Carrie Fry Robinson considers herself lucky that she’s been able to build a business around her passion for soccer. As the founder of Finesse Soccer, her efforts have paid off.
She just won the Kissick Construction Game Changer Award during the 25th annual WIN for KC Women’s Sports Awards Celebration presented by Burns & McDonnell. WIN for KC was established in 1994 to empower the lives of girls and women through advocating and promoting the lifetime value of sports and fitness, while providing opportunities for participation and leadership development. The Game Changer Award is presented to a local individual or group that personifies the true spirit of sport not as a participant, but as a supporter, promoter or champion of girls’ and women’s sports and fitness.
“It was really quite an honor,” Robinson said. “There were over 2,000 people at this event, and it was all about celebrating girls and women in sports.”
Finesse Soccer, founded in 2010, is the area’s only all-female training organization. Its goal is to make players better and their teams stronger, to keep girls in the game by providing a healthy and inspiring outlet for skill development and girl power.
Robinson played soccer as a forward for Shawnee Mission East High School (SME), leading it to two state championships. She also played at Indiana University in Bloomington. But when she graduated in 2005, there weren’t many professional options for female soccer players.
So when she moved back to Kansas City, she started teaching a club team and realized she’d never had a female coach until college.
“I recognized that it was a different kind of coaching, a different kind of environment and I felt like the girls were really responding to having a female coach,” Robinson said.
She began training on the side with a couple of players and word of mouth grew until she had more players than time. So she brought in some additional trainers and has now grown her team to 14 female coaches and trained over 1,000 girls of all ages, backgrounds and skill levels.
“It’s really been a fun journey and what I really love is that our emphasis is not just on skills development but empowering these girls to be confident in who they are, to be proud to be an athlete and help them through some of the social and emotional challenges they face as young girls,” she said. “We talk a lot about how we can use our super powers for good and standing up to bullies and helping friends out.”
Robinson said she feels she and her staff are uniquely conditioned to do this because “we’ve been there, we’ve done that; we’ve kind of suffered through that ourselves and recognize what some of those mental roadblocks are and we coach the girls through that, too.”
Laura Carley, a coach at Finesse Soccer, explained why Robinson was deserving of this award in a video shown at the WIN celebration.
“She doesn’t just look at it as a training program, she looks at it as an opportunity to give these girls the ability to go home and know that they are strong, they’re brave and they’re powerful,” Carley said. “That’s the theme she’s used to let the girls know that not only do they belong on the field, they belong in the boardroom, they belong in the front of the class. She’s using soccer as a vessel to do that.”
Robinson, 36, grew up in Leawood with her parents, John and Jocelyn Fry, attending The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah. She and her husband, Michael Robinson, and their two children are members of B’nai Jehudah, and last year she took part in a leadership program through the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City.
It was through the Federation leadership program that she met Don Wise, president of JVS. He in turn introduced her to Global FC founder Mariya D. Goodbrake, who was running a soccer program in the refugee community for boys. Goodbrake wanted to set up a girls’ program, which was difficult because in many of their home countries, parents do not allow girls to play sports.
“That’s also the status quo here as well for many of the refugee girls,” Robinson said.
But through Goodbrake’s relationships with the boys’ parents, she was able to build enough trust to allow the parents to permit their girls to try soccer, Robinson said. Since Goodbrake didn’t have any coaches or resources, Global FC and Finesse Soccer teamed up.
“We had the trainers and the training staff, so we went up to the northeast part of Kansas City two summers ago for our first clinic,” said Robinson. “We brought our staff and it was really awesome — many of these girls had never had the opportunity to even play sports before. The program has really grown, so we’re still able to provide clinics to them several times a year.”
In addition, Robinson recently had the opportunity to share training skills with Saudi women.
“That was a really cool opportunity,” she said. “We were contacted by the State Department Sports Advocacy Program. They were coming to Kansas City to train some of these female coaches and players from Saudi Arabia. It was the first group of all women of coaching tendency who came to the States for training.”
The Sports Advocacy Program was seeking to supplement its programming here, so the director reached out to Robinson and they put together a program that she thinks was very beneficial for them. They shadowed her at a team training session, she walked them through her session plan and told them a little bit about how she coaches so they could experience her coaching style, communication and motivation.
The next day the Global FC refugee girls and the Saudi women had a free soccer clinic together, so the Saudi women had a chance to put into practice what they had learned from U.S. soccer training, as well as to assert themselves in a coaching role with the refugee girls.
“Some of them spoke the same language and they all shared some similar things,” Robinson said. “It was really interesting to hear some of their conversations, and even though they were different, they were similar in many ways.
“For me, this was really good because it was just part of being Jewish and giving back and doing things for others.”
She said she’s fortunate to have been able to extend her passion for soccer to others in the community who wouldn’t necessarily have access to soccer trainers.
“It feels really good for me because I was raised to do good for others and to help our community, especially refugee communities,” she said.
She also has two one-week summer camps, which include goal scoring and goalkeeping for second- to eighth-grade girls, and field player skills and empowerment for girls ages kindergarten through seventh grade. The summer camps are held at Scheels Overland Park Soccer Complex, 13700 Switzer Road, Overland Park.
“Two summers ago, we had 80 girls in our camp and last year we had 140 girls at camp,” she said. “It’s grown tremendously and I think a lot of that is due to the mentorship we provide and also the empowerment we instill in these girls — you can do it; it’s great to be an athlete.”
For more information or to sign up, go to finessesoccer.com.