Andy Gruenebaum wears three hats for Sporting Kansas City, and they all look pretty sharp on him.
Gruenebaum is the team’s color analyst on SKCTV, goalkeeper coach for Sporting Kansas City Academy and technical liaison for the academy’s affiliates for youth soccer initiatives.
He was a goalkeeper for Sporting Kansas City in the 2014 season, capping off a nine-year Major League Soccer career after eight seasons with the Columbus Crew. He played in 93 Major League Soccer matches, including postseason games, and made 311 saves.
Gruenebaum is 33, and he’s an Overland Park native. He lives there with his wife, Lacey, and their nearly 6-month-old son, Gibson, “and it’s important to us to keep our heritage alive,” he said. His wife is a Methodist, and his mother was a Catholic who converted to Judaism.
His conversion from player to broadcaster, coach and academy liaison took awhile to get used to, he said.
“I missed playing, but at this point in my life I miss the lifestyle more than the actual playing,” he said. “When I’m watching on TV and look at the crowd, I miss those moments.”
He doesn’t miss playing with injuries, though. He had hip surgery, which almost ended his career, and he had wrist and shoulder surgeries to treat less-severe injuries.
His top two career highlights, he said, were “winning an MLS cup with the Columbus Crew in 2008, and getting traded to Sporting KC and the first time I was able to walk out on the field with my hometown team.”
Work and play fulfill different needs for most people, but Gruenebaum looks for the crossover and finds it in his current roles at Sporting Kansas City.
“I think everyone tries to make a living doing something they enjoy so it doesn’t seem like work to them,” he said. “I do travel a lot and miss my family at times, but I like that it enables me to connect with the community. Growing up here, it’s import to me to help the next crop of kids coming up to develop into the players they want to be.
“It’s fun to grow the game of soccer in the city that you grew up in,” he said. “The goalkeeping job with the academy and being technical director for affiliates are similar in that I’m helping develop players for our academy system, and with affiliates, helping with the pathway into our academy. Being on the field coaching is a blast. When I grew up, I didn’t have the kind of access kids have today. It shows how far we’ve come.”
When he was growing up, Gruenebaum said, “all your buddies go out and play soccer.”
“You’d have to drag us inside from playing,” he said. “I found I loved the game, and really excelled at it, as well. I remember watching the games and leaving them wanting to play. One of the advantages is that American goalkeepers have been known to be some of the better goalkeepers in the world, because we also play other sports and develop other athletic skills that we can apply to soccer.”
Gruenebaum made 14 starts for Sporting Kansas City, with four shutouts and 1.19 goals against average. His .636 winning percentage during the regular season ranks fourth best on the club’s all-time single-season charts, and his 73.91 save percentage ranked third in 2014 among MLS goalkeepers with more than 10 regular-season appearances. He finished the season with a career-best 308-minute shutout streak.
Gruenebaum is one of three goalkeepers from the Kansas City area to have played in MLS. He was a state champion and Kansas Player of the Year at Blue Valley North High School. He attended the University of Kentucky from 2001 to 2005 and holds the school’s records of 264 saves and 22 shutouts, after earning first-team all-conference honors in each of his three seasons as a starter. During his collegiate career, he also led the Des Moines Menace to the 2005 Premier Development League National Championship and received the Most Valuable Player Award.
Gruenebaum values events like Jewish Heritage Night because they prompt him to reflect on and celebrate his Jewish identity.
“(Being Jewish is) a big part of my childhood growing up,” he said. “I was raised Jewish and had my Bar Mitzvah. It really tells the bigger story of my family and our Jewish heritage and where we came from, and that’s important to me.”
