Kyndra de St. Aubin was always on the move.

Shooting hoops in games of backyard Lightning, playing Hot Box with her brother, swinging at dandelions on the golf course. For Kyndra, being active was a tenet of family time, and her becoming an athlete was never much of a question.

“You can step up two or three feet,” her dad would tell her as she stood before the basketball hoop. “You don’t have to take the shot from where we take the shot.” But Kyndra didn’t want any concessions. She’d take the shot just like everybody else.

Though Kyndra’s days as a leading Loons analyst have since made way for her role with MLS Season Pass, her story proves both inspiring and relevant in the realm of club history, in celebration of Women’s History Month, and in the broader climate of female visibility in sports broadcasting.

She’s been a beat reporter in Milwaukee stadiums, a voice for the National Women’s Soccer League, and a commentator for multiple Women’s World Cups. In 2017, she stepped into an analyst role at Minnesota United FC, adding a milestone to the path of progress in women’s soccer. The national team’s formation in 1985 preceded its inaugural FIFA Women’s World Cup victory in 1991. Five years later, women’s soccer debuted as a sport at the Atlanta Summer Olympics. Following for the sport only grew, and in turn so did the presence of women in sports media roles. Kate Markgraf made history at ESPN as a color commentator for the UEFA European Football Championship in 2016, one year before Kyndra became the first full-time female analyst in Major League Soccer. But before she was providing color commentary on the game, she was playing it.

When Kyndra enrolled in college, she wasn’t thinking about a field of study. She was just thinking about being on the field. She loved the creative flow of the game, and though she’d played both basketball and soccer in high school, she found herself gravitating toward the latter.

After her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Kyndra transferred to the University of Minnesota. Her degree in broadcast journalism didn’t come in until she went to Chicago to visit her older brother, who was a producer for the nationally syndicated James Brown Show. He’d go to the All-Star Game, go to the World Series, spend his whole day talking about sports, and Kyndra felt a whole new path open up. That was what she wanted: to get paid for doing what she loved.

That’s not to say work isn’t hard. In the fast-paced industry of sports, there’s no off button, and Kyndra experienced this first-hand after graduating with a degree in broadcast journalism in 2003. She moved to Milwaukee, married Bobby de St. Aubin, and from there?

“I just hit the pavement,” she said. There were no cell phones. No home computers. She went to the library and looked things up on clunky public computers, made a résumé, checked out books about football to be in the know about the Green Bay Packers. She typed at a podiatry office five hours a day, three days a week, for cash while she searched and searched for a way into the sports world.

Her first full-time job in sports was covering the Wave, Milwaukee’s professional indoor men’s soccer team, for ESPN affiliate 1510 AM. So Kyndra’s sports career began in a double wide trailer in the parking lot of a Walmart, carpet on the walls and bees buzzing around outside. Craig Karmazin had just bought the station, and he had a vision.

That vision later expanded Kyndra’s beat to the Brewers and the Bucks. Eighty-one baseball games with a recorder and a microphone, driving back to the trailer and cutting tapes late at night. Sales calls at 8 a.m. SportsCenter updates. Covering games until 11:00 p.m., seven days a week, overlapping assignments, always on the go.

“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Kyndra said. “And it taught me a lot about hard work and just the grind of putting in the time and the hours and always sort of being on call.”

The role served as a strong foundation for the rest of Kyndra’s career, and she’s never forgotten it. When her position at Minnesota United was announced years later, Karmazin sent her a screenshot of her pay from her first year at the station. “I think it was like $6.50 an hour, and I was working like 100 hours a week,” she said. “I owe a lot of people a lot of credit for pushing me and getting me and trusting me to do the right thing and to do a good job.”

After four and a half years in Milwaukee, Kyndra and her family moved out to Arizona, where she traded the Brewers, Bucks, and Wave for the Cardinals, Coyotes, and Diamondbacks. She made her television debut on the Big 10 Network around the time of its inception as an analyst for women’s soccer. From there, she filled in for an analyst on a Women’s Professional Soccer game — a predecessor to the NWSL — and worked on the U17 and U20 Concacaf Champions Cups.

Kyndra slowly eased up on the radio work after having her daughter, Adelynne, in February 2014, focusing more on soccer and working for the Pac-12 Network when it came about. In late 2015, she and her family moved to Northern California for her husband’s work. It was that year that she was called to work the World Cup.

Walking into a massive room with a host of former national team players and FOX big names, she and play-by-play announcer Jenn Hildreth were the newbies, but they didn’t let that stop them. They spent the month primarily stationed in Vancouver, “working our tails off and sort of being underdogs, because nobody knew who we were. And we just kind of worked our butts off and ended up crushing it.” They crushed it so hard that they were kept on all the way to the semifinals.

“Every opportunity that you are given, you just have to crush it,” Kyndra said. “You don’t know who’s watching. You don’t know what’s going to come of it, you know, what’s going to be next. Your path is not linear.”

That non-linear path soon brought her back home. In Vancouver for the World Cup, Kyndra struck up a conversation with a man in a Minnesota Twins hat who turned out to be FOX media consultant and MNUFC minority owner Ben Grossman. His parents lived in Northern California, and they met up for coffee in the fall of 2016. She brought her daughter along to Starbucks, thinking it would be a casual conversation.

Instead, Grossman said Minnesota was getting a Major League Soccer team, and he thought she should be its analyst.

The club wanted someone who had grown up in Minnesota and understood the fabric and history of soccer in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Kyndra, who played soccer for the U of M, whose husband trained with the Minnesota Thunder, who knew Amos Magee and Buzz and Manny Lagos, who commentated the 2015 World Cup all the way to the semifinals, was a natural candidate. So she went home and told her husband, who said, “Yeah, you’ve got to do this.”

Kyndra joined Callum Williams in the booth for Minnesota United and stayed for seven years, moving on to MLS Season Pass at its 2023 inception. There, she’s found that Minnesota’s reputation as a hub for soccer community has grown.

“Every broadcast team wants to come to Allianz Field,” she said. “They want to experience the soccer culture in the state of Minnesota and in Saint Paul on those game days … I feel like it’s sort of underrated, but I feel at least now with an MLS team, people are seeing it for what we all knew it was.”

Kyndra travels for every MLS game she commentates, but on weekdays her flexibility allows her to be involved in her daughter’s life, going on field trips, volunteering, or popping in to share a meal. “I’m very, very blessed in that I get kind of the best of both worlds as a mom,” she said.

11-year-old Adelynne tagged along to a game in Charlotte, sat in the booth, went down on the field to see how the cameras operated. She went to the 2015 World Cup in Vancouver and joined Kyndra in LA when she was covering the 2019 Paris World Cup. She plays soccer but loves all sports, and she’s just like Kyndra when she was a kid, playing in the yard, at recess, in gym. Kyndra grew up with a generation of female role models — Michelle Akers, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly, Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain — and has gotten to see her daughter surrounded with another generation of girl power, not only in sports but across the board.

“My daughter has gotten to see and be surrounded by a lot of very incredible women in all sorts of industries,” Kyndra said. “Shari Ballard, for example. You talk about Minnesota United and all the women that work at that organization … and she doesn’t know any different, which I think is great because she can just fully soak it all in and you can still appreciate the history and how you got there.”

Kyndra remembers the intricacies of navigating a male-dominated environment as a young female reporter back in Milwaukee and even beyond. Going into a clubhouse, a locker room, a press conference, she was more than just a reporter. She was a young woman who didn’t always get the benefit of the doubt. She had to prove, over and over, that she knew what she was talking about and was there because she was a good reporter. There were other women in her industry at the time, but not nearly as many as there are now.

“The growth of it, just seeing it, I can’t tell you how proud it makes me,” she said, pointing to broadcasters Michele Tafoya and Doris Burke as inspirations. “It’s just leaps and bounds from where it used to be.”

Global statistics from UN Women speak to these leaps and bounds. Approximately 35 female commentators were hired by the Olympic Broadcasting Services for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, almost a 40 percent increase from 2020 and over 200 percent from 2016. Women’s sports media coverage tripled from 2019 to 2024. Women’s sports are rapidly expanding both in play and coverage, and will only continue to do so.

Burke’s mentality is that the best day will be the day when nobody thinks twice about a woman doing any given job, because it’s normal, second nature. Kyndra agrees, aiming to honor the history and path that the women before her have paved while continuing to hold space in the world of sports broadcasting because it’s where she belongs.

These days, she’s still always on the move, though the days of childhood ping pong and volleyball and water skiing look more like traveling for MLS broadcasts, picking her daughter up from school, or serving as emcee for a women’s leadership panel. Just as when she was a sports-crazy kid running around the backyard, there’s still no stopping Kyndra de St. Aubin. She’s a go-getter and a groundbreaker. She’s an analyst, a mom, and an all-around inspiration, a woman doing wonders for the sports world simply because she’s the best one for the job.