Midfielder, captain, connector — Lo’eau LaBonta brings passion to the pitch and her life in Kansas City.
By Michelle Bacon | Photos by Simon Kuo
Whether it’s her love of fostering animals and spending quality time with her dog Amigo, eating her way through her Westside Kansas City neighborhood or enjoying a game of padel, Lo’eau LaBonta never stops moving.
“I thrive off chaos,” she quips.
It’s that endless vitality that has made her a pillar of the National Women’s Soccer League-leading KC Current team. A starting midfielder, Lo’eau’s decade of experience has set her up for athletic excellence both on and off the field. But even as the team captain and one of the sport’s most public figures — most notably going viral for her Celly Dance in 2022 — she’s quick to attribute the Teal Rising success to team players, leadership and the city that has invested in it.
“We are the standard right now,” she says of the team, which leads the NWSL with its state-of-the-art training facilities, having the first stadium in the world purpose-built for professional women’s sports and most importantly, producing a viable collective of competitors.
Though soccer was always her passion, the payoff was anything but immediate.
“Sports were life,” Lo’eau says of her upbringing in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. Raised mainly by her father, Mark, she and her younger brother, Koa, were entrenched in different sports as kids. She was most drawn to the ever-changing, always immersive game of soccer.
“It’s 45 minutes straight and another 45 after that, but there aren’t many breaks — you’re constantly going,” she says. “It’s a team sport — everything about it, I’ve always loved and have been really passionate about.”
As a student at Stanford University, Lo’eau continued playing but prioritized her education as the end game, pursuing an engineering degree. In that time, she helped the Stanford Cardinals win the 2011 national championship, and a year later, the National Women’s Soccer League was formed.
“I thought, let’s just try this professional soccer career. I’ve been playing my whole life — why not continue?” she recalls. But the path forward was slow, and challenges revealed themselves early on. “I was a semifinalist for the Herman Trophy in college. I was projected to be drafted in the top 10 and I ended up going second to last, so that was already the first big setback.”
From there, she inked a professional contract with Sky Blue FC (now Gotham FC) in 2015, for a modest $7,500 salary. Struggling with the league’s newness and lack of organization, the rookie was cut from the team. Lo’eau returned to Stanford for that engineering degree, and a year later was called to preseason tryouts with FC Kansas City. “And the rest was history,” she says, but not without a few extra barriers.
By then, in 2016, the league’s minimum salary was $10,000 per season, a mere pittance compared to the men’s Major League Soccer team, which guaranteed its reserve players a minimum of $51,500. “Just trying to be a pro athlete at that pay is insane, almost impossible, so I tried to figure out the other things to do to get by,” Lo’eau recalls. “I was having oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and it was probably an appetizer for my dinner.”
It was also around this time that her now husband Roger Espinoza — at the time a Sporting KC midfielder and now an assistant coach — began to endear her to Kansas City.
“Being from California, I have the beach, the mountains,” she says. The rolling Midwestern plains were a change of pace. “[Roger] had lived in KC for almost 10 years, and he was the one who helped me look at KC from a different lens and actually embrace it for what it is.”
Just as she began finding her footing in the city of fountains, she was sent to the Utah Royals in 2018. Under the team’s steadier foundation and clearer direction at the time, Lo’eau’s career ascended. She became a starter, began doubling her number of goals and assists, and rose among the ranks of the NWSL as a true utility player –– quick to support and defend her teammates all over the field.
When 2020 upended the world with the pandemic — and then shattered her own with the loss of her brother, Koa — Lo’eau turned to what she knew best: structure, movement and care. Fostering animals gave her purpose beyond the field; soccer kept her grounded.
“As pro athletes, you’re just wired to always show up and be on time,” she says. “[Soccer was] the only thing that really kept me healthy and eating. Having that structure helped me maintain my sanity after losing my only sibling.”
Toward the end of 2020, the Utah Royals sold and transferred back to Kansas City, returning Lo’eau to the Midwest with her fellow teammates. At the time, Sporting KC was the established men’s soccer team, but professional women’s sports were still largely underground. After all, Lo’eau remembers being a part of FC Kansas City when the team won back-to-back NWSL championships (2014-2015), to little local fanfare.
The formation of KC Current took some time, but Lo’eau was at the forefront for its rapid evolution. “We didn’t have an identity yet, we were playing on a baseball field,” she remembers of the early days. “We were trying to progress the game but were brought back to the reality that it’s just not there yet.”