Kansas soccer's bright & shining star

A year ago, Kansas soccer star Caroline Castans opened the season on the 43-player Hermann Watch List, given annually to NCAA women’s soccer’s Division I national player of the year. 

This year, she was on the Hermann list again, only this time there was an added bonus. 

The senior from Flower Mound, Texas, who has been one of the Jayhawks’ and Big 12’s most dominant players during the past two seasons, was one of 11 players on Top Drawer Soccer’s preseason Top XI. 

Officially, she ranked 10th on the list, but being named to what amounts to a national first team of top soccer talent was certainly an added bonus to the more-familiar watch list. 

“It’s great,” said KU coach Nate Lie of Castans’ preseason honors. She deserves it. “I think I knew — and maybe she knew — that she was gonna be on it. People know her and people are gonna scout her and try to neutralize her as much as they can.”

It’s hard to know, though, exactly what that means and how that looks. 

Castans is not exactly a dominant goal scorer. But on Sunday, during the Jayhawks’ 7-0 win at Missouri State — which tied the program record for most goals scored in a single game — she scored two goals, with one of them coming off of an absolutely perfect cross that looked like a ball served up for her teammates until it crept in over the goalkeepers’ outstretched arms to give KU a 3-0 lead. 

And she’s also not exactly ever the focal point of KU’s attack. Yet, there she was in the season opener, moving to center back from her wing back position when the Jayhawks’ depth at that position was at risk because of injuries. 

“(She) could be an All-American at wing back and then move her back to center back and she’d probably be an All-American there, too,” Lie said after that game, a 2-0 home win over Utah State in the opener. 

She’s also one of the most lethal corner kick takers in the country and plays with an edge that many don’t seem coming. 

Perhaps what makes Castans’ star shine brightest amid all of this individual recognition is that there’s not a single bone in her body that desires to make anything about her. 

It’s team first all the way for Castans —along with her 30 teammates — and exclusively about doing whatever she’s asked to do to help Kansas win as many games as possible. 

They’ve done a lot of that during the first two years of the Lie era. And they’re off to a hot start to a 2026 season that they hope will bring even bigger and better things to the program. 

“I think it’s just trying to reflect on what we did but also not be satisfied with that and always strive for more,” Castans said before the season began, when asked about managing the recognition and elevated expectations for the KU women’s program. “We’re a team now that people are looking at and we kind of have more motivation to keep striving to reach higher goals.”

Next up for 15th-ranked Kansas (2-0), which ran its consecutive wins streak in non-conference play to 12 with Sunday’s blowout victory, is a trip to Columbus, Ohio on Thursday, where they’ll take on Big Ten power Ohio State, the No. 8 team in the nation. 

Kickoff is slated for 4 p.m.

— For tickets to all KU athletic events, visit kuathletics.com