When Kimmy Cummings was a child, her mother sent her to play soccer in the heat of the summer wearing sweatpants.
“My legs were like twigs,” Cummings remembers. “And so she was like, ‘If they see you and how skinny you are, they’re not going to let you play with the boys, so you have to wear pants.’”
Today, there’s no hiding who Cummings is. As the inaugural coach of the Richmond Ivy, Cummings is one of the central figures in the return of women’s soccer to the River City since the Richmond Kickers folded its women’s team, the Destiny, in 2009.
Richmonders are eager to watch: More than 3,000 people have bought presale tickets to see the team’s first match against Winchester’s Virginia Marauders at City Stadium on May 11. With a temperature forecasted to peak in the 70s, none of the players are expected to be wearing sweatpants.
“This is something we haven’t done before,” says Rob Ukrop, a former professional soccer player and chair of the Kickers, under whose umbrella the Ivy will be operating. “The old Destiny team, maybe you had 100 people cheering you on. This is going to be different.”
What appears to be different about the Ivy is twofold. First, interest in soccer is on the rise, with attendance at games growing both nationally and in Richmond over the past few years. Average attendance at Kickers games rose from about 2,000 in 2021 to almost 5,000 in 2023.
“All these people want to come out — they want to come out to City Stadium, they want to spend time together,” says Ukrop. And despite a disappointing 2023 season, he continues, “the crowds, they just kept coming out. So whether we’re winning or losing, it’s an event people in Richmond want to be part of.”
A cultural change
Perhaps more important, though, is the growing interest in women’s sports, including women’s soccer.
“People actually attend women’s sports now and care about women’s sports,” says Carter Blair Yeisley, the Ivy’s assistant coach. Like Cummings, Yeisley is a Richmond native who played for the Destiny in the mid-2000s and has had a long association with the Kickers.
Back then, Yeisley says, virtually “no one came to our games.”
“Women’s soccer was something we did because we loved it, but I don’t think there was tons of support for it. I mean, we had national team players playing in Richmond and no one even knew about them,” she says. “The whole culture around it has changed. People are so supportive.”
Cummings too says there’s been a noticeable shift, saying it’s “honestly surreal” to see Richmonders wearing Ivy merchandise and talking about the team ahead of its inaugural game. Even her dentist asked her if she had heard about the Ivy.
“That’s the excitement that I don’t know was missing necessarily [in prior years], but because Destiny was wearing the same logo and brand as the men’s team, it was hard to differentiate,” she says. “Was that the men’s team and that was just the same logo, or were they actually supporting the women’s team?”
A pre-professional team aimed at bringing talented college and elite amateur players into the professional pipeline, the Ivy will play in the Mid-Atlantic division of the United Soccer League’s W League. Launched in May 2022, the venture was the successor to the nearly identically named W-League, which operated from 1995 to 2015 and included the Destiny among its ranks.
“We knew the league was bringing back the W League three years ago,” says Ukrop. “And every year, they were like, ‘hey, we want you to have a team.’”
But while Ukrop says he was enthusiastic about the prospect, he also felt like it was critical to ensure the Kickers had a sufficient financial and community foundation to support another team.
“Could we have done this earlier? Yeah,” he says before adding, “I just don’t think we were ready for it. The men’s team was on that steady growth path that we need, but at the same time it wasn’t stabilized.”
Homegrown talent
By the time the Kickers announced the return of a then-unnamed women’s team in July 2023, other soccer clubs were popping up. Since its launch, the W League has expanded from 44 to 80 teams. In the Mid-Atlantic division, the Ivy will join clubs from not only Charlottesville, Northern Virginia and Winchester, but also Maryland and Pennsylvania.
For Ukrop, the appeal of the Ivy isn’t just raising the profile of women’s soccer. It’s also the ability to foster regional talent. The team’s 28-player roster includes a host of Richmond-area athletes, including defenders Bree Fulkerson and Lindsey Munyak, forward Kameron Simmonds, midfielders Ava LeGault, Kiley Fitzgerald and Jill Flammia and goalkeepers Camryn Miller, Logan Marks, Keely Thomas and Lauren Hargrove.
“We want this to feel like Richmond,” says Ukrop. “We want to get those homegrown kids, and this is their platform.”
Bringing those athletes to play at City Stadium shows how far the city has come in its support for women’s sports, says Cummings. Despite broader investment in soccer, she says, “what that hasn’t equated to is where young girls and young boys are sitting there watching female athletes compete at a high level as well.”
“One of the things that has been missing from the Richmond community is a place where young girls can sit and watch people that they idolize and say, ‘Wow, I want to do that. I want to be that,’” she says. “They see it on TV, maybe they see it when they go to a professional game, but do they see it in their own backyard?”
On May 11, they will. Cummings says fans should expect “incredibly fast-paced, possession-oriented play” — and goals. Everyone wants goals.
In the past, Yeisley muses, too many people judged women’s soccer.
“It’s not the same as men’s soccer. Usually it’s not the same pace, you’re not having these big, giant athletes and all that,” she says. “But I think if you watch it … sometimes more skill is shown. It can be beautiful in its own way. And I don’t know if people have always given them credit for that. I think we should showcase how good it can be.”
