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SANDY — This is a story about Donovan Mitchell.
OK, not really. The Utah Jazz superstar has had plenty of publicity, speaking engagements, interactions with the community, and press tours in his two seasons in Salt Lake City.
But when another Louisville athlete got the call to come to Utah — rookie Utah Royals FC center back Gaby Vincent — Mitchell was one of the first to reach out.
The two weren’t best friends in college in Kentucky; they barely overlapped during Vincent’s four-year career, in fact. But Mitchell’s a soccer fan and he heard she was moving to Salt Lake.
“He definitely came out to support our games in college,” Vincent recalled. “He was very welcoming when I moved out here. He was really nice.”
So that was how Gaby Vincent was first welcomed to Salt Lake City.
And the whirlwind hasn’t stopped ever since.
The 5-foot-6 center back has played in three-straight games of her rookie season with the Royals, who return from the Women’s World Cup break at 8 p.m. MDT Saturday against New Jersey’s Sky Blue FC (0-5-2, 2 points). And with starting options Rachel Corsie and Becky Sauerbrunn representing Scotland and the United States, respectively, in France, the responsibility for the Royals’ defense falls on the 21-year-old’s shoulders for at least the next few weeks, too.
No problem, say her Utah teammates and coaches, who remark often about her composure as a rookie, the ability to play the ball at her feet, and her coachability while playing next to fellow center back Sam Johnson.
“Every single practice, I try to learn something — not just from the coaches but from my teammates,” Vincent said. “If they ever have any suggestions, I don’t get butt-hurt; I take it to heart and prove that I want to work on it.
“I want to constantly be getting better. At first, it was a little uncomfortable. But now I’m just trying to pick people’s brains.”
Vincent’s role wasn’t meant to be as an immediate star or even a starter. The Royals boast two of the top center backs in the world, not just in the NWSL, in Corsie and Sauerbrunn. Behind them, Sam Johnson was a starting center back with Chicago before coming to Utah in the same trade that brought Christen Press to the Wasatch Front.
So Vincent was meant to provide depth, to bridge the Women’s World Cup break as the league plays a handful of games through the summer months, and to allow Sauerbrunn and Corsie to return comfortably from international duty.
But she’s provided so much more since making her debut as a substitute May 19 in a 1-1 draw with North Carolina. The next week, Vincent started in the back during a 2-0 win over Orlando, then traveled to Boyd, Maryland, where she started just 40 miles from her hometown of Columbia for the Royals' 2-0 loss to the league-leading Spirit.
That game saw plenty of support, too. Nearly 50 people made the 40-mile drive to the Maryland SoccerPlex to support Vincent: friends, family, former club teammates, and ex-players who saw the rising soccer star at every level of her career.
“At first, it made me very nervous,” Vincent said. “But once I got past that, it was amazing. There were so many people there; girls I played with in high school and club, their families their kids. Everyone came to support me. It was amazing.”
Vincent is becoming her own center back, too. In many ways, she is providing something better — or at least, different — than the other options coach Laura Harvey has at her disposal, a significant compliment considering the defensive prowess at the two-time NWSL coach of the year’s disposal.
“All of our center backs are good footballers, and Gaby is the same,” Harvey said of the rookie. “But the journey that she has been on since preseason has been learning off Becky, Rachel and Sam in terms of being good defensively.
“The thing they’ve known since day one is how good she is on the ball. We just have to help her develop and coach her to be diligent defensively.”
Lauded for her passing and technical ability in the Royals’ defensive third, Vincent is making her services critical to the Royals as they push for the club’s first NWSL playoff berth in their second season in the league.
Yet the 5-foot-6 defender’s pro career almost ended before it began.
A four-year starter at Louisville who finishing her degree in computer information systems online, Vincent went undrafted in the 2019 NWSL college draft. That’s 36 picks, one for each of the league’s nine teams spread out across four rounds, and no one selected her.
She had a lot of decisions to make about pursuing a pro career. Should she go overseas without a firm contract? Or maybe she should finish the two semesters of her degree, then decide if a professional career was worth turning down offers in the tech industry.
Instead, she accepted a tryout with the Royals. And after being named a national team-replacement player, she earned her way onto the roster — and the whirlwind didn’t stop until the recent two-week World Cup break. That’s when she went home to the D.C. area for a week, visited her cat, and took a breath from the constant run of starting a pro career.
But she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It was a shot in the dark,” Vincent said of the tryout. “When I was invited to preseason, it was another opportunity.
“I go in every day with that chip on my shoulder.”
Sky Blue FC (0-5-2) at Utah Royals FC (4-2-1)
When: Saturday, June 15 at 8 p.m. MDT
Where: Rio Tinto Stadium
Streaming: Yahoo Sports, KSL.com
