Like a fairy tale: The rise and rise of Minnesota Aurora FC

There’s magic in the Twin Cities right now. And I’m not talking about the northern lights. 

This summer, the Borealis has been playing second fiddle to a women’s soccer phenomenon called Minnesota Aurora FC. Led by USL-W coach of the year Nicole Lukic, the community-owned club has been on a mythic rise on and off the pitch.  

Lukic and her team head into Saturday’s title match against South Georgia Tormenta FC with a near-perfect record of 13-0-1 in the club and league’s first-ever season in existence.

“Our players really want it. They're hungry for it,” Lukic told The Striker this week. “I get goosebumps even talking about it. The title would definitely just be like a fairytale ending to this whole story.”

The USL-W is a pre-professional women’s soccer league that kicked off in May 2022. The league, which competes during the summer, is positioning itself as the United States’ premier league for developing the next generation of women’s talent both on and off the field. 

Along with other leagues like the UWS and WPSL, the USL-W is attempting to fill the space that exists in the women’s soccer pipeline between college and professional soccer. 44 teams across 20 states competed in its inaugural season.

Unlike the vast majority of clubs in the pre-professional world, Aurora FC has averaged crowds of 5,115 during the 2022 season. That includes multiple sell-outs at its roughly 5,250-capacity stadium. If Lukic’s team was in the NWSL, it would currently rank sixth in the league for average attendance. And if you were looking for a ticket to Saturday's final, you have missed your chance. The USL-W title match is already sold out. 

Lukic jokes that she knew the team’s local impact was getting real when she saw on social media people comparing Aurora FC’s title chances to other professional teams in the Minneapolis area. 

“I saw people saying the Vikings have never done it, the Timberwolves have never done it. I think it would be really important to the community,” said Lukic. 

The last time Minnesota was a title town was in 2017, when the Minnesota Lynx won the 2017 WNBA Finals. That team’s historic four titles between 2011 and 2017 are the only silverware of any kind that the Twin Cities have brought home since the Minnesota Twins won the MLB World Series in 1991.

Changing the model 

When Lukic moved closer to the Twin Cities area from Lacrosse, WI, in June of 2021, Aurora FC wasn’t quite fully realized yet. She said that she had heard “whispers” of something coming, but the club was yet to launch its groundbreaking community investment campaign.

Other clubs in the USL sphere, such as Detroit City FC and Chattanooga FC, have a minority community ownership model. Known as regulation C, that is when community members own a share of the team but there is still a primary higher caliber investor. 

When Aurora FC envisioned its ownership model, it saw things differently. The Minnesota club wanted to be entirely sourced through the community. That meant the dedicated soccer community in the Twin Cities had to step up. 

“This was a new legal structure. Trying to work that up, that was my specialty early on,” Wes Burdine, owner of St. Paul queer soccer bar The Black Hart and co-founder of Aurora FC, told The Striker this week. “It was a lot of working with lawyers and talking to people and figuring out what kind of organization could we invent.”

Burdine and other key founding members got to work on the nuts and bolts of creating a club from scratch. What followed was working with Minneapolis' vibrant soccer community to build the club’s identity.

“We had a couple really key principles that were motivating us,” said Burdine. “One, we wanted to emphasize women’s soccer as the central exciting thing. Not just as aspirational for young girls and dads to take their daughters to games, but to really identify the fact that grown-ass men want to come to these games and cheer for women. 

“The other thing was to understand that fans are not just consumers of a product that the team creates. The reason that soccer is blown up in the United States is that it is a community that builds something.”

A few months after opening the call for investors, Aurora FC hit its limit of $1,000,000 and 3,080 investors — set by the Securities and Exchange Commission — in December 2021. These community investors came from 48 states, 8 countries, 2 military bases, and one embassy.

Burdine tells me there was at least another $400,000 worth of willing participants dying to get involved. And even today, the club still receives messages pleading with them to reopen the share buying option. 

“Trust me, it’s gonna be big”

Not long after Aurora FC reached its investment target, Lukic was hired as the first-ever head coach of Aurora FC. In January 2022, she and assistant coaches Jennie Clark and Jen Larrick began trying to assemble their team. 

Lukic admits this was a difficult task. Trying to sell a brand new club and league to many pre-professional players required a lot of belief. 

“We didn't have a crest, didn't have anything flashy to show people. But, we did have all these community owners,” said Lukic. “I would say [to the players], `Trust me, this is gonna be big.’ And then they would ask, ‘Where are you playing?’ And I would say, ‘Well, we don't have a facility yet, but just trust me, it's gonna be big.’”

Lukic says she created a PowerPoint presentation to help visualize her dream to these prospective players, something she nicknamed the “holy grail.” Having the eyeballs and support of 3,080 community investors was a huge part of that sales pitch. 

Another key part of Lukic’s vision for Aurora FC was creating a training schedule far more demanding than most pre-professional summer leagues. The Minnesota team has been holding practices six to seven times a week in the early hours of every morning. This also allowed the players and coaches to then go to work their day jobs or evening jobs after practice. 

“We really tried to paint that picture that this is going to be more than your average summer team. We are going to train more and work harder than your average summer team,” said Lukic. 

The heavy early morning training schedule wasn’t for everyone. Lukic believes many players declined the option to play for Aurora FC because of it, and those other players would give her flak for the demands. 

But Lukic accepted this. If anything, in her opinion it made it easier to sort through the players who were right for the club. “When we had players who didn't want to commit to that, it was fine because then we knew they weren't for us,” she said. 

“It's honestly the best environment I've ever coached in and I'm just so grateful to have the opportunity and to be able to lead a team with my incredible assistant coaches.”

Do you believe in fairy tales? 

On May 26, Aurora FC played its first-ever match: A 1-1 draw against Green Bay Glory, witnessed by a raucous sellout crowd of 5,219 at TCO Stadium. 

Shelby Hopeau made history by scoring the first-ever goal in club history, a fortuitous long-range bouncer that took a deflection before nestling beyond Glory goalkeeper Ashley LeCount.

That would be the first and only time Lukic and her team failed to taste victory. Since then, Aurora FC has journeyed on a 13-match winning streak. The Minnesota club won 11 of its 12 regular season matches and outscored its opponents 35 goals to eight.

Perhaps even more impressive on the defensive side of the ball, Aurora FC has notched six shutouts, including a 1-0 semifinal playoff win over McLean Soccer, and has only conceded more than one goal once (in a 3-2 win over St. Louis Lions back in June). 

Goalkeeper Sarah Fuller has dazzled as a standout performer and leader between the posts. (And yes, that's the same Sarah Fuller who made headlines in November 2020, becoming the first woman to both play in and score in a college football game for a Power Five program, as a kicker for Vanderbilt.)

Fuller made a crucial penalty save in Aurora FC's 2-1 quarter-final win over Indy Eleven. Not long after that stop, Morgan Turner scored the goal of the season with a stunning shot from distance. 

Unsurprisingly, Lukic credits the fans and the atmosphere at TCO Stadium with playing a significant part in aiding Aurora FC on its magical run to the final. She remarked that every time midfielder Sangmin Cha makes a tackle, the crowd quickly breaks out into a chorus of “Cha, Cha - Cha, Cha, Cha, Cha.”

“It has been absolutely incredible. Our fans are just amazing. Every time we have a home game, I suddenly feel like I need to pull myself back down because they make me feel like I'm this professional coach,” Lukic said.

Burdine adds that he’s been blown away by the local support across the Minneapolis metropolitan area. He fondly recalls a “young and hip” man in his 20s getting starstruck seeing the team roll up for a team meal at a local seafood restaurant.

Coaching almost every day for Aurora FC, and then going off to work her day job as director of operations for youth club the Twin Cities Rush, does mean that Lukic doesn’t get much time to connect with the fans away from match days. Her downtime is usually reserved for recharging at home with her husband and puppy.

Talking to both Lukic and Burdine, they bring up the words “fairy tale” multiple times to describe the club’s astonishing origin story and the 2022 season. This prompted me to ask Lukic if she does in fact believe in fairytales. 

The Aurora FC head coach proudly responded “yes” with a smile. And then said that if the club was any fairy tale in particular. it would be Beauty And The Beast. 

“There's this beautiful soccer thing going on and this environment and this experience that we're providing everybody, but behind the scenes, it's definitely been a beast to put together. But hopefully we all fall in love and take home the championship at the end,” she said. 

Stream Minnesota Aurora FC vs. South Georgia Tormenta FC on ELEVEN Sports, Saturday, July 23, at 7 p.m. CT.