The Iowa soccer team will name the locker room of its new operations facility — slated to open before the 2021-22 fall season — after Kim Olsen White, a Hawkeye alumnus who died from complications of cancer in 2020.

White played on the Hawkeyes from 2008-09 — she received limited playing time, but teammates regarded her as energetic on the sidelines. In 2014, White was diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer, with a life expectancy of two or three months. She died in February 2020 after numerous surgeries and chemotherapy sessions.

White documented her experiences battling cancer on her Instagram account, @kimcankickit, which has over 100,000 followers. In September, Iowa soccer’s locker room will be officially named the Kim Olsen White Locker Room.

“She was just always there for you,” Sarah Kinman, a teammate of White at Iowa, said. “She just had this maturity and perspective that we’ll get through all these little problems, and at the same time she was a super competitive person and I think that probably showed up in her fighting cancer later in life.”

In the summer of 2020, Kinman and White’s former teammates — including Kelsey Shaw — talked to current Iowa soccer head coach Dave DiIanni and Iowa Athletics Executive Director of Development John Dwyer about dedicating the new locker room to White.

DiIanni had never met White, as he started his tenure as Iowa’s head coach in 2014, but he followed White’s story through her Instagram page and realized how she has a great representative of the program.

Shaw said White arrived at Iowa from Iowa Western Community College with a severe knee injury – but she took it as a challenge.

“She was not happy being in that position,” Shaw said. “She didn’t feel like she was coming back as strong as a player. She felt like she wasn’t as fast.”

Shaw added that White, who stressed the importance of being outdoors while fighting cancer, would kick a soccer ball around for ten minutes even though she was exhausted by the end.

When White’s cancer metastasized into her lungs, it made it so sometimes she could not breathe, Shaw said, so she would take a deep breath every night and send her energy to White.

 

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The University of Iowa Center for Advancement is crowdfunding through its GoldRush website for the Kim Olsen White Locker Room, with the goal of reaching $150,000 by Aug. 27. The funding currently sits at around $55,000.

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“It’s just a great culmination of her teammates efforts to help raise awareness,” Dwyer said.  “There was four of them that came together and said, ‘We’ll make this a priority, we’re going to reach out to our classmates. We’re also going to give to this project and make sure that we can spread the word and it closes out successfully.’”

With White’s name on the locker room, she’ll be someone current and future Hawkeye soccer players will always know.

“It’s going to be a reminder every day that no matter what’s going on in our lives, no matter the challenges that we face or the successes that we accomplish, we need to keep it in perspective,” DiIanni said. “Because it can always be more difficult. You can always celebrate the small victories and it will help unify us as a program to rally around such a fantastic human being and what she stood for.”