Wichita native Maycee Bell enjoying budding women’s soccer stardom in NWSL for Gotham FC

In a neglected field in south Wichita is where arguably the most talented women’s soccer player from the city learned how to play.

The untamed grass was up to her ankles and she almost always had to pick stickers out of her socks after practice, but Maycee Bell always appreciated her humble beginnings with her first youth soccer team, an independent club named the Cheetahs.

Nearly two decades later, the Wichita native just concluded a standout college career at North Carolina and is currently a promising rookie on Gotham FC, the defending champions of the National Women’s Soccer League, with realistic dreams of someday representing the United States Women’s National Team.

“Anytime somebody would ask me when I was young, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ It was always a soccer player,” Bell said. “This has been a dream come true so far.

“I hope this shows all of the little girls in Wichita that they can make it. When people ask me where I’m from, I’m proud to say I’m from Wichita, Kansas. They might not know exactly where that is, but I’m happy to put it on the map.”

Bell’s celebrity in Wichita may be limited because she only played one season of high school soccer in the area due to her commitment to the youth national team. In 2016, she scored 19 goals with six assists in just 14 games for Trinity Academy, missing time to play in Italy with the under-16 national team, but was still named Kansas Gatorade Girls Soccer Player of the Year.

Despite her relative anonymity in her hometown, Bell proved to be one of the highest-rated recruits in the country, regardless of sport, to come out of Wichita in decades.

She began representing her country at the youth national level as a 14-year-old. One year later, as an eighth-grader, she committed to North Carolina, the most prestigious program in the country. She spent most of her youth playing up two years in division, then when that didn’t provide enough resistance, she switched to playing with an all-boys team.

“I always wanted to put myself in environments where I wasn’t the best player,” Bell said. “Playing with the boys was super uncomfortable. They were athletically better and it was a faster pace, but it pushed me to become a better player.”

When playing for UNC and legendary coach Anson Dorrance became an attainable goal, Ernesto Alcantara, Bell’s club coach in Wichita, began tailoring her training with becoming a Tar Heel in mind.

A popular drill for the team was sprinting 120 yards, so Alcantara researched recorded times of UNC players at the time and how fast they could run 120 yards. Almost all of them could do it in 15 seconds, he relayed to Bell, who was in middle school at the time.

“Normally, kids that age, they compete with each other when they do the drill,” Alcantara said. “But Maycee was competing against the clock to make sure she made every single 120 in 15 seconds. That was pretty special to see how hungry she was at such a young age.”

Bell captured the attention of coaches everywhere with her combination of height and pace, which made her a goal-scoring dynamo in the youth ranks.

But when she attended her first youth national team camp, the coaching staff believed Bell’s attributes could be maximized by switching positions. Instead of hunting goals at the top of the team’s formation, Bell was asked to switch to center back, a position on the back line of the defense dedicated to preventing goals — not scoring them like she had done her entire life.

“I had no idea what I was doing at first, but I really loved it,” Bell said. “I realized I loved stopping people from scoring more than I actually loved scoring. I guess it’s kind of a cocky thing like, ‘You’re not going to score on me.’ I love that feeling.”

With a possible future with the USWNT, Bell made life-altering changes upon her return to Wichita.

She moved out of her parents’ house in Wichita to live full-time with a host family in the Kansas City area, where she trained year-round with her club team, Sporting Blue Valley DA, and played center back in the ECNL, the top youth soccer league in the country.

The transition to defense was so seamless that Bell became a rare freshman starter for UNC, winning the 2019 ACC Freshman of the Year award and heading home a game-winning free kick in the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament.

“You didn’t have to know much about soccer,” Alcantara said, “you could look out there and tell who Maycee Bell was.”

After suffering a season-ending injury in 2022, Bell returned in 2023 to finish out a distinguished career at UNC. The 5-foot-11 defender was then selected with the No. 14 overall pick in the first round of the 2024 NWSL Draft by NJ/NY Gotham FC.

Bell made her professional debut on March 15 in the NWSL Challenge Cup, then made her regular-season debut for Gotham FC on April 20.

“We couldn’t be more excited to add a talented player like Maycee to our back line,” Gotham FC general manager Yael Averbuch West said in a statement. “She has all the tools to succeed at the next level and we look forward to supporting her to be her very best.”

Bell isn’t the first Wichita native to reach the NWSL, as she was preceded by Goddard’s Whitney Berry (2013), Kapaun Mt. Carmel’s Caroline Kastor (2015-16) and Maize’s Katie McClure (2020-21).

There has also been a flurry of talented women’s soccer players from the Wichita area who have enjoyed standout careers recently at the Division I level, such as Trinity’s Ally Henderson (Baylor), Newton’s Brookelynn Entz (Kansas State), Derby’s Jordan Eickelman (Missouri State), Maize South’s Avery Green (Kansas State), Northwest’s Katie Cramer (Kansas State), Bishop Carroll’s Jami Reichenberger (Northern Iowa) and Kapaun’s Grace Hagan (Kansas).

More could be on the way with current high school stars like Eisenhower’s Bella Smith (Tennessee) and Maize South’s Kyndal Ewertz (Arkansas) on the way to play at the SEC level.

Alcantara hopes their stories can be inspirational to the next generation of soccer players coming out of Wichita.

“I preach to the girls a lot, there’s nothing special or magical about players from L.A. or Dallas or New York,” Alcantara said. “The only difference from here and those big cities is that they have a lot more depth, but I tell our girls all the time, ‘You can be as good as their best players. You have two feet, you have a brain and the ball rolls the same.’ I think those girls have shown that Wichita can hang with anybody.”