Indy Eleven opens the season Tuesday at Racing Louisville FC
To Ella Rogers and Grace Bahr, Indy Eleven’s USL W League offseason looked a bit different. Sure, they were both vital pieces of the 2023 team, and they both raised the trophy following the season. To say the very least, of course.
The road to repeating, however, has been anything but the same.
“I think it was just with everything that happened with me personally in that game, winning was just the icing on the cake of a great season,” Bahr said. “It was just pure joy.
“I think everyone was exhausted… 2 p.m. on a Saturday, on a turf field is a soccer fanatic’s dream and also a soccer player’s nightmare. But at the same time, the more work you put in the more rewarding it feels so it was just incredible, and all the postgame celebrations were extremely exciting as well.”
Rogers echoed those sentiments and relishes the fact that the championship feels as good today as it did a season ago.
“The fact that it’s a summer league and that it’s a summer team the amount of pride that I think everyone has for Indy Eleven and playing for the club, I was just so thankful to be a part of that group… We competed and just left everything out on the field.”
Let’s start with the pair’s contributions to Indy Eleven’s 2023 season that not only produced a USL W League crown, but also yielded its second straight division championship, brought to you by a 16-0 win in the final regular season match, the most all-league selections by any club of the 65-team field and a USL W League Organization of the Year nod.
Rogers served as a captain for the Girls in Blue, starting all 14 matches, leading the team in minutes, and registering three assists. Bahr, a mainstay on the backline for Indy, started all 13 matches played in 2023 and tallied three goals and a pair of assists.
On July 22, 2023, when the final game was done and the championship was in its rightful home in the Circle City, Rogers was standing on her own two feet, while Bahr used the aid of teammates as she was carried to the stage to claim her medal.
Don’t let that picture fool you about Bahr, but we will get to that later.
How did they get here? To a team that gets together for three, hopefully four, months out of the year. A roster of 30+ youth, collegiate and post-grad players who share a common goal.
Rogers, a former standout at Xavier University, spent three seasons with the Musketeers and started all 65 games played, registering eight goals and eight assists on her way to leading the squad to three straight NCAA Tournament appearances and a No. 11 spot in the United Soccer Coaches rankings in 2021. She’s now headed to Arkansas, a team that won 15 games in 2023 and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Why did she return for a third season?
“The competitive environment in our training sessions is just really unmatched,” she said. “I think [Head Coach] Pauly [Dolinsky] and [assistant coach] BK [Brandon Kim] do such a great job of making it rigorous when it needs to be. We’re all there for a reason. We want to get better on an individual level, but we know that can’t happen if we don’t have team cohesion and come together.”
Bahr spent two seasons at the University of Wisconsin before transferring to Xavier where she went on to develop into an All-BIG EAST First-Team selection, USC All-East Region selection and the 2019 BIG EAST Championship Most Outstanding Defensive Player.
She’s also five years removed from that chapter of her life, but to her year three is no different from year one in Indy.
“It’s not proposed, and it’s not put on paper that this is just a summer team. We want to win national championships. We want to be a team that can compete against the best and we would back ourselves to compete against the best. That idea behind the team and the platform behind the team is why any competitive athlete and somebody who just has a drive to win and a hatred to lose would love being here and that’s why I’ve been staying.”
But between years two and three it took a village, as they say, to get her back.
“Off season for me was very different,” Bahr said “I coach soccer because I can’t stay away. It’s a game that’s given me so much and I feel obligated and honored to be in a position to give back to others. I also work a full-time job to pay the bills and then on top of that to get back on the field after surgery, recovery, physical therapy, getting back to running, getting back the strength and then getting my confidence back to go into tackles, to play like I’m back to how I was… Offseason has been a bit of everything, certainly chaotic.”
Rogers will return to the squad as a captain again in 2024, saying that the trust the team has put in her as helped a lot in the way that she has developed as a leader.
Bahr will tell you she’s great because, “She leads by action. I think if you logged everyone’s miles, she might double mine and she’d triple other people. She’s going to do the work that maybe people don’t want to put in or she’s going to do extra work just because that’s the kind of person she is.
“I also think part of being a leader is learning and she’s open to those conversations. She and I are talking about our relationship as a center back and as a midfielder. Her intention behind learning as a teammate and learning as a person [is how] she leads by example on and off the field.”
The respect is mutual between the pair after spending two seasons together wearing the Indy Eleven crest after just missing each other at Xavier. Remember when we said we’d get to that story about Bahr later? Rogers probably sums up her spirit and mindset best.
“Grace is one of the most competitive and resilient people I’ve ever met,” she said of her teammate “She’s a goof, but don’t get me wrong, when that girl wants to win get out of her way. She’s going to find a way to win. She just wants to be around the game and loves it so much that she’s not going to let something stop her from doing it.”
The USL W League season begins for Indy Eleven on Tuesday at rival Racing Louisville FC, with the Girls in Blue returning to play in front of their home crowd on Monday, May 20 against Kings Hammer FC.
“It’s so fun playing in front of them,” Rogers says of the atmosphere at the Grand Park Events Center. “I’m just so drawn to going back because of the people and the environment and the BYB, too. They’re unreal, it’s so fun playing in front of them. Their support is unmatched from any other environment I’ve personally ever played in.”
The 2022 season left Indy with some unfinished business after falling in the first round of playoffs.
On the other hand, the 2023 season finished in front of a record-setting crowd that came to support a team that, in addition to the league crown, has made back-to-back playoff appearances, while racking up numerous individual accolades.
However, despite entering this season as the defending champions, Rogers and Bahr both say there are still a lot of things to be proven.
In the simplest of terms from Bahr, “Two trophies are better than one so that should be reason enough. That’s for sure.”
And she has one final message for those reading.
“For fans who know about us, and people who don’t know about us, we’re coming back for title number two. There are no guarantees, but I think the motivation, the excitement… to do it again would be great. We’re here to win, we’re here to have fun. And those two things go hand in hand at Indy Eleven.”
But if you are subscribing for the gameday fits this season, she promises you’ll get those too.
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Single-game tickets are available for $8. Fans who purchase a season ticket for the Indy Eleven USL Championship men’s season at Carroll Stadium receive a ticket to every W League home match as part of their package. Those who already have season tickets for USL Championship action will have W League tickets automatically loaded into their account.
Check out the Indy Eleven USL W League promotional schedule for more information about home games at Grand Park.
