No Lie: KU soccer hopes to build on stellar debut season of former Xavier coach
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- Coach Nate Lie begins year two after KU’s first NCAA berth since 2019.
- Jayhawks return 78% of scoring and 15 players from 2024 roster.
- Three players earn preseason honors ahead of a challenging 2025 schedule.
After a highly-successful debut season in which first-year Kansas soccer coach Nate Lie led KU to its second Big 12 tournament title in school history and first NCAA tourney appearance since 2019, the Jayhawks begin a much-anticipated 2025 campaign Thursday night against Missouri State.
Game time for the season-opener for both teams is 7 p.m. at Rock Chalk Park with a live stream on ESPN+.
Great expectations await the Jayhawks, who enter the season ranked (No. 25) in the TopDrawerSoccer preseason poll for the first time since the 2020-21 season.
“We’ve coached some good teams (in seven years at his previous stop, Xavier) that did some good things and have had this predicament before,” Lie said of heightened expectations in a preseason chat with media members Monday.
His Jayhawks return 78% of the team’s scoring from a 13-6-4 team.
“We’re going to do our best to define that right mix, that right balance of, ‘Hey, let’s be proud of what we did. Let’s use that as confidence, motivation.’ We don’t have to run from that. We should be proud. That should allow us to expect to win games when we walk on the field. But there’s the flip side of what makes us different, special as a program,” Lie added. “What’s always going to define this program as long as I coach here is a level of commitment and selflessness that other teams aren’t willing to match, aren’t willing to buy in together. And if we don’t have that, we’re not going to find the success we want or we need.”
KU, which went on a magical run in winning four games and the Big 12 tourney title (in Kansas City) before dropping a 1-0 decision to Saint Louis in a first-round NCAA contest, returns 15 players from the ’24 roster, including seven starters. Four of those starters scored three or more goals last season.
Lexi Watts, a first-team all-league player a year ago, scored nine goals in KU’s final 16 matches. She finished with nine goals and three assists, one more goal than Jillian Gregorski (eight goals, two assists) and four more than Saige Wimes (five goals, seven assists). Caroline Castans had three goals, six assists.
Watts, a senior from St. James Academy; Wimes, a junior from St. Teresa’s Academy; and Castans, a junior out of Marcus High in Flower Mound, Texas, recently were named preseason all-conference. It’s the most preseason all-league selections KU has had in league history. The Jayhawks, however, were picked to finish fifth (of 11 squads) in the Big 12 coaches’ poll.
“There’s the new excitement of being back together, whether that’s returning and seeing familiar faces or the infusion of excitement from the new talent, the new personalities,” said Lie, in his second season at KU following a successful stint at Xavier where he led the team into four NCAA tourneys.
“We haven’t had many challenges quite yet. We haven’t had much adversity yet. That’s when you really see the test of character within an individual or a team, but that’s to come. It’s been a nice start thus far,” he added.
Lie said, “I hope so. I think so,” when asked if the narrow loss to Saint Louis in the NCAAs fueled the returning players in the offseason.
“That was eight, nine months ago and so it’s hard to keep that sort of motivation — those feelings that were very raw in that moment — fresh,” Lie stated.
“It’s partly our job as a coaching staff to figure out how to channel that feeling that we had, where we thought we left something on the table, where we thought we could have kept playing, and with that comes a sense of urgency and a sense of desperation, which is hard to hold for nine months leading into a season. And it’s really hard to hold (it for) three months during the season. That’s why only the best teams can be consistent and find ways to win week in and week out, find ways to win on Thursday and then do it on Sunday. And so we’ve been messaging it.”
He noted the Jayhawks “have some experience of players understanding what it takes to compete at a certain level. It’s their responsibility and job to try to pass that down to others. It’s certainly our responsibility as a coaching staff. I do think we came in ready for the most part, Our philosophy as a coaching staff is let the players have their summer, trust that they’ll use that summer to their advantage and to our advantage, and day one, they’ll show us instead of us micromanaging every step that way.
“And it was a good step, coming back largely fit. I think that’s a statement of intent. It allowed us to have a more advanced starting point than we had last year.”
KU plays a nonconference schedule that includes a match against Florida State, currently ranked fourth in the country in the TopDrawerSoccer poll. Game time will be 7 p.m., Aug. 28, at Rock Chalk Park.
Here’s KU’s schedule for the upcoming soccer season
August: 14-Missouri State, 7 p.m. 17-South Dakota State, 1 p.m. 21-Utah Valley, 7 p.m. 24-at Utah State, 2 p.m. 28-Florida State, 7 p.m. 31-Drake, 6 p.m.
September: 7-at Yale, 11 a.m. 14-at Liberty, 11 a.m. 18-at Oklahoma State, 7 p.m. 25-Baylor, 6 p.m. 28-TCU, 12 p.m.
October: 2-Kansas State, 6 p.m. 5-at Texas Tech, 1 p.m. 10-at Iowa State, 6 p.m. 16-West Virginia, 6 p.m. 19-Cincinnati, 1 p.m. 23-at BYU, 8 p.m. 26-at Utah, 2 p.m. 30-Colorado, 6 p.m.
November: 3-8-Big 12 tournament, Fort Worth, Texas
This story was originally published August 13, 2025 at 9:44 AM with the headline "No Lie: KU soccer hopes to build on stellar debut season of former Xavier coach."
