On a hot and humid day in Kansas City, Current midfielder Lo’eau LaBonta watched teammate Sam Mewis carefully running back and forth. She sat in a circle of Current players cooling down from a midday practice as Mewis jogged nearby with a trainer, cautiously rehabbing her right knee, which has proved to be a long-term project after she had arthroscopic surgery on it in August of 2021. LaBonta joined with her teammates in calling out encouragement to Mewis, as urgently optimistic as they would be if Mewis had the ball in front of an open net.

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“Those are just the little things that show you we love and support everybody on this team,” says LaBonta. “Anything we can do to help them and get them back on the field, we will.”

LaBonta has now plopped down into one of the patio chairs on the side of the Current’s new training facility, a chair still wet from the heavy thunderstorm the night before. The rest of the team is about to hit the weights for the back half of training but LaBonta has graciously carved out some time to talk to a reporter, one of many covering the Current’s training complex unveiling.

LaBonta is old hat at media duty as one of NWSL’s 100-cap veterans. And yet for some reason LaBonta’s induction into that prestigious club came almost as a surprise; 100 already? But upon reflection, it makes sense. LaBonta was drafted in 2015 (No. 34 overall by Sky Blue FC) and has been playing steadily ever since then. Those 100 caps crept up on everyone as surely as the passage of time.

“I’ve had a lot of hard years in this league,” LaBonta said.

Her time with Sky Blue didn’t last long. She was waived midseason as a rookie but landed with FC Kansas City in 2016, and has remained the organization ever since through its various iterations – in fact, she’s one of just two players from that ‘16 squad who didn’t retire or get traded away, alongside fellow midfielder Desiree Scott. In that time, she’s experienced a lot. LaBonta developed her craft under then-head coach Vlatko Andonovski, but then lived through FCKC’s 2017 shuttering and sale to become the Utah Royals. Then the Utah Royals went through their own collapse in the wake of reports on owner Dell Loy Hansen’s racist behavior and a toxic work environment in the overall Utah organization. The Royals were then brought back to Kansas City on short notice, where they finished 2021 in dead last with a 3-7-14 record and a -21 goal differential.

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And on top of everything specific to the team, there were leaguewide issues that affected all the players, from taking a stand against systemic abuse and harassment to laying the foundation to eventually negotiate the first CBA with the league.

“We’re not just professionals here showing up to get our paycheck, we’re here to make it better for the next generation,” said LaBonta, yet another hat she unofficially wears amidst those 100 caps.

This is more than just a fraught career path; it’s a zig-zag run through an active minefield where players were left waiting multiple times for whether they’d have jobs next season. This is the context in which we must consider LaBonta’s 100 caps, summed up inadequately by “a lot of hard years.”

The reward for LaBonta’s perseverance: she is now settled at the Current’s new training facility, and the players in general seem pleased with their ownership and their conditions. She has the respect of a devoted fanbase, including original FCKC diehards who never forgot the two championships they brought to the city. As of the writing of this article, Kansas City is on a nine-game unbeaten streak after a slightly rough start to the season and sit fifth on the table, just three points behind league leader Portland Thorns.

“If you look at our starting lineups from preseason to Challenge Cup to here,” LaBonta noted, “We’ve played so many different formations. We’ve never had the same starting lineup day after day or game after game. So it’s really interesting trying to figure out those dynamics. And I think that’s why it’s just now starting to click on our team and we’re getting some results because we are figuring those things out.”

In their latest game, a 2-1 win over the San Diego Wave, LaBonta was the team leader in shots, chances created, and passing accuracy in the course of her 78 minutes on the field. She’s been crucial to their ability to win back the ball – a mentality she credits to her time under Andonovski, who asked her to believe in winning every 50/50 ball. (“I was just like, how can you win? It’s not a 50/50 if I’m winning it every time,” she mused philosophically. “That’s the mental.”) And the team trusts her as their penalty taker, which has also given them one of their better celebrations.

“I wake up everyday, come here, and I’m so happy now that we have a locker room because I get to see the people that I love every single day and joke around with them,” said LaBonta. “And it’s not all like kumbaya, but we are like, genuinely happy. And I think that shows on the field because the girls are out there tackling for each other.”

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To say that the team is genuinely happy suggests that there is a fake kind of happiness to be had on a team, where everyone is just papering over the cracks in the locker room. LaBonta described, perhaps, a realer kind of happiness – imperfect and a little messy.

“We have little competitive pieces, and people get into it,” she said. “But they’re going all out and they know they may leave here frustrated that they didn’t get the win, but the next morning, they’re going to come back and bring the best attitudes around because happy is just a moment, like you’re feeling it in the moment.”

Surely the team has earned it. Even when they were assured they’d continue as a team in Kansas City under new ownership, they still had a hell of a first season, necessarily hectic in part due to the team being acquired and having to roll out a functional first home game in a matter of months. But they did the work and played the games and made it to the offseason. “By the beginning of this year, we completely reset. And it’s just been the best of vibes,” said LaBonta.

KC is a group with players in wildly different stages of life. LaBonta described having younger players who want to go out and get to know the city and older players who are searching for houses or, like goalkeeper AD Franch, have a young family – which begat an interesting point about having a more permanent home. So often players, coaches, and fans talk about “locker room culture” or team bonding, but how do you actually do that with 25-plus people with different life stories? Part of it starts with simply having a locker room in which to build the culture. “It’s just learning those rules,” said LaBonta. ““Desiree Scott, I’ve played with her almost all my professional career…so I know she’s always behind me. She’s got my back. She likes to play the smaller passes. Whereas when Vic Pickett is in there, I know she can slice and dice through everybody and get through, versus Addie McCain, who likes to one-two as well. Those relationships come with also having a facility and an environment to have those talks and build those relationships off field.”

LaBonta wouldn’t go into too much more detail about what, specifically, they do in the locker room to work on everyone’s mental buy-in, to get the players on board with the “KC, bay-bee” mindset, or the meaning the players have developed from phrases like “Teal Rising.” Some of the players, she implied, might be more private about that than others, wanting to keep certain boundaries around what goes on in the locker room. She partially summed it up though: “Basically, don’t be a douchebag.”

Where LaBonta fits into that culture on the field is clear; off the field, she points to her Twitter handle “L0momma” as a clue, although she doesn’t necessarily take on the mantle of team mom. “I’m just the wild child,” she said. “But also I know I’ve been here awhile and (my husband) Roger (Espinoza) has been here, so they always come to me about anything in KC. So yes, (I’m) like ‘Lomomma’ but I can also be the crazy one.”

“When we went to Florida for a month and got to be together,” she said, “Some people were like, ‘oh my god, it’s gonna be so long’ and for me, I was like, ‘oh my god, I can’t wait, I’m with all my friends and they can’t leave.”

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KC bay-bee indeed.

(Photo: Amy Kontras / USA TODAY Sports)