Photo Illustration by Alberto Mier/CNN/Daniel Mick

Forty-eight regular-season games played and zero losses. While a championship eludes them, this team has their eyes on a much bigger prize: going pro.

Minnesota Aurora FC is a community-owned women’s soccer team born from a parking lot meeting in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, they consistently play in front of crowds larger than some professional teams in the top flight of women’s soccer. Yet they started and remain an amateur side.

Dreamed up by two friends, Wes Burdine, the owner of popular queer soccer bar The Black Hart in St. Paul, and Matt Privratsky, who’s spent his career in public policy and clean energy advocacy, the team is the result of the duo being frustrated by the lack of elite women’s soccer in Minnesota.

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