Minnesota's Aurora soccer team is a grassroots success story

Andrea Yoch dug into her bag after a recent Minnesota Aurora game against the St. Louis Lions. Hers is a Mary Poppins-level bag, containing two sets of clothes, shoes, contact lenses, glasses, water, notes, pens, keys and whatever else she needs to get through the day.

"Occasionally, I'll sneak in a little Gray Duck for after the game," she says, flashing a mini-bottle of vodka.

Yoch, 55, is the president of the Aurora, a first-year, preprofessional women's soccer team. The majority of players are in college, trying to sharpen their skills during the summer. The team is groundbreaking in that it's owned and operated by women and funded by a community of 3,080 fans who invested a total of $1 million to help with initial operating costs.

The team's nine founders all take part in every aspect of gameday operations, ensuring that players are fed, equipment is in place, ticket requests are handled and interviews with players and coach Nicole Lukic are arranged. Occasionally, Yoch ropes in her husband, Steve, and, when they're in town, her adult sons Ryan and Ben, to help at games.

"My family has always been all hands on deck," Yoch says. "We're basically a volunteer organization and so to make it successful, we need a lot of hands."

Yoch covers every inch of TCO Stadium in Eagan, where the Aurora play, on game days. After this particular game, she checked her step counter: Just under 14,000 for the day.

"I've been averaging between 13,000 and 16,000 steps in a game," she says.

The Aurora's first year has been a smash hit, as the team went undefeated during the regular season and reached the playoffs. All their revenue projections have been exceeded. Yoch sat down to chat about her career, love of soccer and the enormity of the Aurora's success. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where are you from? Were you always a sports fan?

I grew up in Baltimore, a mile from Memorial Stadium. My parents are immigrants and my dad and I watched sports so he could feel more comfortable in a sports-crazed country. The Orioles were in the World Series in '79 and won in '83 and that locked me in for life. Sports fandom is the great equalizer in America. Everyone becomes your friend and you are unified with one goal in mind.

How did you end up in Minnesota?

I met my husband at Boston College. When I graduated with a degree in journalism and applied for jobs at sports departments on the East Coast, no one wanted a young female. These days, I would get hired, but then, not so much. My husband [then boyfriend] is from here and was at the University of Minnesota law school, so I decided to apply for jobs in Minnesota.

Being part of the Aurora isn't the first time you've been a groundbreaker.

I was the first female sports editor for the Boston College student newspaper. It was fun. I only had trouble with one coach and otherwise got to travel for the first time with teams, went to Ireland with the football team, packed friends in my hotel room at the Big East tournament and met people like [columnist] Jackie MacMullan and some of my closest friends. I was also the first female sports editor of the Albert Lea Tribune, too, the job I got when I moved here.

Is soccer on the television at your home all day?

All the time. Not as much for me because I don't watch as much. But yesterday, for my day off, I sat on the couch and Nashville was playing at 4 p.m. and my buddy [former Minnesota United player] Jamie Watson calls those games. So I watched that one. Then I watched Minnesota United at 7. If it's winter, you know the Wild are on for me. I don't ever miss a Vikings game. So it's just a general sports household. And my husband is hard-core Premier League. So if Premier League is on, he's got the game on.

It's just you and your husband at home now? Where are your two sons?

Yup, one is in Boston and one in New York, but it's a constant string of texts from my kids. They were out here opening night which was awesome.

Who are your favorite soccer players?

Jessica McDonald [USA]. Megan Rapinoe [USA]. [Minnesota United's] Michael Boxall. [Tottenham's] Son Heung-min. [Former Minnesota United player] Christian Ramirez.

What's the best sporting event you've witnessed?

That's such a hard question. I could list 20 events and not get to them all. Wednesday night's quarterfinal win with 6,200 fans packed in TCO Stadium was incredible and emotional. Game 163 in 2009 [Twins vs. Tigers] for personal memories. My oldest son was 10 and was really getting into the Twins and I pulled him out of school early.

Has this year been everything you envisioned?

I couldn't have envisioned this. I have a very, very big, ambitious imagination and this has exceeded that. We budgeted for 3,000 fans a game. We haven't had less than 4,800 in the building for any of our home games. We budgeted for $50,000 in merchandise sales. We're well over that. We budgeted for $80,000 in sponsorships. We're well over that. So we were so off the mark of what we were hoping for.

Why has the interest spiked higher than you anticipated?

I think people over the last few years have become very aware that women's sports haven't been treated well. I attribute a lot of that to the brave women who filmed the locker rooms at the NCAA Final Four and really showed the disparities.

What we said is, 'Yes, there are disparities. Here's an easy solution.' And I think, especially right now, people want to do something very concrete. Buying tickets. Showing up. Buying merchandise. Supporting us is concrete. And also, it's fun. Especially in Minnesota. We needed something good, we needed something positive.

We needed to be able to say back to the country: 'We've got this.' We're still healing from the death and aftermath of George Floyd. And I think this has been a very positive way for people to get together and feel good about being Minnesotan.

And also, we deliberately set our ticket prices so that it was affordable for families.

How can you sustain this with Aurora?

Staying in touch with our fan base is going to be huge over the off season and continuing to be out in the community with them. Making sure that we're hearing their feedback of what they want to see us change. That's going to be really important because this experience has been great and we don't want them to feel disconnected from us over the next few months.

Why was it important for the club to release a statement expressing the disappointment following the overturning of the Roe vs. Wade decision?

That was a really good example of how this project is working. There are nine founders and, while I am the team president, it's more because we needed one person to be the team president. We make big decisions together, so we spent about two hours crafting the statement, waiting a little bit to see what the other teams were going to do. And then when nothing was coming, it was clear, we just needed to go.

Gotham City in the National Women's Soccer League, we saw their statement first, but it's really, really important for us that this team represents our fans, and our players, and equality for everybody. And so, we really felt we needed to stand up and say something.

You are an empty nester. You could have decided to go travel. You decided to run a soccer team.

So, [laughs] one of the great ironies of this is that when I first moved out here in 1989, I spent about 10 years trying to convince Steve to leave because I was like, why, why are we here? Now, he's ready to leave or at least spend winter somewhere else, and I'm like, "Oh no, we have to stay." Thirty-three years later and I'm the biggest cheerleader for Minnesota.

So yeah, we're not doing it in the right order but it's so exciting. It's so much fun and I'm not ready to be done and go lay on a beach yet. We still have a lot to do. As my friend Chris Hawkey says, let the adventure continue. And so we're going to keep adventuring.