A Day with Dawe

In her 58 games as the starting goalkeeper for Kansas, senior Sophie Dawe has had plenty of days when the action barely came her way. 

A couple of shots. Maybe a key clearance or two. A few goal kicks. And it’s on to the next one. 

Things have usually gone well in the win-loss column when that type of workload has happened. And it’s a credit to both the KU attack and the defense in front of Dawe. 

But if you’ve ever watched a KU women’s soccer game and seen Dawe standing all alone while thinking to yourself, ‘that must be terribly boring,’ not to worry. 

No matter what happens on game day, Dawe gets an insane amount of training and activity during KU’s rugged practices. 

Last week, R1S1 Sports went up to the soccer fields behind Allen Fieldhouse to watch Dawe work at one of Nate Lie’s practices. And what we saw was constant action, extreme effort and peak athleticism on full display. 

Join us, as we take you inside ‘A Day with Dawe.’

The day began plainly enough, with Dawe being in one of the last groups to show up to practice. 

She carried the look of an elementary school soccer player, who was simply excited for a day of fun with her friends, and she maintained that through the early portion of the warm-up. 

She played hacky-sack with a few teammates, smiled and chattered during running light sprints and stretches to get loose and, as one of three team captains, was always in the first line to go. 

All the while, Lie, who was doing some warming up of his own with long kicks with his assistant coaches, kept smiling knowing what awaited his star goalkeeper. 

“You have to be a special kind of crazy to do what she does,” Lie said. “You get your butt kicked over and over and we really put ‘em through the ringer every day.” 

That part did not begin until Dawe broke away from the rest of the team and went to the far end of the field with freshman Brooklyn Smith and sophomore Clara Roche for goalkeeper drills. 

But Dawe did not mind the classification from her head coach. 

“Haha. I like to think I have a different demeanor, on and off the field,” she said. “You’ve kind of gotta be a little bit different to do this. Like, not a lot of people want to throw their face in front of a ball every day.” 

That was no exaggeration. 

For the better part of the next 40-50 minutes, Dawe did just that, rotating with the freshman Smith in net while assistant coach Tiffany Hansen and a trio of managers played pepper the goalkeeper by hitting as many rocket shots toward the net as possible, from close range and in just about every imaginable situation. 

Some came from the top of the boxes, whistling toward the cross bar. Others came from quick passes and unknown shooters, around practice dummies that were situated in front of the net to simulate the traffic of defenders and offensive attackers that clog the space in front of her. And some came from point-blank range, on a second or third attempt after a Dawe save, that required her to react on instinct not thought and put her whole body in harm’s way. 

“I actually love getting shot on, Dawe said, noting that during the team’s small-side scrimmages she actually tries to tempt and bait her teammates on the opposite side to fire as many shots at her as possible from everywhere on the field. “It has to be all about natural reaction, because once you’re in goal you really don’t have time to think. It has to be all reaction.” 

The first drill Dawe did was a distribution drill to activate her hands and feet. It was repetitive, with the next shot coming before the one before it had even landed. And it featured intense focus from Dawe. 

A quick touch sends it high. A palm save keeps control. And a dive and cover to the ground ends the sequence. 

Throughout all of it, Dawe offered input to coaches and managers about where she’d like the shots, what she wanted to work on and what they might do to make a drill better or harder or both. 

Between turns, she’d run to the side of the net, grass clippings covering her glistening arms and parts of her jersey and gloves, to wipe down her sweat-drenched face and gloves before hopping right back into the line of fire. 

Throughout the session, which featured Dawe on the ground as much as standing on two feet, the KU captain reacted with a mixed bag of emotions. 

It would be impossible for her to stop every shot sent her way during a training session like that. And she knows that. Still, though, the balls that slipped into the net past her drove her crazy.

“I still hate it,” Dawe said of getting scored on, with the subtle grimaces on her face each time one went in backing up that claim. 

But she also noted that she is proud of herself for how far she’s come since high school, when such moments would’ve stuck in her head and been hard to let go of. 

“I think, with goalkeeping, it’s really easy to get into that perfectionist mindset, which I’ve gotten out of, luckily, because it would make practices a lot harder,” she said. 

That last part — making practice harder — is the whole point of what Dawe, Smith and Hansen do during the majority of KU’s soccer practices. 

“We have one main rule for practice,” Hansen said. “And that’s to make sure that everything we do is as game-like as possible.” 

Truth be told, most of what Dawe and the other KU keepers face during training is much harder than what they face in games and nearly impossible for any KU opponent to replicate. 

And that’s just the way they like it — make practice as hard as it can be so the games seem like a bit of a picnic. 

“It feels like games are second nature at this point,” Dawe said. “We face every possible shot and with a lot of speed. Sometimes we get some balls that are hit a lot harder than we see in games. I tell our forwards, ‘Start counting goals,’ because games are not forgiving.” 

There were breaks. But they were short. 

Because there was such a rhythm to the whole thing, Dawe found herself leaning one way or another anticipating what might be coming next. 

On a couple of occasions when that was the case, the people taking the shots would make her pay by slipping a shot into the net to the opposite side of the way she was leaning. 

“Fair enough,” she said after one such instance. “I needed that. Keep us honest there. I think the really cool thing about our environment is Tiff really prioritizes it being collaborative.” 

While much of the goalie-specific parts of practice were about repetition and reaction, the small-side scrimmage portion allowed Dawe to showcase something that she’s enjoyed as much as anything about the past two years — organization. 

She’s not often a part of KU’s attack on the other end of the field, but she does have something to do with getting it started. And she loves that. 

“Even if you’re not using your hands, you’re still organizing things in front of you,” she explained. “And, with this team, we get to play with our feet a lot, which is really fun.”

All of it makes for a pretty intense 90 minutes, day after day, except on game days, of course. But because she has hopes of playing professionally after leaving KU — before jumping into the health care field when she’s finished in goal — Dawe relishes every second of it, even on the most grueling days. 

Every shot. Every mistake. Every bruise. Every scratch. Every win. And every save. 

“Oh, it’s hard work,” she admitted. “But I think I’ve got a routine down with recovery and that’s something I’ve learned a lot about since I came into college. You can’t really go full-speed every day and survive. But it’s fun when you have a good group of people to do it with. And when you love your position, it just makes it that much better.”

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