Kansas guard Jayden Dawson (1) addresses the crowd during the senior speeches following the Jayhawks’ 104-85 win over the Wildcats on Saturday, March 7, 2026 at Allen Fieldhouse. Photo by Nick Krug

Like so many young players, Jayden Dawson became more of a focal point each successive year he played for Eric Behrens at Omaha Central High School.

He could always shoot it, and he always had the right attitude — humble, quiet, still easygoing and friendly, as Behrens described him. It was the rest of his game that needed work, and Dawson was willing to put it in.

“He was pretty slender early on,” Behrens recalled, “so I think for him a big thing was just adding physical strength and getting in the weight room with some consistency, and just becoming a little more dynamic in terms of being able to take contact and finish at the rim.”

By the end of his high school career with the Eagles he was first-team all-state and headed to play Division I basketball at Loyola-Chicago. There, once again, he seemed to find himself a “bigger piece of the puzzle” each successive year, as Behrens, watching from afar, put it. Fourteen appearances off the bench before an injury as a freshman, 15 starts in 26 games with a couple big performances off the bench as a sophomore and then the junior year that made him a hot commodity in the transfer portal: 13.9 points on 36.3% shooting beyond the arc and 3.1 rebounds per game as the top scorer for a team that reached the NIT semifinals.

To help get the Ramblers there, Dawson went off for 35 points on 27 shots, including the go-ahead layup with 56 seconds left, in a postseason victory over San Francisco — the best performance of his college career.

Glimpses of that version of Dawson have been fleeting during this, his final season.

The senior guard, recruited directly by head coach Bill Self, signed on to join the Jayhawks in April at a time when they had barely anyone with returning collegiate experience on their projected 2025-26 roster. But the team — and Dawson’s early results — shook out in such a way that Dawson has often found himself on the outside of the rotation looking in. He’s played in 24 games, but averaged just 6.7 minutes in his 12 appearances in conference play.

And yet there was Self on Dawson’s senior day on March 7, after what will surely be his only start as a Jayhawk, making a promise to the crowd: “He’s going to win a game for us moving forward, I guarantee it.”

Dawson didn’t play KU’s next time out against TCU in the Big 12 tournament. But after the Jayhawks emerged with a narrow victory, he told the Journal-World in the locker room postgame how motivational Self’s remarks had been for him.

“He’s been telling me things like that throughout this whole season,” Dawson said, “just trying to lift me and keep my confidence going and things like that, but it definitely just makes me (have) a lot more confidence, and it was definitely huge to hear it.”

The 6-foot-5 guard’s most significant playing time of the year came in a three-game stretch in November, during an early period in which star freshman Darryn Peterson was out due to a hamstring injury. Dawson played at least 20 minutes and made two shots in each of those three games, against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Princeton and Duke. He had positioned himself as the first guard off the bench and was even beginning to garner more minutes than freshman Kohl Rosario, who was still in the starting lineup at the time.

Dawson has neither received 20 minutes of playing time nor made more than one shot in any single game since. With Peterson still out for the Players Era tournament in Las Vegas that immediately followed the Duke game, Dawson hurt his wrist dunking in warmups prior to KU’s first of three games, against Notre Dame. He played four minutes against the Irish and had to exit, and didn’t appear in either of the next two games. In the meantime, two returning Jayhawks surged forward: Jamari McDowell did well enough to earn his first-ever starts and Elmarko Jackson played one of the best games of his career in a comeback win over Tennessee.

So Dawson slid down the rotation, after so much of his high school and college careers had been characterized by steadily increasing roles.

Only in two games against Kansas State did he play more than seven minutes in regular-season Big 12 action, but he’s given his team a boost on occasion. For example, his 3-pointer late in the first half against Baylor on Jan. 16 put KU back in front when it had surrendered its lead, and Self declared it the biggest shot of the game.

But Dawson admits that it has been difficult adapting to playing in short bursts.

“But like I said, that’s what we prepare multiple days before the game for,” he said. “We go over scouts and we know the personnel down to a T. If the walk-ons got to go in, they’ll know the personnel and they’ll know the scouting report. And we all have to be ready whether we play or whether we don’t play.”

However challenging it may have been, both Dawson and his coach feel like he may have turned a corner of late. Self explained his senior-day remark in a postgame press conference and noted he had told Dawson the same thing personally — that he’ll win the Jayhawks a game — during the prior week.

“I think I see something that’s happening better,” Self said. “He hasn’t shot the ball in practice close to like he’s capable of, but I feel like the last week he’s kind of starting to, maybe just the last two days he’s starting to, because he’s a good shooter … I also think he’s a good position defender, too. So he’s going to help us win a game.”

Dawson said he’s felt a change over the past several weeks of what he described in his senior speech as “the quickest year of my life.”

“Just being here now for seven, eight months coming towards the end of the season, you would hope that you’d have this type of confidence going towards the end of the season, especially being a senior,” he said. “But yeah, I’d definitely say I’ve been knocking down more shots and just playing with a little more confidence than I was at the beginning of the season.”

Whether he will have what it takes to do so in a pivotal moment down the stretch ultimately depends on his ability to stay ready.

“You never know when your opportunity’s going to come,” Behrens told the Journal-World. “It’s always a next man up. You’re one injury away, you’re a couple guys in foul trouble away from all of a sudden being more (of a) focal point in the rotation or whatever.”

Behrens, who will soon return to Omaha Central to serve as its principal, is as eager as anyone for the former Eagle to soar: “Like Coach Self said, I hope he can do something in a crucial moment of a big game to help the team get a win. I think that’d be great for him.”

It’s been a frustrating season, by Dawson’s own admission, and not the one he expected. But whatever happens, he still considers playing at KU “a life-changing opportunity.”

“And I wouldn’t change anything, any decision I’ve made, to come here,” he added. “This is the best decision I’ve made, and the relationships I’ve built with my brothers, this will last a lifetime. Like I said, I’ll forever be grateful for this opportunity.”