, this dynamic team set an NWSL regular-season record with 57 goals. That was highlighted by the league record 20 set by the mesmerizing Temwa Chawinga, who scored the only goal of the match Saturday.

But it also was built through an NWSL-record 18 players scoring goals through the regular season.

Oh, and those 37 other goals were more than nine other teams managed the entire season.

Along the way, the Current’s 55 points in the standings were nearly as many as the club had accumulated in the last two seasons combined (62).

Much like the goal production, which this regular season was only two short of the last two seasons put together (59).

That kind of change is truly remarkable.

Now, maybe it was easy from afar to assume such vast improvement would parallel the opening of the new stadium, which followed the building of a dedicated practice facility and other significant investments by the ownership group of Angie and Chris Long and Brittany and Patrick Mahomes.

But it didn’t just automatically happen.

And that speaks not only to dedicated players and the alert work of the front office to keep building the roster, including the pivotal signing of Chawinga.

It reflects a certain redemption and deliverance for Andonovski, the adoptive Kansas City treasure hired by the Current last October just weeks after resigning as the coach of the U.S. Women’s National Team.

Never mind that Andonovski previously coached FCKC to two NWSL titles here.

He knew there were questions about his return to “the club game” and how long it would take him to readjust to the differences, he told reporters earlier this week.

Not that he begrudged anyone.

“I was questioning myself,” he said.

When I asked him Saturday about the arc between then and now, and how this turnaround happened, he smiled. Then he recalled the first sentence of his first meeting with the players after he’d expressed his gratitude for being hired.

“‘We both had a very (crummy) year, OK?’” he remembered saying. “‘It can only go up from here.’”

As he considered the scene further, he also told them, “‘This is the moment where we all need to commit to be the best that we can be for ourselves, first and foremost, because of how the year went.’

“‘But then we also owe it to the owners and organization that … trust us. And then we have to do it for our fans and the community that is with this team and with this organization in good times and bad times (and) in tough times.’

“So that’s how it all started.”

It picked up with acquisitions such as Chawinga, for whom Andonovski pushed after scouting her years ago, and, more recently, defender Alana Cook.

Cook knew Andonovski in “bits and pieces” with the national team but appreciates seeing a more revealing and complete view of him now.

“You really get to see his brilliance as a coach,” she said during a recent interview session with reporters covering the team.

And while the ultimate signature of this season remains to be delivered, brilliance is an apt term for how everything has come together thus far.

Not just in the stadium itself, but in what it’s enabled and inspired for a city, for a club that was under water in the standings a year ago, and for the right coach at the right time.