Raven Jemison got a breast cancer diagnosis in February. Surgery in April. And somewhere in that waiting — the tests, the uncertainty, the not-knowing-what-stage — she sat with a question most people spend their whole careers avoiding: if this is my time, are they gonna talk about championships I won with the Milwaukee Bucks, or the impact I made in people's lives?
That's how she opened up. Not with revenue numbers, not with the valuation story, not with the stadium. With mortality. With the realization that legacy and job description are not the same thing, and that she'd been treating them like they were.
By the time she finished that answer, I understood why this conversation was different from most sports business conversations I have. The Kansas City Current went from a $3 million expansion fee to a $275 million valuation — second in the entire NWSL, only behind Angel City FC in LA — in five years. That's a real number. But the number isn't the point. The point is how you build something that generates that kind of return in a league that most people, five years ago, wouldn't have put serious money into. And the answer Raven kept coming back to wasn't tactics. It was infrastructure — physical infrastructure, yes, but also the leadership infrastructure underneath it.
The $3 million bet most people weren't making
I want to put the number in context, because it's easy to hear "$275 million valuation" and think the owners were geniuses, or lucky, or both. What I'd push back on is the framing that this was obvious.
When Angie and Chris Long decided to build a stadium on Kansas City's riverfront — the forgotten part of the city, the part nobody was going down to — the honest reaction from most sports business people would have been polite skepticism. A women's soccer team. A new stadium. A market that's the second or third smallest DMA in the NWSL. In a league that's been around 14, 15 years and has had fits and starts, as Raven put it, for most of that time.
I almost made a bid for the Portland Thorns about a year and a half ago. Studied the league, spent real time understanding how the business operates, took my wife and boys to a Thorns game and met with the ownership group. Decided I wasn't ready. That's a decision I think about now, sitting across from Raven, watching what the Current have built. Not with regret exactly — the timing has to be right, and I genuinely wasn't ready to run an organization of that complexity — but with a cleaner understanding of what I missed seeing. The opportunity wasn't in the valuation trajectory. The opportunity was in the ownership mentality. The Current's owners operated from yes and how, not no unless. That's a specific thing. That's rare.
Raven described it plainly: "No is not in the vocabulary. It is yes and how." When you build from that posture, you end up with a stadium that opened eight weeks after she arrived. Eight weeks of preparation. You end up with visiting locker rooms that are — and this detail stuck with me — world-class, intentionally, because every visiting team plays at CBKC Stadium at some point, and now those players go home and tell people about Kansas City. You flip the NFL logic — where we made visiting teams as uncomfortable as possible — and turn the stadium itself into a recruiting tool.
That's not an accident. That's a philosophy that got built before the stadium got built.
Happy struggling
The thing Raven said about her first job at the Florida Panthers — $7.25 an hour, minimum wage, one of the most expensive cities in the country, had never seen a hockey game — was simple: "I knew it was the right place for me because I was happy struggling."
That sentence does a lot of work. She wasn't happy with the circumstances. She was happy in the direction. There's a difference between tolerating discomfort and actually orienting toward it because you know the work itself is right.
My version of that was simpler. My mom didn't let me play football my freshman year of high school — wanted me to prove I could handle the grades first. Then she watched me in basketball, watched me in soccer, watched the grades hold up, and eventually said yes. By the time I got to Nebraska, the work ethic wasn't something I decided to have. It was already built in. The discomfort was already familiar. You don't show up as a 7:30-to-9:00 worker by accident. Somebody made you do the reps before you understood why.
Raven's version: she watched the people in front of her at the career fair talking to the Florida Panthers' director of inside sales, saw that they were passive — waiting for him to talk to them — and decided she was going to be different. She bought an ill-fitting suit from Nordstrom Rack and made it her shot. That's the rep. Not the suit. The decision to treat the moment like it mattered before anyone told her it did.
The thing I want every young person listening to that story to understand is that "generate revenue and you'll never have to look for a job again" isn't just a tactical tip. It's a philosophy about how to make yourself undeniable in a field where a thousand people want your seat. Raven got the Florida Panthers job. Twenty years later she's running a franchise that's worth nearly $300 million.
PULL QUOTE: "The work that's done from 7:30 to 9:00 is the work that prepares you to be excellent from 9:00 to 5:00." — Raven Jemison
The leadership thing most people leave behind
I've had the best coach in all of sports — Jim Caldwell, who was deeply in tune with emotional intelligence, with how to get the best out of a person by treating them like an individual. I've also had, in my view, the worst — Adam Gase, who had none of it, and whose locker room reflected that clearly.
Raven named the two things she consciously left behind from the big-league organizations she came through. The first: the mentality that a thousand people are waiting for your seat, so I'm not going to coach you, I'm going to let you figure it out. She saw it everywhere coming up through the industry. The implicit message is that your job security is always conditional, always under competitive threat, so you spend your energy not losing the job instead of doing the job well. That's not productive. What you get from that culture is people managing their own fear, which is the opposite of a team.
The second: information being rationed by seniority. You get more context when you hit manager, more when you hit director, more at VP. Raven is intellectually curious by nature — she put it clearly, she always wants to know how she can help another department and how that department can help her — and the invisible competing forces she kept running into were partly structural, partly cultural. Departments not talking. People not on the same page. The information flowing up but not across.
What she built at the Current instead is something she calls one team, one dream — not as a slogan, but as an actual operating principle between the business side and the soccer side. She and general manager Caitlin Carducci and head coach Vlatko Andonovski made beelines for each other when they won the shield this year. Not after a press conference. Immediately. Because the business can only sell what the soccer side produces, and the soccer side can only get more resources if the business is selling. Those aren't competing interests. They're the same interest, viewed from different angles.
In a startup league — which the NWSL still is, even after 15 years — you can't afford the friction of church and state. There's not enough room for error.
The asset nobody is measuring right
The stadium is 94 feet from the top seat to the pitch. Entry-level ticket is $20. Local restaurant partners only — no chains, no generic concessions. Face painters, balloon artists, caricature drawings. A grandfather who brings his daughter and his granddaughter to every other game.
That last detail is the one I keep coming back to. Three generations at a women's soccer match in Kansas City, Missouri, and none of them are there because someone made it their civic duty. They're there because the experience is built for all three of them simultaneously.
The valuation story — $3 million to $275 million — gets told as a financial story. It's actually a community story. Raven said it directly: "The community has been the secret ingredient with respect to why we are so successful and sell out every match." Kansas City is a market that commits when you commit to it. Nebraska is the same. I played in Lincoln and I know exactly what it feels like when a Midwest fanbase decides you're theirs. You cannot manufacture that. But you can earn it, and you earn it by treating the stadium as a community asset before you treat it as a revenue asset.
The teams coming online next — Denver, Boston — are starting with their own stadiums because the proof of concept is now clear. Own your facility, control your dates, host other events, give female athletes the infrastructure they actually deserve. The Current didn't just build a stadium. They built the template.
What I take from this, practically
Three things I'm sitting with after this conversation:
- Invest in women's sports now, not when it feels safer. The rocket ship metaphor Raven used is real — we're still on the launching pad, and the trajectory is clear. The investments coming in are no longer charity plays or "I have a daughter who plays soccer" plays. These are business decisions, and the people making them early are going to look prescient in ten years the way early NBA investors look prescient now. I almost bought into the Thorns and didn't. I'm not making that category of mistake twice.
- The 7:30-to-9:00 frame is the right frame for evaluating anybody you want to work with or invest in. What are they doing before the official day starts? What are they learning that nobody assigned them to learn? Raven picked up emotional intelligence in hockey, a sport she'd never seen, in a city she'd never lived in, making minimum wage. She wasn't developing skills that were convenient. She was developing skills that were adjacent to what she'd need later — leadership, reading a room, selling on emotion. The people worth betting on are the ones doing that kind of preparation before they know exactly what they're preparing for.
- Know yourself before the world tells you who you are. That's Cheat Code Number One in Raven's book, and she's right to put it first. Social media is a feedback loop that will reshape you around the opinions of people who don't know you, if you let it. I've seen it happen to players, founders, executives. The ones who are immune to it aren't arrogant — they're just anchored. They know what they bring. They know what matters to them. That clarity is the foundation everything else gets built on.
Raven sat with a mortality question in February and came out the other side building something she'd be proud of regardless of the championship count. She already has the championships. What she's building now is the part that outlasts her résumé.
That's what this conversation was actually about.