WITH FRIDAY NIGHT’S 6-0 home victory over the Dayton Dutch Lions FC, the Indy Eleven W closed out their season with a 5-5 record under first-year head coach Brandon Kim. The team’s third-place finish in the USL W League Valley Division means it won’t qualify for the postseason for the first time in the team’s history, but that’s hardly the whole story for a group that spans high school players, college players, and beyond.
One such teammate is forward Katie Soderstrom Bulger, the former Butler standout who also played at Carmel High School. Soderstrom Bulger, who was part of the team that won the 2023 USL W League Championship, teaches second grade at Center for Inquiry School 70, part of Indianapolis Public Schools. She just finished her first year in the classroom, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t training.
“It was very tough,” she says about the transition to the classroom, “but it was very rewarding. I learned a lot about myself, and I had a lot of good people alongside me to help. You never know until you’re in it. … I’m a very active person, and soccer’s not something that I ever wanted to completely give up. I do a lot of running and conditioning on my own, and then I’ve been doing lots of little rec leagues and stuff just to keep up on my touches.”
Except for the beginning of the season when Soderstrom Bulger had to juggle both teaching and soccer, the school calendar coincides nicely with a 10-game, six-week, “pre-professional” schedule from mid-May to early June, though she also works summer soccer camps at Butler and plans to visit Japan where her husband, Louie—also a former player for the Bulldogs—is from.
It may be a lot, but not all veteran Indy Eleven W players have summers off in their line of work. Former Purdue player Maddy Williams Osswald once thought her soccer days were over before an engineering colleague at the sustainability and consulting firm Keramida pointed her to a story about the formation of the team. Osswald had also played professionally in Europe, and at 29 years old, she’s now the oldest player on the team.
“For us oldies that work, there’s really not a ton of training and time on the ball in the off-season, which is kind of what makes it difficult,” Williams Osswald says.
In addition to some of its players working day jobs, the minimal amount of resources on which the team gets by is also on display in their travel routines. The Eleven plays most of their games in places within driving distance—like Dayton, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Lexington—and while there is a team bus that transports them, they usually drive to the location and back on the same day.
They have a coach who understands because he’s largely in the same position as they are. Kim, who has known and coached several of the players for years through club soccer, is also volunteering in his role for the team, though he earns a salary for his work as the Girls Director for U11 and U12 at Indy Eleven Academy.
It’s not enough, as he recently took on additional part-time work as an aide at the Montessori School of Westfield. “I was speaking with (Garry Sumski, Indy Eleven Academy’s boys and girls director U8-U10), and he was asking me if I knew anybody who would be interested in working at the school because he needed a little bit of help,” says Kim. “And I was like, ‘I’ve got time during the day right now.’ … I started just to help out going in a few hours during the day, and it’s just kind of turned into this whole thing now. It’s been a new experience for me, but it’s one that I’ve really enjoyed.”
Meanwhile, there are younger players on the team who have watched the likes of Soderstrom Bulger and Williams Osswald make it work as they come up on their season of post-college decision-making. Addie Chester hails from Muncie, where she is about to enter her senior year on the Ball State team, though she started her college soccer career at Louisville. She’s always had connections to Indy, as her family lived in Carmel for a time.
Some of her summer days have started with a commute to downtown Indianapolis, where she interns for Big 5 accounting firm Ernst and Young. She would head back to Grand Park for training before staying in Muncie for the night. Chester is open to potential professional soccer opportunities, but knows the accounting life awaits.
She says when she’s tempted to complain about how difficult the juggling act is, she knows she can seek out Williams Osswald, who understands her plight.
