The annual Kevin Gray Awards, presented by Pepsi and co-sponsored by Sporting Kansas City and Global Sports International, recognize the achievements of soccer players and coaches in the Kansas City area. Each year, as the event quickly approaches, we at Sporting Kansas City enjoy catching up with a few of the past winners and featuring them in blog posts that are released in the days leading up to the show. Welcome to this year’s first Kevin Gray Awards Spotlight! Today, we highlight the 2011 Kevin Gray Female Youth Player of the Year, Caroline Gray.
Gray, a St. Teresa’s Academy alumna and recent 2015 University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate, had no difficulty continuing her soccer success in college after receiving the award following her last season at STA. During her freshman year at UNL, Gray started all 18 games for the Huskers and scored her first career goal at Penn State on October 14, 2011. In her sophomore season, she, again, played in every single match and added two goals and six assists to her increasingly impressive stat sheet. Gray’s third year at UNL proved to be, arguably, the most eventful. Maintaining the trend established by her performance in the two years prior, Gray started all 24 games for the Huskers in 2013 and provided leadership en route to Nebraska’s first-ever Big 10 Tournament Championship. According to Gray, that year’s regular season and postseason titles serve as two of the proudest achievements of her entire soccer career. Finally, in Gray’s senior season, she started all 19 matches, averaged 87 minutes per match, and earned Big 10 Player of the Week honors in November 2014 for scoring the
in the final game of the season. After adding this recognition to the long list of individual honors she had managed to collect throughout her college soccer career, Gray went on to graduate as a 2-time member of the Tom Osborne Citizenship Team, with an Academic All-Big Ten award and 5 appearances on the Scholar-Athlete Honor Roll—effectively leaving her mark on the Nebraska women’s soccer program for years and years to come.
Reflecting upon her time at Nebraska, Caroline says she will miss most “the friendships [she] made with the girls on the team” as well as the opportunity she had to play in one of the best conferences in the country, an experience that she says “took her game to a whole other level.”
As the daughter of the late Kevin Gray—of whom these annual awards are held in honor—Caroline articulated how appreciative she feels not only because the awards were and are instituted in remembrance of her father, but also to have won the award for Female Youth Player of the Year in 2011 just a month after her dad’s passing. “It was the most amazing award I could have gotten,” Gray said, “and I just knew how proud he would have been.” Regarding Kevin Gray’s monumental impact on sports in the Kansas City area, Caroline recalls “his incredible drive to improve every aspect of sports in Kansas City, especially women’s sports” through his creation of the Women’s Intersport Network (WIN for KC). As for soccer, “he wasn’t the most knowledgeable,” Gray said, “but he loved to watch, regardless.”
This summer, Caroline is excited to have moved back to Kansas City full-time and plans to stay heavily involved in the growing sport of soccer while working at GSI Sports, one of the co-sponsors for the Kevin Gray Awards.
Be sure to check back tomorrow for our next Kevin Gray Awards Spotlight on Salina, Kansas native and USWNT prospect, AD Franch! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter & Instagram, and like us on Facebook for all things Sporting Club Network!
