We had the good fortune of connecting with Johnny Freeston, Rachael Cooper, Shaina Swain and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Johnny Freeston, Rachael Cooper, Shaina Swain, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
The Harpos FC W team was started based on a set of three guiding principles: the game, the community, and the moment.

At the heart of our program, our north star is ultimately soccer. Our core team is composed of a special group of women who are passionate about playing soccer and committed to staying together as a team as we start a new program with Harpos FC. Our ultimate goal was to create the most enjoyable, meaningful, and successful soccer experience for our current players and to lay the groundwork to bring in new players to grow the program. Furthermore, we aimed for our team to be a part of a broader community. We wanted the organization that we play for to be more than a name on the front of our jerseys. We wanted to ensure that we could join a community of people who support each other on and off the field. We found the club unity and pride of the Harpos organization to be admirable and hope to be able to expand that camaraderie with the addition of a women’s team.

Additionally, while the supportive environment of both the on- and off-field community and success of Harpos FC was important, we also wanted to bring a new team to Harpos to promote the growth of women’s soccer more broadly. Women’s soccer is having a moment. This summer’s Women’s World Cup saw record-breaking numbers of fans attending matches in person, millions of fans watching world wide, and a level of competition and parity that hasn’t been seen on the global stage before now. Locally, there is a movement to bring a professional women’s team to Denver. Our initiation of a women’s soccer program at Harpos FC was made in part to capitalize on a small piece of this momentum to lift our team’s presence and footprint to a new level. We want to ensure that women have a platform to play soccer after college. It was important to us to start a team with a club that would give equal opportunities and resources to the women’s program as they did their established men’s team. The Harpos organization was willing to invest in women’s soccer and the resources that it takes to be competitive – uniforms, equipment, fields, coaching. We are excited that we were able to bring our team to a club that was not only willing but eager to align their platform with the growth of our current team, our hopes for new teams for our league, and the expansion of womens soccer more generally.

Do you have a budget? How do you think about your personal / team finances and how do you make lifestyle and spending decisions?
The Harpos W team aims to provide a competitive but positive space for adult female soccer players of all levels. In order to meet this aim, it costs a minimum of roughly $600 per player per year to ensure that our team has the resources that it needs to be competitive in the Colorado Premier League and beyond. Our team finances go towards a variety of costs: year-round indoor and outdoor training spaces, league fees, tournament entry and travel, coach compensation, equipment such as balls or jerseys, and more.

Our budget is determined largely by the balance of being able to afford what we need to make the playing experience enjoyable (decent fields to play on, refreshed equipment every few seasons) while making participation financially viable for our participating players. Even just a year ago, we were entirely financed by player fees. We have been fortunate through our union with Harpos FC to already have some partnerships that help to underwrite some of our costs. Our ultimate goal is to be able to finance the team primarily through fundraising, sponsorships, and the occasional tournament victory purse.

Risk taking: how do you think about risk, what role has taking risks played in your life/career?
For better or worse, risk is an inevitable part of life. We believe in strategic risk-taking that evaluates opportunities by weighing if the potential benefits of taking a risk outweigh the consequences of failing with your gamble. In many ways, founding a women’s soccer program at a new club is risky. We both have been a part of our league long enough to see many new teams be founded only to fall apart after one or two seasons because they couldn’t sustain their efforts. When considering making a jump to initiate a new program, we thought about a lot of potential risks that were involved: the possibility of losing players, alienating existing partnerships, having to rebuild an equipment inventory, searching for a new coach.

The risks were complicated by the fact that this decision was one that we wanted to make for a whole group, not just ourselves. We were open and honest about the potential risks with our players, sought anonymous feedback, questions, and concerns, and had many conversations with Harpos FC leadership to do our due diligence in researching the opportunity. We ultimately decided that the risks of bringing our team to Harpos FC were outweighed by the opportunity that partnering with such an established, high profile organization could bring the team – and are so far more than happy with the way the risk has paid off.

Where are you from and how did your background and upbringing impact who you are today?
Shaina: My mother is from Guatemala and my dad’s family is Italian so I’ve joked many times that my life can be described by three F’s: family, food, and fútbol. Growing up in east Tennessee and later New Mexico, my family moved relatively regularly and I changed schools more often – I went to five schools between fourth grade and the time I graduated from high school. After high school, I lived in three different states spread across the country for college, graduate school, and my first job. Wherever I went, sports – and soccer in particular – always provided an immediate way to meet people who had at least one important thing in common. Being a part of a team has always been a way to make social connections with strong women no matter where I lived or what I was doing there. Soccer has in many ways created a found family for me throughout my life, and has blessed me with opportunities to learn important life skills beyond the game, such as how to lead, how to be a good teammate, how to push myself, and how to communicate.

Rachael: Colorado native here! Born and raised in Conifer, CO! Growing up, my parents were adamant on my younger sister and I having an after school activity to “keep us out of trouble.” I remember trying everything from horseback riding to volleyball to choir, but the second I stepped on a soccer field when I was 8 years old, everyone knew that was the thing that was going to stick. Playing became my passion and the soccer field became a place where I felt like I belonged. Long story short, I never stopped playing. I played through college at CSU, in the WPSL, and now the CPL for Harpos FC. I use the skills I have picked up from being a soccer player every day. My work ethic, teammate mentality, ability to work under pressure, and being a leader in times of stress are all things that I attribute to my career as an athlete.

What is the most important factor behind your success / the success of your brand / team?
As cliche as it sounds, the most important driver of our team’s success is our players. We have been able to bring together a talented and diverse group of women who care deeply about the team’s success both on and off the field. Our players range in age from 18 to almost 40 – there are few places in life where you can assemble individuals from so many life stages together with a single, united purpose. We work as engineers, nurses, marketers, coaches, and teachers. Some of us are mothers. All of us come together to create a vibrant group of 25+ women who push each other on the field and support each other’s endeavors in other parts of life.

Almost all of our team recruiting is done through word of mouth, with players recruiting teammates on rec teams or college teammates who moved to the area or a new coworker who mentions playing the game. Some of our players have been with this team for more than 5 years and have stuck with the team through seasons when our league only had four teams or when we could barely muster eight players for practices. We have been lucky to create an environment that women want to be a part of and are committed to supporting. We could not run this team without the players volunteering their time and effort to everything that makes us tick.

What value or principle matters most to you? Why?
The core vision of the Harpos W team is to provide the most enjoyable, meaningful, and successful soccer experience where players can be a part of something bigger than themselves. To meet that vision, Harpos FC organizes itself around three primary values: family, character, and excellence.

Members of the Harpos W team are sisters. Family is a core value of the Harpos organization and one of the main pulls in our decision to partner with them. The W team supports and shows up for each other both on the field and off. We share important values, support each others’ individual interests, and emphasize putting the whole above the individual.

Character and excellence go hand in hand with our vision for what success means to this team. We expect to hold our team members to the highest standards in the way they conduct themselves in the world. We believe that positive character is embodied through pursuing victories the right way – by winning with grace and losing with dignity. Our focus on achieving personal excellence puts success directly in the hands of every member of the Harpos W team. We want our players to feel a personal stake in the success of the team so that we can continue to grow and expand.

Work life balance: how has your balance changed over time? How do you think about the balance?
Running a competitive program takes a lot of time and commitment that would otherwise be spent on other parts of the “life” side of work/life balance. In particular, launching the Harpos FC W team over the past six months required a significant amount of time and dedication as we set up the initial team infrastructure – including setting up social media platforms, developing fundraising events and sponsorship programs, recruiting new players, ensuring that practice spaces were secured, and vetting potential coaches.

One of the most special things about our team is the commitment of our players to the work that makes the machinery of our team run. All of the players on Harpos, including ourselves, have full-time jobs, most of which are outside the world of competitive soccer. Our love for the sport of soccer and our long-term vision for the team and the possibilities of our league more broadly keep us all going. While establishing and running this team has been the equivalent of an unpaid, part-time job for both of us, we recognize that the program’s growth and successes will ultimately reward us with new opportunities and the ability to build something that we hope can continue on with future players after we’re both retired from the game.

What’s the end goal? Where do you want to be professionally by the end of your career?
Our big goals in starting the Harpos W program are to expand the platform available for women’s soccer post-college beyond professional opportunities and to have a positive impact on the women’s game more broadly. That starts with internal growth, as we hope to grow the Harpos women’s program to be home to a second women’s team in a short term. Longer-term, we want to create a sustainable program that can welcome new players into a space where they can continue to play this sport for another decade or more after their college careers are over. We envision doing this by creating a better network between not just Harpos but also the Colorado Premier League and college varsity and club programs to create a more direct pipeline between youth players and our league so that women can see that there are opportunities beyond what you are doing when you’re twenty years old. We hope that we can be a model for girls in high school or younger to see that even if you have a full-time job outside of soccer, or are a mother, or never make it to the pros, that your soccer experience doesn’t end when you graduate and that you can be part of a supportive and welcoming environment that truly can be lifelong.

Tell us about a book you’ve read and why you like it / what impact it had on you.
Shaina: One of the most impactful books that I’ve read in the past few years was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Although the book on its face is about the interweaving of Western scientific thinking and Indigenous grounding in the natural world, I found that its lessons on the role of gratitude and interconnectedness stuck with me in a much more far-reaching way. The book’s teachings are both easily quotable (“Balance is not a passive resting place”) and the kinds that you can spend hours reflecting on and applying to your own life. For me, in particular, this book was a reminder of how infrequently we stop to pause and recognize, reflect, and be thankful for both the physical world around us – especially being blessed to live in such a beautiful state as Colorado – and the people who inhabit it. It’s a lesson that I still have to remind myself to revisit when I get caught up in the fast-paced environment of daily life but one I’m grateful to have to fall back on.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
From Johnny:

Everything that we’ve done with Harpos FC has been enabled and supported by my amazing wife, Jennelle Freeston. She’s shown constant love, support and encouragement from 2005 until present. I love her more than anything in the world.

From Shaina + Cooper:

To Harpos FC –

Thank you for welcoming our squad into the Harpos family! We are so grateful for the opportunity to bring our team into a club that not only aligns with the values and goals of our current group, but is also willing to invest in the expansion of women’s soccer. Cheers to all the good things ahead!

To our team –

The dedication, loyalty, and respect you all have shown each other is the true driver of our success. None of this would be possible without every single one of you. Thank you for showing up for each other and volunteering your time to this group! 🩷

Website: https://www.harposfc.com/

Instagram: 

  • Harpos W’s: @harposfc_w

  • Harpos FC: @harposfootballclub

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/harposfc/

Image Credits: Seth Beamer Productions

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