Sarah Hepola: How Dallas shaped US World Cup player Weston McKennie
DALLAS - As a boy, Weston McKennie had a habit of kicking a ball - any ball, but for the purposes of this story, let's say a tennis ball - down the aisle of a Walmart while his mom shopped. He was a rambunctious child, the word "hyper" often gets slung around, one more American boy with boundless energy and no place to put it.
The balls kept him occupied; his parents rarely left home without one. Sometimes he juggled, sometimes he kicked the ball against a curb, over and over, but on shopping excursions in North Texas with his mother, Tina, as she stood contemplating a wall of cereal boxes or frozen fish sticks, there was her boy forging down the aisle dodging incoming carts as he kept the ball in play, honing his footwork between the Raisin Bran and the Wheaties.
As the FIFA World Cup kicked off this Thursday, with nine matches in the Dallas area, 27-year-old Weston McKennie will be kicking and dodging for the U.S. team, a rare chance for the soccer star to compete on American soil, since he spends most of the year in Italy on the celebrated Juventus FC. McKennie is a midfielder known for versatility, a Swiss Army knife of a player, with a boyhood love of Harry Potter so deep that he waves an invisible magic wand as a post-goal celebration. He has a lightning bolt tattooed on one finger, and on his arm, a tattoo of the skyline of Dallas, the sprawling metropolis where he came into his own superpower.
"What's funny is that I was born in Washington, but when people ask where I'm from, I always say Dallas. I claim Dallas," McKennie said. "I guess because the majority of my formative years were there, and my best friends were there, and my family's still there, so it's home."
The Landon Donovan inspiration
That a boy from Texas - land of football, and not the European kind - would play soccer at all speaks to the unusual circumstances of McKennie's childhood. Born in the Tacoma area, he was about 6 when the family moved to a village in southwest Germany, where his father was stationed in the Army. He and his older brother John were old-fashioned American kids obsessed with football and basketball, but the German students at the elementary school across the street from their home played one game: soccer.
"Weston was super competitive," said John McKennie Jr., 35, a part-time real estate agent in Forney who also works as a fireman in Grand Prairie. "He was of the mindset, if I'm gonna be out there, I want to win."
Call it the competitive fire of the youngest child, call it the first flickering of a major talent. It wasn't long before Weston could best older kids on the field, and a coach named David Mueller took notice, mentoring the young upstart.
One day in 2006, when Weston was 7, his mom took him out of school - a surprise, she told him - and the pair drove to nearby Ramstein Air Base, where the U.S. men's national team were making an appearance ahead of the World Cup. Little Weston had his black and silver cleats and a yellow soccer ball, and he and his mom stood in a long line until the moment he handed his cleats to soccer star Landon Donovan, who signed them.
On the drive home, he told his mom, "I wanna play for the national team one day."
She said, "Keep playing the way you're playing, and you will."
'That German kid'
When Weston was around 10, his family left Germany and moved to North Texas. They landed in Frisco, then Little Elm.
"I was a bit devastated at first," McKennie said. He had friends in Germany, but also, he'd fallen in love with a sport so common people played it on street corners. That wasn't the case in Texas, which might have been part of the reason he was kicking a tennis ball down the aisle of Walmart instead of playing outside with neighbors.
Texas required other adjustments. In Germany, kids could roam free in a village considered safe and remote, but now the family lived in America, country of color-coded terrorism alerts and stranger danger. A boy couldn't just venture out on his bike, at least not in 2009. He also started playing American football again, and he was so good that a choice had to be made. To excel in any sport would mean giving it your all, but you can't give your all, twice. As the story goes, he proclaimed that he liked soccer 99.9% and football 99.8%. The verdict was in.
He joined a youth rec team, where he blasted past other kids. "They used to think he was German," said his mother Tina, 59. They called him "that German kid." As in, wow, that German kid is incredible. Eventually, Weston made his way to FC Dallas Academy, where he proved such a standout that a future in professional soccer no longer sounded like a pipe dream.
In many ways, he was a typical teenager, a decent student who played Grand Theft Auto in his downtime and rode his Heelys around Stonebriar Mall, but he was also serious about sports. Between tournaments and practices, his schedule got so busy he had to finish high school online.
'The Texas boy'
In 2016, a watershed moment came when McKennie was 17, and he got offered a homegrown scholarship with FC Dallas as well as a full scholarship to the University of Virginia, a plum situation for any young athlete. But then German-based FC Schalke slid in with a different offer: Go pro in Europe.
His father, John McKennie Sr., wanted him to take the UVA scholarship. "You got a full ride for college!" John remembers telling his son. Now retired from the military and divorced from Weston's mom, the 57-year-old lives in Carrollton. The decision about where Weston would play after high school caused tension, because Weston wanted to go to Germany, and his father could not persuade him otherwise. "I was angry at first," said John, "but eventually I said, it's his choice, it's his future. Then I just became a supporter." Years later, Weston told his dad he went to Germany with no plan B. That was his motivation. Success was the only option.
It worked. In 2020, Juventus recruited McKennie, who became the first American to join the storied Serie A team. That's the same year he won U.S. Soccer Male Player of the Year. He became known as "the Texas boy," proving to European skeptics that, yes, Americans can play football, even if we insist on calling it soccer.
"He's carried the identity of Texas with him," said his brother John Jr. "He's fast and strong and larger than life."
Weston is famous enough in Italy that being in public can be tough. Selfies, autographs, the fame trap. He's not a household name in North Texas - though for years, there was a mural of his face in Oak Cliff - but the World Cup will undoubtedly raise his profile. He recently filmed a Purina commercial with his dogs, Lola and Sky.
"The beautiful thing about having dogs is that they see you for who you are," McKennie said in a voiceover as we watch him running up and down bleachers in darkness, sweat beading his face, only to find two gorgeous dogs at the top, one Akita and one Husky. The message of the commercial, as we watch McKennie plunging into an ice bath and jogging on the field, is that sports can be bruising, but the wise player stays grounded.
'People call me extra'
Family is another way McKennie stays grounded. Although he's in Italy most of the year, he comes home to visit on occasion, though more frequently the family comes to him, or they take group vacations. Lately McKennie's been obsessed with golf, which he plays with John Jr.
"I hate to admit this," his brother said, "but he's already better than I am, and I've been playing longer."
Age and success have not quieted Weston's competitive spirit.
"Don't play Uno with him," said his sister, Tanisha Powell, 40, who's only kidding, since she plays Uno with him a lot. "If you lose, he makes you do the most outrageous things. Like, swallow a teaspoon of paprika."
Whether this derives from the need to win or a desire to seek revenge as a younger sibling is an open question.
"People call me extra," Weston said. Back in his youth soccer days, there was a running joke among the boys, "What is Weston McKennie's favorite gum? Extra."
He's getting the last laugh. Earlier this year, McKennie signed a contract to play with Juventus until 2030, with a reported salary increase from $3 million to $4.7 million per season.
When the World Cup kicks off, the U.S. men's team will face Paraguay in Los Angeles on Friday. The opening round also finds them squaring off with Australia and Turkey. Hopefully they keep advancing to take the field against top seeds like France and Spain.
"In soccer, you always feel like you have to prove yourself," McKennie said, "and we know that in some games, we're going to be the underdogs. But we see that as a challenge. To prove people wrong and prove to ourselves what kind of team we are."
For McKennie, this is also the completion of the dream he had as a young boy, when he met those giants playing for the U.S. men's national team. He did compete in the 2022 World Cup as well, when he started all four matches in Qatar before the U.S. was knocked out, but this June gives him a chance to flex his footwork on American soil in what is undoubtedly the biggest sporting event in the world.
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This story was originally published June 11, 2026 at 4:39 AM.