Overview:
A new stadium for women's soccer near South Broadway is not expected to open until 2028, but it has already gotten the community talking.
“As a soccer fan, on the surface, this is very appealing and exciting,” said Jenn Greiving, a longtime Overland Park resident and Co-President of the Overland Park Neighbors Association. “But then digging down into, what does this actually mean for [South Broadway], for our neighbors, for our community? Our neighbors definitely want to understand how this is going to impact their way of life.”
Like many Denverites, Greiving was thrilled when she heard Denver was getting its own National Women’s Soccer League team. She bought season tickets for her husband and kids right away and is still looking forward to family trips to the pitch.
But when the Denver NWSL ownership group announced its plans to build a new 14,500-seat stadium for the team at the Gates Rubber Company site at the Santa Fe Yards near South Broadway last month, she had a slew of questions about how developers and the city were going to approach cooperation with the surrounding neighborhoods.
“My neighbors want to know, how is this going to impact traffic? How is this going to impact our ability to get around our own neighborhood?” Greiving said. “I think neighbors want to know that they are going to be listened to, that they can develop a sense of trust with what the city and the developers are saying.”
Located at the intersection of I-25, Santa Fe and Broadway, the Santa Fe Yards lies at the nexus of six Denver neighborhoods. Greiving says listening to these communities—Baker, Overland Park, Platt Park, West Wash Park, Ruby Hill and Athmar Park—will be essential to the project’s success.
“It’s so important for the city to provide ample opportunities for neighbors to give feedback,” Greiving said. “It’s my hope that as developers and the city are looking at the designs and how they’re integrating different things, they take into account the guiding principles that the (City’s) Southwest Area Plan sets out. Not how we can just improve this one tiny little pocket, but how that improvement will ripple out into the surrounding neighborhoods.”
Shelby Drulis, President of the Platt Park People’s Association, said he wanted to see increased RTD and shuttle options along South Broadway to reduce car traffic around the stadium.
“We’re also hoping to find ways to partner with the team,” Drulis said, referencing his neighbors’ hopes for community engagement. “People were really excited to have something that they’re proud of in their neighborhood, to have a stadium, to have a team they could represent.”
Right now, the Denver City Council is deliberating on whether to allot $70 million in city funding to share the acquisition of the land with the NWSL through an intergovernmental agreement (IGA).
While formal collaboration between residents, developers and city officials has been limited so far, negotiations around Community Benefit Agreements are promised to begin once the IGA goes through. The NWSL has said they expect the IGA to be finalized in May, while the City Council said they plan to hold off on voting on funding and rezoning until November.
A History of Unfinished Business
The 41-acre lot has been empty since 2001, when the Gates Rubber Company sold it to developer Cherokee Denver for $26.5 million. It’s remained undeveloped ever since.
“It’s just been sitting empty,” said Dave Moore, owner of Divino Wine and Spirits, located across the street from the lot. “Untapped potential, I guess.”
Since opening Divino in 2003, Moore has witnessed several developers attempt to break ground at the old factory facility. The timing was never right; first came the 2008 recession, then environmental contamination concerns, and most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, each of which stymied development.
Gates Corp. bought the property back from Cherokee in 2009 and continued remedial efforts to clean up residual groundwater pollution from the company’s manufacturing operations. Gates then sold the site to Broadway Station Partners, a group of Denver developers that promised to finish the environmental cleanup, in 2014; Endeavor Real Estate Group bought some of the site in 2019, but the promised mixed-use development never materialized.
This is not the first time the area has dealt with the environmental contamination. The South Platte River was a hotspot for Denver’s manufacturing industry during the 1900s, and pollution from Shattuck Chemical Company led to the establishment of a Superfund site at the intersection of Evans and Santa Fe. Greiving says the city’s lack of enthusiasm to deal with these issues in the past has made some of her South Broadway neighbors wary of new developments.
“In Overland, there has been a history of two different issues. First, the city coming in and making decisions that had a substantial impact on the neighborhood, and then there’s also a history of the city not addressing key issues in our neighborhood,” Greiving said. “So I think neighbors, understandably, are a little hesitant about welcoming this new development without a broader understanding of the impacts it might have.”
According to Keith Meyer, president of Denver Inc., which works with Denver’s RNOs, the site’s history of failed developments has also jaded the City Council. “There’s a lot of big questions in the air still, which revolve around, ‘This is a lot of money,’” Meyer said. “I think that adds to some of the concerns that City Council was discussing.”
While Dave Moore also remains skeptical of the latest plans for the site, the store owner thinks the soccer stadium would be a great addition to the South Broadway neighborhood.
“Everybody said, ‘This is the real deal this time,’ you know?” Moore said. “I’ll believe it when I see them breaking ground. I believe that the plans are to move forward, but anything could happen, especially in unstable economic times as we’ve seen in the past few months.”
A Goal for Women’s Soccer, A Big Win for South Broadway
One thing everyone can agree on? Having a stadium dedicated to women’s soccer would be epic. Caitlin Long, a former semi-professional and D1 soccer player who founded the Lipstick Lovers recreational league last year for queer women and trans and non-binary soccer players, couldn’t be more excited for the franchise to come to Denver.
“Getting our own stadium sends a message that this is important,” Long said. “This is not an afterthought. We want to build this from the ground up to have it intentionally be a space for professional women’s soccer.”
To Greiving, a mother of two, having an NSWL team is about more than just sports or competition. “I’ve really appreciated the role models that I think the US women’s national team have served as in terms of advocating for women’s sports,” she said. “I want to see that advocacy come through and elevate women’s sports in Denver as well.”
Beyond the NWSL, Denver’s network of women’s sports organizations and advocates has grown significantly in recent years. 99’ers, a sports bar focused on showing professional women’s sports, opened in 2024 on Colfax. Denver also got its first Women’s Elite Rugby (WER) team, the Denver Onyx, this year and is home to numerous sports-focused camps, clinics and events for girls.
“For young girls and women and gender-expansive youth, to see women at this high level, this high caliber of sport, it affirms that this is possible,” said Long. “And it generates so much more of a conversation around the inequities that have existed between women’s and men’s sports.”
The stadium comes at a time of historic growth for the women’s sports industry. Deloitte announced in a March report that women’s professional sports are set to generate a record $2.35 billion in revenue this year, up from $1.88 billion in 2024. Women’s sports leagues are also expanding, with the WNBA aiming to add four teams by 2028 and the NSWL looking at establishing another team in Boston this year. WER began its debut season this year with six teams across the U.S.
“Having a women’s soccer stadium would be amazing,” said Meyer, who described the energy in other women’s sports venues as “electric. It could really be a point of pride for Denver and the neighborhoods if it’s built hand-in-hand.
The Stadium at the Santa Fe yards is set to open in 2028. Until then, the NWSL team will play and train at a temporary facility in Centennial.