photo by: Kansas Athletics

Kansas midfielder Caroline Castans lines up a kick against Duke on Sunday, Nov. 23, 2025, in Durham, N.C.

A memorable season for the Kansas soccer team fell short of history, as the third-seeded Jayhawks lost 2-0 at No. 2 seed Duke on Sunday afternoon at Koskinen Stadium.

In just the second season at the helm for head coach Nate Lie, KU had become the third team in school history to reach the Sweet 16, but the Jayhawks couldn’t quite knock off the Blue Devils to make it where the program never had before.

Instead, Duke’s Mia Minestrella put her team ahead shortly after halftime, and Kat Rader added an insurance goal immediately after the break on the rebound off her own penalty kick to set the final margin at 2-0.

“I just told the team after the match that every year tends to end in a little bit of sadness and pain,” Lie told reporters postgame. “I think this one is especially up there on the list. This is a great group of young women that represents our program and the university at the highest level in and out of the classroom. They brought this program such a far way. They’ve competed from day one all the way through 25 matches now, always fighting and battling, and I’m proud that we did that to the end.”

The Jayhawks couldn’t make anything of seven first-half corner kicks, including one that produced a threatening header by Emily Tobin, and were held to just three shots after halftime.

“I think we were fighting for the ball, I think we had confidence in ourselves,” midfielder Caroline Castans said. “We knew it was coming — unfortunately it didn’t end up coming, but we just kept having faith that it was about to be there.”

Senior Lexi Watts was the only KU player with two shots, including one of the Jayhawks’ two shots on goal, in her final match. Dawe made three saves, one of which was diving to her left to save Rader’s penalty before she had to watch the Duke forward tap it back in anyway.

Duke midfielder Devin Lynch had drawn the penalty when she beat defender Jordan Fjelstad to a ball in the box and then tumbled to the ground, seemingly tripped up by Fjelstad’s left foot. Rader’s ensuing goal came less than two minutes out of the halftime break.

Minestrella’s goal in the first half had featured a somewhat more elegant buildup. Avery Oder worked her way past Lydia Viets on the left wing and sent the ball into the middle. KU wasn’t able to clear it adequately, and Rader tracked it down and tapped the ball out to Minestrella. Her shot was fairly light, but an off-balance Sophie Dawe couldn’t track it down as it rolled into the back of the net for her fifth goal of the NCAA Tournament.

“When you play players of that caliber, your margin of error just kind of gets a lot, lot smaller,” Lie said. “Again, it wasn’t like they were peppering us, but every time they break through a certain layer they’re pretty dangerous.”

That all came shortly after Dawe had denied Oder on a breakaway, and Rader too not long afterward. Rader finished with five shots on the match, and Minestrella, Oder and Mia Oliaro had two apiece.

“They switch the ball a lot, they’re very composed, they like to take people one-on-one and then they just generate a lot of chances,” Watts said. “So I thought they did a really good job and I’m also proud of our team for handling that.”

The Jayhawks nearly changed the match in the final seconds of the first half with an equalizer. Castans got the ball back from Jocelyn Herrema off a throw-in and lofted a ball over the entire Duke defense to Kate Langfelder, but the sophomore midfielder’s one-touch left-footed attempt sailed high.

KU put two shots on goal in the final 15 minutes to force Caroline Dysart’s only two saves. One was a right-footed attempt from Castans that Dysart swallowed up. The other came on a long individual run by Watts, but it didn’t get high enough off the ground to challenge the keeper.

The season at large

The Jayhawks finished Lie’s sophomore campaign at 16-6-3 with the loss in the third round of the NCAA Tournament. KU didn’t claim a Big 12 tournament championship like it had in 2024 — the Jayhawks lost 1-0 to BYU in the title game this time — but it qualified for the postseason as an at-large No. 3 seed and beat Cal Baptist and Louisville before falling to the Blue Devils, advancing two rounds further than it did the previous season.

“If you would have told me a couple months ago that we would have made the Sweet 16, I would have been ecstatic for our team,” Watts said. “Obviously right now, we wanted to win, we wanted to make history, so it’s obviously a little bit sad, but just super proud of all the girls. Everyone has stepped up and everyone has had a role on this team, and I think that’s the best part.”

KU can return the vast majority of its roster for next season. The most notable players who went through senior-night festivities were Watts and Saige Wimes, the pair of stalwart forwards who have helped fuel the press that has become the Jayhawks’ signature under Lie.

“These have been the best couple years of my life and I’m thankful for this team,” Watts said. “I’m going to have these people by my side for the rest of my life, so just super grateful for all of them.”

KU is also expected to lose starting midfielder Emika Kawagishi, rotational midfielder Mackenzie Hammontree and reserve defender Emily Minard. But the rest of the Jayhawks’ lineup could remain intact, pending movement in the transfer portal and otherwise.

“We’d like to think that we’re not done growing,” Lie said. “Sometimes it shows up in the record books, sometimes it doesn’t, but I think this year’s team showed a lot of growth versus last year’s team … I think we still have room for improvement. We could have won this game, and maybe partly we were on the wrong side of a whistle that had a big impact, but despite that, we could have made more winning plays, and we’ll have to understand what it looks like to run through a tackle, what it looks like to manage a game. The more moments that we have like this, the better that we’ll handle them going forward.”