Mary Shepro first fell truly in love with soccer in the streets of Qatar.
Before she became president of business operations for the Columbus Crew and, as of Sept. 21, the same title for Columbus' new women's team, the former Chicagoland attorney was helping Qatar prepare for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. On one of her trips, she witnessed the entire country burst with joy minutes after its 2019 AFC Asian Cup win.
Shepro's passion for soccer was born out of the passion she saw that day. Crowds took to the streets with flags and danced in gridlocked traffic during her four hour, 12-mile drive from the airport to her hotel, she told The Dispatch.
"It was unlike anything I had ever seen," Shepro recalled.
Now, Shepro is being entrusted to lead not just
one, but two Columbus soccer teams. Earlier this year, the city landed the 18th National Women's Soccer League team at a time when the world's most popular sport is gaining more momentum than ever in the United States. The team will debut in 2028.
"We are committed to providing Columbus NWSL 2028 and our supporters every resource to set a standard for success that every women’s sports team and fan base deserves, and Mary has proven she’s the right person to make that vision come to life," Whitney Haslam Johnson of the Haslam Sports Group, majority co-owners of the Crew, the Cleveland Browns and the new NWSL team said of Shepro in a press release.
From banking law to sports
While her love for soccer was born in adulthood, Shepro loved sports from a young age. She was a swimmer, played hockey and club rugby for years, all of which nurtured an intensely competitive spirit that would drive her successful law career.
Still, sports law was never "on my radar," she said. Shepro studied political science at Columbia University in New York during the 2008 financial crisis. She wanted to know more about how the economy worked, and why this crisis was not just national, but global. She continued her education at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she earned a masters degree in global politics before earning her law degree at Notre Dame Law School.
In 2014, Shepro started working for Jones-Day in Chicago before, "on a whim," accepting a job offer at DLA Piper, a sports-focused law firm, in the Windy City in 2018. There, she worked with myriad professional sports teams and franchises. Shepro told The Dispatch there must have been a moment that locked her love of sports litigation into place, but what she remembers most is that work no longer felt like work.
"I didn't ever have that feeling of wanting to slam the laptop shut, but instead it was, 'what more can I learn about what we're doing?'" Shepro explained.
Her international experience was soon put to good use. DLA Piper had an ongoing relationship with Qatar's government starting in 2013 to independently investigate human rights abuses against laborers building infrastructure for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. In 2019, Shepro was part of a team working on Qatar's behalf after FIFA named it the site of 2022 World Cup, which included issues related to stadiums, broadcasting and transportation, as well as international arbitration before the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and proceedings before the United Nations.
"So much of what global soccer is, is global politics, economics and sports – it's really a convergence," Shepro said. "It's the world's sport, and everything about it touches parts of the community, of the economy, so I found that fascinating."
Shepro's experience in Qatar was what ultimately encouraged her to make Columbus home. She had worked closely with the Chicago Bears during her career, which is how she got introduced to the Haslam Sports Group. In 2022, the Haslams hired Shepro to be the vice president and general counsel for the Columbus Crew, as well as assistant counsel for the Haslam Sports Group.
In 2025, she was promoted to president of business operations for the Crew, where she oversees, "fan engagement and marketing, community impact; matchday experience and facility management, ticket sales and services, corporate partnerships and revenue generation and organizational administration."
Now, she'll do the same for women's team.
Women leading women and where they're taking Columbus
When Columbus was picked to be the next city with an NWSL team in April, Shepro said she received a letter from a young female soccer fan who had grown up watching the Crew. The young fan played soccer herself, and asked her parents why there wasn't a women's team in Columbus.
The young fan thanked Shepro and the organization for bringing such a team to Columbus, Shepro, who still has the letter, recalled. She said it reaffirmed to her the importance of helping grow women's professional soccer and making it larger part of the professional sports ecosystem, especially as a woman in sports business.
"I'm a big believer in we need a diverse team that compliments each other. We don't need to all be the same player," Shepro told The Dispatch. "It's incredibly important to have more women in leadership positions [in sports], and I think it's a special thing for a professional women's soccer team to be able to have a female president."
Columbus isn't the first city to have a single person oversee both a men's and women's professional soccer team in one city. Some critics have questioned if team owners believe their women's teams are important enough to have their own president.
Shepro pushed back on such comments. While there will be shared leadership, Shepro said they're working hard to double their workforce to ensure that their new women's team has just as much support as the Crew.
But leading the men's and women's teams isn't going to be an apples-to-apples endeavor. Shepro noted that at the new training facility set to be built at McCoy Park, they'll be implementing different amenities specific to female health and wellness, while meeting the same standard as state-of-the-art men's training facilities. The organization has already started to build on existing health and family resources at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field, she said.
The fan bases also look different, she said. NWSL fans skew younger and more female, so community outreach and fan engagement will be unique to that base. Shepro noted that the franchise created a council of community members to help inform the organization and shape the values and goals of the new team.
"There's going to be so much emotion around our first season and our first game, and we get to have all these firsts as an expansion team. So for our city and community to be able to experience all these firsts with us, I think it hopefully will drive a new passion for the sport and especially for the women's game here," Shepro told The Dispatch.
What we know about the NWSL Columbus team
The new NWSL team will play at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field like the Crew, though they'll be on different calendars. The women's team will stay on the American calendar (late winter through late fall) while the Crew recently announced a switch to the European calendar (late summer through late spring).
A team name, colors and other brand decisions have yet to be announced, but the Columbus NWSL franchise started seeking fan input in June. Shepro said they've received "hundreds of fantastic ideas" and that the franchise is excited to share team's brand "in the coming months."
The new team will play its first game in 2028, which Shepro is manifesting to be a sold-out match.
"At the end of the day, what makes these athletes professional is the fact that people watch and support them," Shepro said. "We wanna make sure that that same incredible support that we see for the Crew is there for our women's team as well, so we just [ask] that the community continue to show up and support NWSL like they have so far and they have with the Crew."
Business and consumer issues reporter Samantha Hendrickson can be reached at shendrickson@dispatch.com
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: From Qatar to Columbus, new women's soccer president brings a passion for the game
