Make This Town Big: The Story of Roy Turner and the Wichita Wings

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.