With Denver Summit FC, Rob Cohen is betting on Colorado falling in love with pro women’s sports

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A poster board behind Rob Cohen’s desk asks a simple question: Why do you want a pro women’s soccer team in Denver?

Dozens of little girls filled it with answers. 

Some trigger a laugh: “Girls rule, boys drool.” Others call for representation: “Women are soccer players too!” 

But in 13 words, one girl managed to sum up the cause Cohen has championed for nearly 30 years. “Denver has been a good sports city; let’s make it a great one!”

The CEO and chairman of IMA Financial Group founded the Denver Sports Commission, which has helped bring some of the largest sporting events in the country to the city. He’s also served on the boards of an alphabet soup of Denver-based nonprofits, largely focused on economic development or education. 

Now, along with running a 2,500-person company, he’s got a bit of a side gig.

In January 2025, Cohen and an ownership group of powerful investors and Colorado sports stars were awarded the National Women’s Soccer League’s 16th franchise. Before signing a single player contract, the group committed to spending more than $300 million in what Cohen claims is the largest investment in women’s sports to date.

If the team — named Denver Summit FC in July — is financially successful, Cohen stands to profit as the controlling owner. But even as women’s sports surge in popularity and teams reach record valuations, turning a profit is still a struggle. Cohen acknowledges that professional women’s soccer teams aren’t making money. 

But after a career in the insurance and financial services game, Cohen isn’t one to take a risk if he doesn’t believe in its payoff. And with the Summit, he said the payoff goes beyond dollars and cents.

“The more I thought about it, for me, this was as much about paying back a community that had made a huge difference in my life and my family’s life,” he said. “And I really believe that this is the moment for women’s sports.”

After decades of working outside the spotlight, the Summit has presented Cohen with the biggest opportunity — and challenge — he’s faced in his mission to make Denver a global destination for sports: Get the city to fall in love with his team.

A love story or two

Growing up in Wichita, Kansas, Cohen played a variety of youth sports, basketball being his favorite. As he got older, he recognized that sports can be a microcosm of life. There are highs and lows, wins and losses. Similar to art and music, it has the power to transport participants and fans alike to a world separate from day-to-day life.

“When people attend sporting events, their work, their family issues, whatever, tend to go away, and they focus on the gladiators in the ring,” Cohen said. 

He was hooked.

After graduating from the University of Texas with degrees in risk management and finance, he bounced around the country for nine years, working different jobs in the insurance field. When he stopped in Denver in the late 1980s, he moved in with three rabid Denver Broncos fans. 

He started attending games with his roommates in the south stands of the old Mile High Stadium and has rooted for the team ever since. Eventually, he headed back to Kansas to join IMA, his family’s insurance business. 

But his heart was still in Denver, and he was back within 14 months. He returned to open a Colorado branch of IMA, but more importantly, to see about a girl.

“The best decision I ever made was to come back and find out if that relationship was real, and we’ve now been married 35 years,” he said. 

Cohen and his wife, Molly, sank roots in the city with three sons and a daughter. In 2000, Cohen took over as CEO of IMA. While the employee-owned company has a presence across the country, its headquarters gradually moved to Denver from Kansas.

Raised by two civil rights activists, Cohen was taught the importance of community involvement at a young age. His mom would bring him and his sister to visit orphanages and encouraged them to share their Halloween candy with underprivileged kids. That sentiment followed him to the city. 

He’s served on the boards of 20 Colorado nonprofits, including as chair of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Denver Partnership and the board of trustees for Metropolitan State University of Denver. 

But one of his most tangible impacts on the city came through IMA. In the thick of the Great Recession, the effort to redevelop Union Station as the anchor to RTD’s FasTracks project was on the verge of collapse. State leaders had refused to direct money to the project, with more than $150 million in federal loans on the line.

“The federal government actually pulled the funding for Union Station because they didn’t believe any private development was going to occur,” he said.

Cohen used his own money to finance a new $30 million building for IMA on the north side of the station. It proved to be a crucial private-sector investment and helped secure the loan.

“His impact on Union Station was transformational,” said Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who at one point was CEO of a tenant in the IMA building. “You always have to have someone like Rob to make any of these projects work.”

The redevelopment has become a national model for transit-oriented development, and the IMA building itself has become prime real estate. The plaza shared by the two buildings now hosts a yearly ping-pong tournament IMA puts on for charity. Johnston is a frequent attendee.

“Sometimes you’re right, and sometimes you’re wrong in business, and that was one where we got it right,” Cohen said.

The sports czar

In July 2023, Madeline Leibin went to a World Cup watch party to see the U.S. women’s national team play Vietnam. She approached the organizers afterward and asked how she could help them bring professional women’s soccer to Denver.

The event was the result of a message sent by sports executive Tom Dunmore to former NWSL player Jordan Angeli on X. Dunmore wanted to bring an NWSL franchise to Denver. Angeli was in. The two, joined by insurance executive Ben Hubbard and venture capitalist Nicole Glaros, hatched For Denver FC. The watch party was their launch. Hundreds of people packed it.  

Leibin, a civil rights lawyer, became a community organizer. The NWSL was picking its 16th team based on four criteria: ownership group, market strength, commitments to building facilities like a stadium and the size of the expansion fee.

“Obviously, we couldn’t harness a stadium or an ownership group, but we put our sights on showing the league that Denver is a soccer city,” she said. 

Dozens got involved, and hundreds continued to show up to the group’s events. But in those early days, it was unclear if investors would step up.

“We were organizing these watch parties without any sense of what an ownership group would look like,” she said.

To actually pull the thing off, they’d need ownership with the necessary experience, connections and grit. 

Enter Rob Cohen. 

Fresh off back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 1998 and 1999, the Denver Broncos began construction of a $400 million replacement for Mile High Stadium, mostly funded by taxpayers.

At the same time, the Big 12 was on the hunt for a new city to host the conference’s football championship game. Cohen said the league sent a proposal to Denver asking the city to submit a bid. It went to the Broncos, who sent it to the mayor’s office, who sent it to the Chamber of Commerce, who sent it to Visit Denver. No bid was submitted.

“It seemed crazy to me that we would use taxpayer money to build a facility, then had a chance to have an economic return on that and not take advantage of that,” Cohen said.

So he did something about it.

Cohen recruited top leadership from the city’s sports teams and universities to form the Denver Sports Commission. Since its 2001 founding, it’s attracted March Madness, the Frozen Four, the NBA All-Star Game, the MLB All-Star Game and the NHL Stadium Series, to name a few. 

Fans of Colorado and Colorado State football can thank the commission for 16 years of turning Mile High into a battlefield for the Rocky Mountain Showdown. The game reverted to alternating between the schools’ stadiums in 2019, which Cohen thinks was a mistake. 

As the chair, he was never paid for any of the sports commission’s work. Cohen said he did it for that feeling that had first gotten him to fall in love with sport.

“For me,” he said, “the joy of putting on an event like the Rocky Mountain Showdown is — I would just sit in there and go, ‘Look, there’s 70,000 people here that are having fun.’” 

Lessons in failure

Along with the memorabilia from events hosted by the sports commission, several posters hang in Cohen’s office. They advertise the 1976 Denver Olympics that never happened. 

After being awarded the Winter Games in 1970, cost overruns and environmental concerns led Colorado voters to pass a constitutional amendment in 1972 barring state tax dollars from being used for the Games. The International Olympic Committee promptly replaced Denver with Innsbruck, Austria. 

Cohen sees the Olympics as the Holy Grail of sporting events. He’s attended 16 of them and, unsurprisingly, served on the boards of the U.S. Olympic Museum and U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation. So four decades after Denver’s Olympic fiasco, Cohen accepted the uphill challenge of getting the city a second chance. 

He led an exploratory committee that sought the U.S. Olympic Committee’s support for a bid to host the 2030 Games. It envisioned a privately funded Olympics that would incorporate venues in Utah, which hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics, to avoid building niche venues that would sit empty after the Games. Cohen’s dream evaporated in 2018, when Salt Lake City beat out Denver for the country’s bid.

“Anytime you put your heart and soul into any project … when it doesn’t go the way you thought it was going to go, or you don’t win on the field of play, yeah, it hurts,” he said.

Cohen is still disappointed that he never got to bring the plan to the public. But it didn’t keep him down for long.

“Back to my love of sports, that’s what you learn from sport. You learn how to lose, learn from it and pick yourself up,” he said. “That experience, hopefully, will make me a better owner.”

About four years later, Cohen was ready for his next grand crusade. This time, he wasn’t after a major sporting event; he was after a team. Cohen led a group of investors seeking a Women’s National Basketball Association, or WNBA, expansion franchise for Denver. The bid process got as far as a site visit from the league commissioner. Then he discovered For Denver FC.

“For Denver”

The efforts of Leiban and For Denver FC had not gone unnoticed. 

“It’s almost hard to pinpoint when they first got on our radar, because I feel like it was a steady groundswell of momentum,” NWSL COO Sarah Jones Simmer said.

Still leading the WNBA bid, Cohen took note and began conversations with For Denver FC’s founders. He also checked out a meeting. 

“I just wanted to go observe, so I just showed up, you know, in shorts and a baseball cap, and I was blown away,” he said.

The passion and vision of the group ignited a spark in him. He began looking into the business side of things and comparing the two leagues’ viability in the Denver market.

“To make a long story short, it didn’t take me long to kind of shift my focus from the WNBA,” he said. “I just felt like at this time, at this moment, in this place, this was a better option.”

Once he was in, things started moving quickly. The selection process stretched throughout 2024, with 19 cities ultimately submitting bids. The league cut it field to six, then to three: Cleveland, Cincinnati and Denver.

Jones Simmer was part of the committee evaluating the bids. She said they graded the ownership, market, infrastructure and franchise fee very intentionally in that order.

For ownership, Cohen had assembled a group with deep pockets and deeper connections. The team’s alternate governor, Mellody Hobson, is co-CEO and president of Ariel Investments. As part of the Broncos Walton-Penner ownership group, Hobson is among just a handful of Black owners in the NFL. Others included Hubbard and several Colorado sports insiders. In 2025, Peyton Manning and Mikaela Shiffrin rounded out the group. 

Looking for controlling owners, the league wanted someone who understood the market they were building and recognized the challenge. It also wanted someone with deep relationships in the community.

Cohen’s work with the sports commission convinced them that he understood what it would take to make a successful franchise in Denver. It also showed his character. 

“There are some sports owners who do it for their own personal glory. It’s like a trophy that they can add to their portfolio because they want to own a sports club,” Jones Simmer said. “That is not who Rob is. He is doing this for Denver.”

Infrastructure-wise, the team had committed to building a dedicated stadium and practice facility. It would also agree to pay a $110 million franchise fee. 

The efforts of For Denver FC had elevated what had already proven to be an incredibly strong market for women’s sports. Stadiums consistently sell out when the U.S. women’s national team plays in Colorado.

To silence any last-minute doubts, the group enlisted an army of its smallest soldiers. Hundreds, if not thousands, of young girls wrote letters in support of the team, delivering them to the mayor and league officials during a Denver visit. 

“It was like a mail crate full of them, and they made a point of handing it to the commissioner, and it was heavy,” Jones Simmer said. “Those little details matter a lot to us. It shows us that the fans are ready.”

On Jan. 30, 2025, in front of a crowd of hundreds, NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman awarded the NWSL’s 16th franchise to the Mile High City. Cohen had his team. 

“I’d say everything in my life in the sporting world led to the moment where we won this franchise,” Cohen said.

408 days

Denver’s team would debut in the 2026 season. That gave the ownership group less than 14 months to build a professional sports franchise from the ground up.

Step one: Hire a president. They picked Jen Millet, a proud graduate of Cherry Creek High School. Millet was the chief marketing officer of the Golden State Warriors before helping found Bay FC as the club’s COO. 

After a fan vote, the team settled on the name Denver Summit FC. By August, they had a head coach, Nick Cushing, and a general manager, Curt Johnson. 

Johnson’s hiring brought criticism from some fans. The North Carolina Courage won two NWSL titles while he was GM, but his tenure overlapped with that of coach Paul Riley. Riley was fired by Johnson after an investigation by The Athletic documented a decade of sexual misconduct by the coach.

“Player safety, an inclusive, welcoming environment and a championship mentality are all core facets of the club we want to build. We believe Curt shares these same values,” Cohen told The Athletic after Johnson’s hiring.

The team’s roster has slowly taken shape one player at a time, currently at 23, with five Coloradans. In January, they signed one of the biggest names in soccer. Raised in Golden, U.S. women’s national team captain Lindsey Horan Heaps will join the team in July. 

In 2028, the team expects to walk onto the field of the country’s second stadium dedicated to women’s sports. Ownership plans to spend $150 million to $200 million building the venue at Santa Fe Yards, a long vacant parcel of land bound by Interstate 25 and Santa Fe Drive. After a contentious process, Denver agreed to spend $70 million on the project.

Jones Simmer was at the stadium’s announcement. She saw the impact the team had already started to make on the city.

“There were 300 girls just screaming their heads off in enthusiasm for what was going to be happening in their backyard,” she said.

In November, the team announced it had sold all 8,500 of its 2026 season tickets. For Denver FC transformed into a nonprofit supporters’ group named the 14ers. In a nod to its hard work, the section behind the goal at Santa Fe Yards will be for supporters’ groups and named Section 114. 

Denver Summit FC plays its inaugural match against Bay FC in Santa Clara, California, on March 14. After two more road games, the team will make its Colorado debut at Empower Field at Mile High on March 28. It’s set to break the NWSL’s single-game attendance record, with 45,000 tickets sold so far. The team will then play two games at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park before moving to a temporary stadium in Centennial. 

The team has been practicing since January and won both its games during the preseason. Millet said none of it would have taken shape without her boss, who, while still the CEO of IMA, rolls up his sleeves every day alongside her. 

“I think what fuels us, what keeps us going on the late nights, early mornings and all weekend long is the support seen from fans and the larger Denver community that believes in this,” she said in an October media conference. 

For Cohen, proof of that community support isn’t hard to find. All he has to do is look behind his desk.

“I read one or two of the sentences, and then it just fires me up,” he said. “Like, OK, all this hard work is worth it.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.