Freshman forward crosses off major milestone in first college game

There’s a chance that what KU soccer freshman Faith Johnston accomplished on Thursday night during the 25th-ranked Jayhawks’ 5-2, season-opening win over Missouri State at Rock Chalk Park is something she’ll still be talking about when she’s in her 80s.

It’s not every game that a true freshman, playing her first game of college soccer, scores the first goal of her college career in the process.

But that’s exactly what happened for Johnston, when she cleaned up a loose ball in front of the MSU net and casually knocked it into the goal to give the Jayhawks a commanding 3-0 lead.

“The kid can score goals,” second-year KU coach Nate Lie said after the win. “She just can.”

A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Johnston has been playing soccer since she was 6 years old. And she’s been playing the striker position — she calls it the “nine” at KU — for nearly just as long.

Because of that, scoring goals has been something she’s made a living at, and she’s found just about every way imaginable to put the ball in the back of the net throughout her career.

This one, though, as automatic as it was after her first touch cleared some space, was one she’ll always remember.

Just ask KU sophomore Jillian Gregorski, who, herself, scored two goals in KU’s season-opening victory.

“So cool,” Gregorski said of Johnston scoring in her first collegiate game. “I remember mine. I was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?!?’ But I’m so proud of her. She did everything right in that situation. So, she deserves it.”

Added Johnston of the moment: “Honestly, it means the world. We’ve been working really hard at practice, and so I knew that we were gonna get one as a team. I didn’t know if it would be me necessarily, but, Molly (Shepherd) had a great assist and all I had to do was tap it in.”

After she did, Johnston was mobbed by nearly every one of her teammates on the field, who were happy to cheer the moment as much as the 3-0 lead on opening night.

“They were just ecstatic for me,” a still-smiling Johnston said of her teammates. “That’s the part that made it so memorable, my whole team just being there and celebrating others’ success as if it’s your own. And it’s really just the best feeling.”

Johnston credited her teammates for inspiring the goal, saying they did so much work to create the chance that she knew she had to “lock in” when the opportunity arrived.

And Lie, who showed genuine joy on his face when asked about Johnson’s first career goal, said he believed there’s plenty more where that one came from.

“If she can figure out stuff in between the 18s (middle of the field), that kind knows what she’s doing in the final third,” the KU coach said. “She has to plug away to kind of close those gaps that other people have on her in other phases, but she has a skillset that we don’t have a lot of, so hopefully she can build off that confidence.”

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