Jennifer Rose Buczkowski (born April 4, 1985) is an American former

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

midfielder A midfielder is an outfield position in association football. Midfielders may play an exclusively defensive role, breaking up attacks, and are in that case known as defensive midfielders. As central midfielders often go across boundarie ...

. She played for

FC Kansas City FC Kansas City was an American professional women's soccer club based in Kansas City, Missouri. The team was one of the eight founding clubs of the National Women's Soccer League in 2012, and began play in 2013. They were two-time NWSL champions ...

in the

NWSL The National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) is a professional women's soccer league at the top of the United States league system. It is owned by the teams and, until 2020, was under a management contract with the United States Soccer Federatio ...

. She previously played for the

Philadelphia Independence The Philadelphia Independence was an American professional soccer club that was based in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester, Pennsylvania. The team joined Women's Professional Soccer as an expansion team in 2010 and played its home games at West ...

and New Jersey Sky Blue of

Women's Professional Soccer Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) was the top-level professional women's soccer league in the United States. It began play on March 29, 2009. The league was composed of seven teams for its first two seasons and fielded six teams for the 2011 sea ...

Early life

Buczkowski was born in

Elk Grove Village Elk Grove Village is a village in Cook and DuPage counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. Per the 2020 census, the population was 32,812. Located northwest of Chicago along the Golden Corridor, the Village of Elk Grove Village was incorpora ...

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

. She played three seasons at Elk Grove High School and was named by Gatorade as the 2003 Illinois Player of the Year.

University of Notre Dame

Buczkowski attended the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin founded the school in 1842. The main campu ...

from 2003–2007 and set the Notre Dame record for 103 career games played. During her career at Notre Dame, she scored 77 points (22nd in Notre Dame history), 20 goals, 37 assists and 97 starts. Buczkowski was a three-time NSCAA All-American. She was among the final 15 candidates for the MAC Hermann Award in 2005 and 2006.

Club career

Sky Blue FC (WPS)

Buczkowski was a sixth-round selection (39th overall) in the 2009 WPS College Draft for the New Jersey Sky Blue. The team went on to win the national championship.

Philadelphia Independence (WPS)

The following season, Buczkowski was selected in the first round of the expansion draft by the

. During the 2011 season, Jen won the "Iron Women Award" for playing every minute of the season. From 2009–2010, Buczkowski started in 38 of 41 games played in the WPS.

Chicago Red Stars (WPSL Elite)

After the folding of the WPS in early 2012, Buczkowski joined the

Chicago Red Stars The Chicago Red Stars are a professional women's soccer club based in Bridgeview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. A founding member of the Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) league, they have played in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) sin ...

, in the semi-professional

WPSL Elite The Women's Premier Soccer League Elite (WPSL Elite) was a women's semi-professional soccer league created by the Women's Premier Soccer League (WPSL) to support the sport in the United States, both from continued interest by WPSL teams in profess ...

. The team would go on to come in second to the

Western New York Flash The Western New York Flash (WNY Flash) was an American soccer club based in Elma, New York that competed in the United Women's Soccer league. They have won league championships in four different leagues: the USL W-League in 2010, Women's Profess ...

after penalty kicks during the WPSL final.

FC Kansas City (NWSL), 2013–2016

In 2013, she signed with

for the inaugural season of the

. She started all 66 regular-season matches in the first three seasons of the NWSL for FCKC, the only player in the whole league to do so. Buczkowski won the NWSL Championship in 2014 & 2015 with FCKC. She retired after FCKC's match on May 13, 2016, as she had enrolled in the DPT Program at the

University of Kansas The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and several satellite campuses, research and educational centers, medical centers, and classes across the state of Kansas. Tw ...

and her school schedule prevented her from playing soccer.

International career

Buczkowski was a member of several youth national teams. She was a member of the U-19 World Cup team in 2003 and played every minute of the U-21 Nordic Cup tournament in 2005, in which the team won the championship.

Honors and awards

Team

''with FC Kansas City:'' *

NWSL championship The National Women's Soccer League Playoffs (or NWSL Playoffs) are a single elimination tournament among six teams in the National Women's Soccer League of the United States, deciding the winner of the NWSL Championship. Since playoff games cann ...

: 2014, 2015

Coaching career

Buczkowski joined the

as Assistant Coach in 2007. In 2011, she joined the Lyons Township Soccer Club coaching staff.

References

External links

*
Notre Dame player profile

FC Kansas City player profile

Jen Buczkowski on Twitter
{{DEFAULTSORT:Buczkowski, Jen 1985 births Living people Notre Dame Fighting Irish women's soccer players Sky Blue FC (WPS) players Philadelphia Independence players American women's soccer players National Women's Soccer League players FC Kansas City players Women's Professional Soccer players Sportspeople from Park Ridge, Illinois People from Elk Grove Village, Illinois Soccer players from Illinois Sportspeople from DuPage County, Illinois Women's association football midfielders Chicago Cobras players USL W-League (1995–2015) players