The Colorado Rapids always knew Darren Yapi was there. He just had to find himself.
With 11 goals and four assists since the start of the 2025 season, the 21-year-old forward has exceeded expectations. The club rewarded him on Tuesday with a contract extension, making him a U-22 Initiative player through the 2028-29 season, with a club option for the 2029-30 season.
During a young, early professional career that started in 2021 as a 16-year-old, there were doubts but no blaring alarms. Growing up, the Denver native scored goals at will at the youth and academy levels. Painstakingly, he waited three and a half years after signing to net his first with the Rapids’ first team.
It finally came in garbage time of a 4-1 win over St. Louis CITY in July of 2024, when he slotted it through Ben Lundtap legs from an angle for the final goal of the evening. You could see the weight lift off Yapi’s shoulders as he celebrated with a half-hearted knee slide and rolled onto his back. Motionless, he looked at the sky briefly before the dogpile of the team, subs and coaching staff smothered him.
Since then, he’s gotten better and better every year. He’s scored in knockout games, nearly hit double digits in 2025 and it culminated in an equalizing goal as a substitute against Lionel Messi in front of 75,000 at Empower Field a few weeks ago.
“I’ve been scoring goals since I came out of my mother, so to have that taken away from me for so long, I had to really find myself. In the process of me doing that, I lost myself a bit, lost my self-esteem,” Yapi told The Denver Post. “But now I’ve got it back and now I have this confidence from that experience from that stretch … During that time, I learned a lot about just trying not to panic and knowing that eventually the results are going to show up because of my hard work.”
In retrospect, he said, he’s grateful for that years-long goal drought because itap unlikely he’ll ever go that long without scoring again. If he goes goalless for a few straight games now, there are no alarm bells, just patience and trust. Plus, he’s got a number of other ways to impact a game — something he said he didn’t have earlier in his career.
Part of that is his versatility both positionally and tactically. He’s gradually gone from the top of the Rapids’ shape out wide. Originally, he almost exclusively played the center forward position alone in between opposition center-backs. Last season, during a tactical shift in former coach Chris Armas’s philosophy, he played in a front two on the left alongside Rafael Navarro.
This year, he’s all alone occupying the left wing position in a three-man midfield or attack in Matt Wells’s hyper-specific system. Yapi said he hasn’t had to make a monumental shift in how he plays, but more so that he’s still doing him, only in a different area of the field.
That means taking his strengths — speed, pressing, recovery and hold-up play — and being an excellent foil to Navarro, whom Yapi resembles more and more each season. Only this year, they’re feeding each other more than ever, rather than sharing the spoils created by teammates like they have in the past.
Yapi got out to a hot start with four goal contributions in his first five games this year before going three games without. Then he immediately scored as a sub against Miami, and has now gone four straight without a goal contribution before signing the extension.
All par for the course.
“These experiences are so important. When you’re young, obviously you want things to go well, but I’m kind of — this is gonna sound weird — happy that (goal drought) happened, because now I have the experience,” Yapi said. “When things aren’t going well or they are going well, I know how to react and I know how to change it in a heartbeat.”
Yapi is one of the last remaining Homegrown Rapids on the roster from a stellar generation that included Cole Bassett (now with the Portland Timbers), Oliver Larraz (Vancouver Whitecaps) and Sam Vines (Houston Dynamo). Yapi’s success and a pipeline of upcoming exciting youngsters at the academy and Rapids 2 levels are proof of development quality within the club.
“Darren truly embodies the pathway we believe in as a club, and we’re incredibly proud of the way he has progressed through our system,” Rapids president Pádraig Smith said in the club’s press release. “He has consistently shown his ability to impact games at the MLS level, and we believe he has the qualities to develop into a top attacker in this league and beyond. This new contract reflects both his performances and the standards he has set for himself, and we’re excited to see him continue to build on that here in Colorado.”
