Kennedy Wesley wants to learn as much as she can at San Diego Wave FC

Despite only being in the National Women’s Soccer League for two months, Kennedy Wesley has already proven to be the draft pick San Diego Wave FC expected her to be. Wesley has made six stars for San Diego, helping them be in eighth place in the standings before the start of the upcoming NWSL weekend matches.

For someone who always wanted to be a professional football player, this may not be the start to her professional career that Wesley expected, but she has taken to the league very well and is impressing with each match she plays.

“I knew, from when I was really young, that I wanted to be a professional athlete in some sense,” she explains as we kick things off in the interview. “I actually did both club soccer and competitive gymnastics until I was about 14 or 15 and then I came to the conclusion that if I really wanted to excel in any sport, I had to pick one.”

Kennedy Wesley decided that football was the sport she was going to play and from her freshmen year of high school, she pursued that dream; from playing youth soccer, club soccer and youth national teams to now with the Wave in the NWSL.

Along that journey to becoming a professional league, Wesley spent four seasons with Stanford University, with players like Naomi Girma and Sierra Enge that she now plays with in San Diego. Stanford wasn’t her first choice however, because she herself didn’t think that it would be an option for her. “I went to a visit there and several other schools on the west coast because I knew I wanted to stay sort of close to home. After my first visit at Stanford, I felt like this could be a home for me so I fell in love with the school pretty early on.”

Queue five years later and she now is using that experience she gained at Stanford to play in the NWSL.

“Having played with a lot of Stanford players now in the league, and having conversations with them before the draft even, was super helpful to get an idea of how their transition was.” Wesley states. “Obviously most people have a similar experience, the league is just so much faster, more physical, everything is just bumped a few levels from college so knowing that going in, I went in with the mindset that it would be a shock to the system at first but all I can do is absorb all of the information, all of the talent that’s around me and apply it as quickly as I could into my game. Using former teammates like Sierra [Enge] and Naomi [Girma], just two examples, was super helpful in the whole process.”

Having someone like Girma right there with her has been a great help for Wesley, even back in their Stanford days. Both Girma and Wesley played center back in college and now in the NWSL, which has helped with Wesley’s transition to becoming a professional player.

“She was always someone I looked up to in that position, on the field and off it, so talking to her and getting her ideas on how she’s adjusted from college to the league, and where the team [San Diego] is at now and what the team needs now, was all super helpful and it prepared me well for the pre season.”

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It wasn’t just Girma and Enge that Wesley drew inspiration from, other Stanford players, Alanna Cook and Sam Hiatt for example who also play in the backline, gave her inspiration to try and play in the NWSL and possibly excel there too.

“The training environment we had at Stanford with such high level of talent, players, resources, everything that we had there is such a good setup for coming into this league, in my opinion. Being able to compete with players [then] that are now here even though it was a few years ago, it was such a high level, high paced environment that the transition is almost easier I think. So it definitely prepared me well for sure.”

Part of that training environment was forming herself as a defender. Kennedy Wesley sees herself as a defender with two different mindsets depending on whether she’s being defensive or offense.

“I think defensively, I’m super aggressive, pretty fearless, will go into any challenge and just try to dominate whoever I’m playing against physically. I just have a brave, no fear mentality,” she explains. “Offensively, I try to pride myself on composure on the ball, settling things down to set up my teammates well. It’s a little contrasting with the aggressive defensive side with the more calm presence offensively.”

Once she finished her time at Stanford, Wesley looked at her options and knew that she wanted to play, no matter where she ended up. “I knew, physically and mentally, that I didn’t want to be done with the sport so any opportunity that would arise post college, I was willing to sign up for. After talking to coaches and such, I saw that I could have potential in the NWSL so that’s what I went with. I was definitely eager for any opportunity or chance.”

This led to Wesley declaring for the draft, and introduced her to all the intricacies that come from declaring for the NWSL Draft. With the college season ending in the first week of December, Wesley had roughly a month to field calls and text messages from various teams and try to see which team would match with her best.

“That was kinda stressful in a way because I was like ‘okay, I’ve played my four or five seasons in college and now I can just wait and see if a team is interested’. That was the hardest part, the waiting for a bit until the beginning of January. Overall, it wasn’t too stressful of a process but I just had to be patient,” she ends with a laugh.

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This then led to her and her family heading to Anaheim in early January for the 2024 NWSL Draft. With the draft being so close to home, it made the decision easy for Wesley to attend the draft, and having her family around also eased all the nerves that come from being at the draft and potentially waiting to be selected.

“I personally see myself as an easy-going, chill person and I had never been so stressed in my life because not knowing where I could go, if anywhere, but it was the possibility of not going at all that was always in the back of my mind.” she says. “Fortunately, I was in close proximity to Anaheim which was where the draft was held so my family was with me pretty much the whole day. We got breakfast, tried to make it as normal of a day as possible but in the back of my mind, I was definitely a little bit stressed out. I’m a planner and not knowing, not being able to plan out how my future could look like was stressful. but I was super thankful to have family and friends nearby to try and make things as normal as possible.”

With all the contact she had pre-daft and the day of the draft, San Diego was actually one of the teams Kennedy Wesley never spoke to. She had them in the back of her mind as a team she would’ve wanted to be drafted by due to its proximity to her family, but with her never interacting with the team, she had removed them as a possibility.

“I personally had crossed that out of my brain. I hadn’t really interacted with them much so I thought they had their eyes set on someone else, which was totally fine. Once it all started and names started to get called, I feel like everyone kinda maps out in their head, we knew that some of the players in that draft class were unbelievable so it made sense [that they would go first]. I personally didn’t know where I was going to land, if I was going to land at all, so once San Diego went on the clock and my agent had told me ‘you’re going to San Diego’ a little bit before they announced the pick, I was just through the roof [emotionally]. Mainly because I had no idea that they were interested in selecting someone like me so I was so happy.” she ends with a smile.

It took a few days for Wesley to realise her new reality. Even after all the media obligations that now came with not only being a draft pick, but also being San Diego’s first pick at the draft. “I was just smiling and talking,” she laughs as she remenisces.

She went on a celebratory dinner with immediate family and friends the next day and that’s when it really sunk in, she was going to San Diego to be a professional football player.

“That day, and the two days after, all the logistics started coming in and I like ‘okay, this is really happening. I have to be there in a few days’. It was definitely a quick turn around and in the moment it was almost hard to realise what was actually happening but in the days after, that’s when it really started to sink in.”

Those logistics were made easier due to the fact that she was still relatively close to home, so her relocation wouldn’t be as far as New York, or another state altogether. She could pack all she needed in her car and drive down with her family if needed.

Once she arrived in San Diego to train with the Wave, she immediately realised that in order to succeed, her speed of thought and play had to improve.

“There are things in college where you might get the ball and have a few seconds to look around and figure out what the right pass to make is but in this league, you probably have two seconds and if you don’t make a decision then, you’re probably not going to find success,” she states with a slight smirk. “So yeah, speed of play and a lot of that has come from just training in an environment like that which makes it a little bit easier .”

When she’s probed on anything she’s found easier than expected in adjusting to the league, she pauses for a few seconds, trying to answer as thoughtfully as she can. “That’s a good question.”

She does come up with something that not necessarily has been easier, but has come more naturally to her than she had anticipated.

“The competitiveness. I feel like I’m able to compete, get into tackles and do a lot of the same things defensively that I was able to do in college, and that’s something that I’ve been priding myself in since I was way younger. To see it kinda translate over into this league too has been a little bit rewarding in a sense. Knowing that all the emphasis I put on that part of my game for so long is able to translate over, is nice to see.”

Something that you pick up on fairly quickly when speaking to Kennedy Wesley is her willingness to take a beat before answering. She’s measured in her responses but it’s always infused with positivity. She knows what she wants to achieve and what it’ll take to achieve it, but she respects that so early on her career, she’ll have to rely on advice from everyone around and take in as much as you can.

This is amplified when we talk about her goals for the season, which end not so much being statistical but more to do with her own game overall. “There’s certain aspects of my game that I’ve been wanting to improve over the last four or five years and I’ve slowly been chipping away at different aspects.”

“One goal I have on this team especially is to learn as much as I can to make all the aspects of my game that I’ve been trying to improve even better,” she expounds. “The details I get from the coaching staff, the extra reps that I might get with teammates after practice, my goal is to be the best sponge that I can be and absorb as much as I can this year so it sets me up for a good next few years going forward. My goal is to make as many individual improvements as I can for the rest of the season.”

All of her work is aided by the fact that the coaching staff at the Wave were willing to look to her to start after losing key players like Girma and Abby Dahlkemper to injury. While she wasn’t completely ready to push herself, the faith of the coaching staff gave her enough self-belief to step into that moment when needed.

“I’ve always been a proponent of ‘sometimes you don’t really get to just jump in yourself, you gotta be pushed off the diving board’ and that’s kinda how I felt in the beginning,” she jokes. “You only have one of two choices, you can either sink or swim so I’m super thankful that the coaches put their trust in me to do that. I don’t know that if I had kinda eased into the group would it have looked different so I’m glad that I was thrown into the fire a little bit.”

Part of her hesitancy in the beginning was that she was a rookie and didn’t expect to play as much as she had straight away. She was looking to learn as much as possible and do whatever the team asked of her, without the added pressure of being a “day one” starter.

“That totally flipped a little bit,” she states in bemusement.

“Obviously coming into a new league, and a new team is super hard but all of the staff and some of the older players on the team have done an amazing job of making me feel prepared and confident enough to go into these games. [The games] have been so much more physical and faster than what I was used to in college but the training environment that we have in San Diego could prepare anyone to step on the field against another team in the league and feel confident in their performance. So I have all my teammates and staff to thank because they’ve made everything almost seamless.”

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We continue on and discuss her debut which came on April 13th at Racing Louisville. With the injuries that San Diego had picked up since they had started the new season, Wesley felt that she might have a chance to play at some point, but she wasn’t completely sure.

“Casey [Stoney] had told me a couple of days back prior to our game against Louisville that she was planning on starting me in the game and if I would be okay with it. I was like ‘sure, absolutely, I would love that opportunity’ and knowing that I had a couple of days to prepare, I don’t think I necessarily did anything different, I was just super excited and eager to get out there. You never wanna see opportunities arise from other people’s injuries but that’s the reality of the situation, the reality of this league, so I was super excited to get my name called.”

The game itself was a blur for Wesley. While no one looks forward to starting their professional career on the road in a hostile environment, Wesley felt supported by her teammates in Kailen Sheridan and Abby Dahlkemper, who were right next to her and helped calm her down. San Diego came away from that game with a clean sheet in a 0-0 draw and Wesley credits both Dahlkemper and Sheridan for giving her confidence throughout that game, and help her team pick up a point on the road.

As we end the interview, Wesley tells me that she has never had a pre-match routine and right now, all she does it plat Wordle or Connections to help her focus right before game.

“I feel like I’m not a superstitious person so coming into this environment, I don’t have a set routine. I just make sure that I watch the scout [report] and watch film the morning of the game. That’s the one thing that’s stayed consistent from college up until now.”

Whatever Kennedy Wesley is doing is clearly working because she put in stellar performances from the time she’s started for the San Diego Wave until now. The season is long and with the returns of both Dahlkemper and Girma may limit her minutes, Wesley will now feel confident that if called upon, she will perform for her team and help them win as many games as possible.

Check out our other interviews with the rookies in the NWSL this year:

Madison Curry - Angel City FC

Savy King - Bay FC

Leilanni Nesbeth - Chicago Red Stars

Maycee Bell - NJ/NY Gotham FC

Reilyn Turner - Racing Louisville

Sam Meza - Seattle Reign FC

Ally Sentnor - Utah Royals FC

Croix Bethune - Washington Spirit