Michael Romalis

Make This Town Big Michael Romalis

It was an improbable story. From 1979 to 1992, world-class soccer players from England, Denmark, Argentina, Wales, Ireland, and beyond, made their way to Kansas, of all places, to play for the Major Indoor Soccer League's Wichita Wings. The first major league professional sports team in Kansas history, the Wings would heat up the cold, winter nights in a jam-packed and raucous Kansas Coliseum. Competing against the likes of New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Chicago, plucky Wichita would become a yearly playoff contender and one of the league's most successful franchises. None of it would have been possible without a working-class boy from Liverpool, England named Roy Turner. A star for the North American Soccer League's Dallas Tornado in the 1970s, Coach Turner would convert the men, women, and children of Wichita into an army of orange-clad soccer fans dedicated to making their town bigger than it ever had been before.