Matt Potter was fired as head coach of the Kansas City Current on Wednesday, with the club saying the decision was “related to issues around his leadership and employment responsibilities.”
“We watch the play on the pitch, we keep a pulse on the locker room,” said general manager Camille Ashton.
But Potter’s firing actually seems to have come as a shock to the locker room.
Just hours after their coach was fired, the Current defeated the Houston Dash 2-0 in their Challenge Cup opener on Wednesday. Following the game, two of the club’s top players, Lo’eau LaBonta and Cece Kizer, spoke to the media.
LaBonta was asked directly if she’d ever had any negative interactions with Potter, to which she replied: “No.
“Not to my knowledge, no,” she continued. “I’ve done numerous interviews with Matt and about Matt, and Matt literally just did one for me. And we’re very truthful people. We had no knowledge that this was going to happen at all. We didn’t have any say in it. It was news to us and where the whole shock came from.”
Kizer was also asked about Potter and said she felt the same as LaBonta.
LaBonta said before the game she took some time to check in on her teammates, all of whom she said were surprised to hear of Potter’s dismissal.
“What are your initial feelings?” LaBonta said she asked her teammates. “I think everybody just said ‘shocked.’
“But I think this team is so competitive and so motivated to win. It wasn’t, ‘All right let’s sit in our feelings,’ it was, ‘What’s next, how do we solve this, what are we going to do now?’
“I thought it was going to be a lot of questions. And I really didn’t have any answers, but we were leaving it open to people to ask or say anything. And then we had a couple of players who don’t usually speak up, speak up and say, ‘Let’s go now, we have to stay focused on the game.'”
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