This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of the FCA Donor Publication. The FCA publication is a gift from our FCA staff to all donors giving $50 or more annually. For more information about giving, visit here.
Aubrey Kingsbury remembers the lean years.
Kingsbury, a goalkeeper for the Washington Spirit in the National Women’s Soccer League, remembers the quaint fields built for youth teams and the thinly dotted crowds that resembled an unfinished pointillism canvas by Seurat. She remembers the locker rooms without showers and washing her own jerseys. She remembers the cheap hotels featuring bedbug welcoming committees. She remembers playing for pennies.
And now? Well, NWSL games aren’t exactly Barcelona vs. Real Madrid in El Clásico. But the league is no longer an afterthought either.
The 33-year-old Kingsbury, like the NWSL itself, has come a long way. She joined the league in 2015, its third season of existence, after a standout collegiate career. Since then, she has earned NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year honors twice (2019, 2021) and helped lead the Spirit to two NWSL finals, winning in 2021 and falling short last season. She has also played overseas and earned a few coveted call-ups to the U.S. Women’s National Team.
Just as her skills on the pitch have grown, so has her influence in the locker room. She is a captain and a spiritual leader on the team, encouraging her fellow players to think about eternal matters. Her life is a powerful testimony of a God who loves receiving glory through His redeemed children.
“It’s very easy for me to see that throughout my life, the things that I’ve gotten to do and accomplish have nothing to do with me,” Kingsbury said. “It’s very evident that God gets the glory, and it was all His doing.”
Twinsies
When telling the story of Aubrey Kingsbury, it’s important to start with this crucial point: She came out first.
When Paul and Char Bledsoe rushed to the hospital to have their second child, Char had never had an ultrasound and the doctor had only detected one heartbeat. On November 20, 1991, Aubrey Bledsoe said hello to the world.
“Wait,” the attending nurse said. “There’s another baby.”
Six minutes later, Amber Bledsoe made her surprise entrance. And make no mistake, that birth order was not forgotten.
“I was the oldest and I definitely used that to my advantage when we eventually got our own rooms and I got the bigger one and things like that,” Aubrey said. “Those were an important six minutes.”
The four Bledsoe kids (including older brother Bret and younger brother Micah, who is now a goalkeepers coach at Florida State University) grew up in a loving Christian home in Cincinnati, Ohio. With their dad serving as a professional worship minister, Aubrey and her siblings spent a lot of time at church. She participated in FCA in middle school and got baptized when she was 13, alongside Amber. But as Aubrey looks back, her motives weren’t entirely genuine.
“It was like a family thing,” Aubrey said. “She was getting baptized and I was like, ‘Well, I can’t be the sister who doesn’t and look like a heathen.’”
If the comparison game for twins isn’t already intense enough, imagine also playing the same sport ... and the same position ... on the same team. Aubrey and Amber were both goalies in soccer and guards in basketball at St. Ursula Academy. They also shared a bedroom, a car and sometimes even the same grades. Their high school art teacher once gave both of them A’s on a project even though Amber’s was clearly better.
“I was so upset,” said Amber, an art major in college.
“We were always butting heads,” Aubrey admitted. “And it was my mission to be funnier, better at sports, better at school, really anything that set myself apart.”
Eventually the situation resolved itself in soccer when Amber switched to a different club team and shifted to other positions their high school team. Well, the situation mostly resolved.
“I tried center back,” Amber said, “but that did not work out well because Aubrey and I did not need to be that close together. One game, I had a back pass [to Aubrey in goal] and I played it in the air. It was not a good ball. She chested it down, and I heard about that for a week: ‘Don’t give me a ball that bad, Amber.’”
Eventually, Amber switched to forward.
“I would warm her up before games,” Amber said. “That was fun. I would barrel balls maybe a little too hard: ‘All right, sister, let’s get you going.’ We were definitely competitive, but I’d like to say that’s what pushed both of us—her especially, still playing today at such a high level.”
While Amber played in goal at Brown University, Aubrey became a three-time All-American at Wake Forest University and led the Demon Deacons to their first NCAA College Cup appearance. It was there, in college, where Aubrey began taking faith seriously. She got involved with Athletes in Action and came away from AIA’s Ultimate Training Camp the summer before her junior year a changed individual.
“That was just a big springboard to strip my identity away from my performance in sports and achievements and accolades and just rest on Christ and all that He’s done for me,” she said.
Humble Beginnings
In 2014, Kingsbury started her professional career in Norway for top-flight club IK Grand Bodo. She joined the NWSL in 2015, playing for Sky Blue FC (now NJ/NY Gotham FC) in New Jersey before the Orlando Pride selected her in the league’s 2016 expansion draft.
Her one season with Sky Blue FC was memorable—if not always for the right reasons. Like many players, Kingsbury lived with a host family during the season—more specifically, a host grandma on the Jersey shore.
“It wasn’t terrible,” Kingsbury said. “She was super-sweet, and I got to live near the ocean. But less-than-ideal circumstances for some one trying to optimize performance in terms of sleep. I would have to play bedroom musical chairs as different family members would come to town.”
Unfortunately for Kingsbury, host grandma’s grandkids were old enough to partake in the local nightlife. “Just having friends over and in and out all night,” she said.
Her drives to training and games were long, attendance for home games at Rutgers University’s Yurcak Field in Piscataway was sparse, and her rookie contract for a 20-game season was $12,000. After the seven-month season ended, so did free housing.
“Then you found yourself homeless after that,” she said. “It was a bootstrapped league. It definitely was not glamorous.”
While some players returned to their colleges or their family’s home during the NWSL offseason, Kingsbury traveled overseas to supplement her income and refine her game. She played on loan internationally in Denmark (2015-16) and Australia (2017-20), winning Australia’s W-League Grand Final and earning the league’s Goalkeeper of the Year award with Sydney FC in 2018-19.
In the NWSL, she played two seasons (2016-17) with Orlando before being traded to the Washington Spirit prior to the 2018 season. That year, the Spirit played their home games at the Maryland SoccerPlex in rural Boyds, Md., a sprawling 24-field venue that hosts a variety of youth soccer leagues. For many NWSL players who were used to state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar facilities at Division I colleges, adjusting to these kind of facilities was an adjustment.
“We didn’t have many supporters at that time, so I pretty much knew everyone by name and could pick out their voices,” Kingsbury recalled. “The same fans would hang around for autographs and stuff. It was definitely an intimate experience.”
In 2021, she helped lead the Spirit to the franchise’s first NWSL title, picking up her second NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year award and Championship Game MVP honors along the way. By 2023, the Spirit was playing fulltime at Audi Field, the 20,000-seat soccer-specific stadium built for Major League Soccer ’s D.C. United in the nation’s capital.
Last August, the NWSL and its players signed a historic collective bargaining agreement, which will raise the minimum player salary from $48,500 in 2025 to $82,500 in 2030, guarantee all player salaries and eliminate the draft, granting all players unrestricted free agency and the ability to negotiate contracts with any team in the league. The NWSL now mandates that its teams play in stadiums that can seat at least 10,000, and in 2024, the NWSL’s Kansas City Current opened 11,500-seat CPKC Stadium, the world’s first venue built exclusively for professional women’s soccer. In January, Denver was awarded the NWSL’s 16th franchise at a cost of $110 million, the biggest expansion fee in the history of women’s professional sports in America.
For players like Kingsbury, who remember training rooms the size of a glorified closet and hunting for the least-lumpy field to practice on at a youth complex, these are heady times.
“It’s really incredible that women can be a professional soccer player and it’s a viable career option and you can grow up knowing the league is stable enough to exist when it comes your turn,” she said. “Because the previous league [Women’s Professional Soccer] folded when I was a sophomore in college, so I didn’t necessarily have this dream of being a pro soccer player....It’s pretty crazy to think of how far we’ve come.”
‘My Mission Field’
The Spirit’s chapel program, in large part, can be attributed to Kingsbury.
Shortly after signing with the Spirit in 2018, she met Patricia Hollowell, FCA’s Collegiate Director at the University of Maryland who expressed interest in providing chaplain services to the Spirit. Kingsbury asked the Spirit’s front office to give Hollowell and co-chaplain Sarah Adewunmi, an FCA volunteer, access to the players and permission to run pre-game chapels. And so, the Spirit’s chapel program was born.
Now, every NWSL team now has a chaplain. Kingsbury is the player representative for the Spirit, helping Hollowell and Adewunmi set up weekly meetings for any interested Spirit players while also coordinating with other team’s chaplains when the team hits the road.
But Kingsbury’s influence goes far beyond the administrative. Recently, she invited all her teammates to join a Christian book study, offering to buy copies for anyone interested.
“She’s constantly doing things like that where she is helping other people grow in their faith,” Hollowell said. “Everyone on the team knows she’s a believer. The way she carries herself and the way that she approaches living out her faith and loving on people, I think everyone really respects her for it.”
Soccer is “my mission field,” Kingsbury said. “I’ve had teammates from all over the world and just some really cool experiences. So yeah, [I’m] still here. I never would’ve thought I would be playing into my thirties, but I’m really loving it. I know this is where the Lord has me, at least for now.”
Tough Loss, Bright Future
Kingsbury still marvels at what happened at Audi Field on Nov. 16, 2024.
There, before a rowdy sellout crowd in the NWSL semifinals, Kingsbury stopped not one, not two, but three penalty kicks against defending champion Gotham FC to propel the Spirit into the league championship.
“That was the mountaintop moment where you wish it was the final,” Kingsbury said.
In the championship, though, the Spirit dropped a taut 1-0 decision to Orlando. Pride forward Barbra Banda snuck a roller past Kingsbury in the 37th minute, and none of the Spirit’s 26 shots found the net. It was a bitter end to an otherwise fantastic season.
“I don’t think the pain ever really goes away, just because you work so hard,” Kingsbury said. “For me, it’s less about wanting to be an NWSL champion and more wanting all our hard work to pay off.”
At age 33, Kingsbury is still an elite goalkeeper. She started each of the Spirit’s 26 regular-season matches in 2024, totaling 74 saves and a 1.08 goals-against average while reaching No. 5 on the NWSL’s all-time regular-season saves list.
Kingsbury signed a new three-year contract last year, keeping her with the Spirit through 2027.
The current NWSL regular season started in March and runs through early November. Kingsbury would love to lift another trophy, but not for the normal reasons of fame and glory.
“It’s just more about wanting to achieve something with your good friends and the people you’ve been to war with all year long,” she said.
Then there’s the dream of making the U.S. women’s national team one last time—for the 2027 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics. Kingsbury received her first national team call-up in November 2019 and has earned two caps in international friendlies—against Uzbekistan (April 2022) and China (December 2023). She also traveled with the team to the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, but didn’t see game action as the U.S. surprisingly bowed out in the round of 16.
But the whole USWNT process can be frustrating for players, with a constantly shuffling roster and a lot of silence in between training camps. Kingsbury hasn’t heard anything since receiving a phone call informing her she wasn’t selected for the 2024 Olympic team roster.
“The difficult thing is if I were to have a kid, I would be out for a full year,” said Kingsbury, who married her husband, Matt, an Arlington County (Va.) police officer, in December 2021. “But I know if the Lord wills it, He can certainly do it. So yeah, it’s still a desire and a dream of mine to make the future World Cup and Olympics, and we’ll see what He can do.”
Hollowell sees Kingsbury’s response to the USWNT roller-coaster ride of emotions as “real life faith lived out,” she said. “Just watching someone truly walk what she talks was really, really cool.”
After her playing career is over, Kingsbury might try management in an NSWL front office.
“It’d be cool to have a lot of former players helping make decisions on behalf of the players rather than these executives who are maybe a bit more out of touch with what the day-to-day is actually like,” she said.
Outside of soccer, life is full. Matt and Aubrey are active in their church and participate in a weekly small group. They like cooking together, walking and hiking with their German shepherd mix and exploring the greater D.C. area. And as relatively new homeowners, “a lot of our time is spent on the yard,” Aubrey said. “We’re learning a lot about weeding and fertilizing and all these things that I call my mom for.”
But for now soccer—and the mission field it provides—is still calling. So she coordinates chapels and book studies, bakes birthday treats for every teammate, and shines the light of Christ in a burgeoning league.
“As our league has grown, the nations are coming to me in a sense,” she said. “I’ve got some teammates from France, the Ivory Coast and England. This year, we have a Brazilian and a Colombian girl. I think it’s super-cool that I get to meet and get to know so many people. But I don’t know what the future has in store for me.”
That’s okay, though. She knows the One who does.