KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
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Kansas City is guaranteed to host six games in FIFA World Cup 26, including a quarterfinal, but the region may also serve as a base camp for as many as three teams.
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Compass Minerals National Performance Center is among the crown jewels of soccer facilities in the U.S., a cutting-edge training facility that almost certainly promises to attract one of the globe’s first-rate soccer powers to Kansas City next summer.
“This is shared space between three different local entities,” Sporting Kansas City Senior Director of Communications Kurt Austin said, “a really unique partnership between Sporting Kansas City, our Major League Soccer team; Children’s Mercy has their Sports Rehabilitation Center here; and then U.S. Soccer has their Coaching Education Center here.”
The facility boasts five soccer fields.
“We’ve got the ‘superpitch,’ which has three natural-grass playing surface fields,” Austin said, “... Different blends of grass on each of the fields get used at different times of the year based on the weather here in Kansas City.”
There are also two turf fields, which are primarily used for U.S. Soccer’s coaching courses. All the fields have audio and video capabilities built in, allowing coaches to easily revisit training sessions.
But the practice fields are merely the tip of a very impressive iceberg.
“In 2018, when we opened this place, David Beckham and his contingent from Miami, when they were putting their program together, said that this is one of the top soccer facilities in the world,” Chet North, the director of Sporting KC’s Sports Performance Lab, said.
High praise from a player who spent most of his iconic playing career at Manchester United and Real Madrid, two of the world’s most prestigious and revered soccer clubs.
The bowels of Compass Minerals National Performance Center feature three 30-person locker rooms, one on the Sporting KC side of the facility and two on the U.S. Soccer side.
In between, there are hot-and-cold tubs, hydrotherapy pools and saunas, while the Sports Performance Lab sits across the hall. It has a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or DEXA, machine, which can scan for body composition and bone density, along with an atmospheric chamber; an exercise with oxygen therapy, or EWOT, machine; a cryotherapy chamber; four hyperbaric chambers; and the “Zen room.”
“There’s six things going on — there’s nutrition, hydration, relaxation, circulation, thermoregulation and meditation,” North said.
Players can grab a snack and water, plop into a zero-gravity chair, strap on pressure boots and pull on some headphones that play soothing sounds while watching soothing beach scenes.
North said it’s not uncommon for players to fall asleep in the Zen room. Some use it before practice, some after or maybe both, but everyone takes a turn two days before a game.
Sporting KC’s coaching staff is also encouraged to take a load off — from the mind, body and soul — in the Zen room.
The facility also has a kitchen and smoothie station as well as a lounge area with ping-pong tables, a pool table and a video-game console.
Next to the oversized TV, connected to an Xbox, sits a barber chair for players who want to bring in someone for a haircut. Behind a row of comfy recliners is a classroom space and a room with six beds, in case players need to grab some shut-eye.
A sprawling and spacious weight room, which is shared with Children’s Mercy’s rehab facility, has varied workout equipment and free weights adjacent to more therapy pools with a pool. There’s also an outdoor pool and outdoor training circuit among other amenities.
“Putting all this stuff together, basically we went from Australian rules football to hockey to golf to tennis to soccer — every possible sport to find something that we might miss, then, from that, find out what we could afford and what’s practical for this facility,” North said.
Even the hillside north of the “superpitch” serves a purpose.
“You’ve got the 20-degree hill, a 10-degree hill, then 8-, 12- and 16-plyo stairs out there,” North said. “It all blends into the fabric of the field out there, but that’s from a college up in the Northwest and a place in Europe — kind of putting that together.”
The different slopes and stair configurations can be used for rehab.
“If you go around the entire facility, there’s so many things that took a lot of thought ahead of time, because we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything,” North said.
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