photo by: Sarah Buchanan/Special to the Journal-World

The Kansas soccer team celebrates its 4-1 win over Kansas State with the crowd at Rock Chalk Park on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025.

The Kansas soccer team may have entered this year’s NCAA Tournament selection show on a bit more of a down note compared to last season — it fell short of a Big 12 tournament title this time around — but the Jayhawks came out of Monday with a more favorable seed than last year and the promise of a home match at Rock Chalk Park.

KU is a No. 3 seed and will host Cal Baptist, an automatic qualifier out of the WAC, at 6 p.m. on Friday. It’ll be the first home tournament match for the Jayhawks since 2019, after they lost 1-0 on the road at Saint Louis in the first round last year in Nate Lie’s first season at the helm.

“We have the best fan base ever and I think just coming back from a weeklong travel trip, it’s especially nice to be home this week,” said Caroline Castans, KU’s all-conference junior wingback. “I’m just so excited because we didn’t get to have that last year, so it’s going to be a really fun experience.”

Lie said No. 3 is the highest seed he’s ever received. When all was said and done, the Jayhawks finished No. 7 in national RPI, having picked up some big wins in league play but also benefiting from their unbeaten nonconference slate, which featured a variety of eventual tournament teams.

“We’re battle-tested, we’ve played a lot of different styles, we’ve played teams that are probably game-planning against us, we’ve played teams that were confident that they’re better and tried to impose on us,” Lie said. “That broad array of experiences hopefully sets us up for what could potentially be to come.”

Cal Baptist didn’t take a straightforward path to postseason contention. The Lancers are only in their eighth season in Division I and have won the WAC tournament in consecutive years (they will soon move to the Big West). In order to do so this time around, they had to rally from down 2-0 in the final half-hour and then beat top-seeded Utah Valley — a team they had lost to twice during the regular season — in penalty kicks in the tournament final, with the clinching kick coming from their own goalkeeper, Mikayla O’Brien.

CBU is 12-8-2 on the year with a 6-3-1 record in WAC play. The Jayhawks beat that same Utah Valley team 3-2 in Lawrence on Aug. 21, and they also have a 1-0 win over South Dakota State, which Cal Baptist lost to by that same score.

Forward Ava Westlund has nine goals and five assists on the year, while Creighton transfer midfielder Anja Jestrovic has tallied seven goals and eight assists. O’Brien, with a goals against average mark of 1.31 on the season, was the WAC’s goalkeeper of the year. All three were first-team all-league selections, as was defender Summer Allen.

“I’m sure they’re going to be a great opponent,” Lie said, “and what I just told the team is whatever they’re doing from probably about this moment until kickoff at Rock Chalk is preparing to try to beat us … We have to expect that they’re going to know all of our tendencies and try to take away the things that we do most naturally, and that’s the fun thing about this time of year. There’s no tomorrow if you lose, so everyone puts everything they got into the preparation.”

The Jayhawks will hope to advance past last year’s finish and keep their season going. Lie said he wants to give fans a high-level performance at home, where KU hasn’t always delivered over the last two seasons.

“We have our work cut out for us,” he added, “but I have a lot of confidence in this group and we’ll just see how long we can keep playing.”

With a win for KU, a second-round matchup against the winner of No. 6 Louisville and Kentucky would follow, taking place at Duke if the Blue Devils also advance.

“We are all coming in together, and we just have to be there for each other and play our heart out, and that’s all we can focus on,” senior forward Lexi Watts said.