A Commodore Keeper

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Sara Wojdelko often struggles to sleep the night before a big game, and few ever loomed larger than November’s NCAA Tournament game against No. 1 seed Florida State. Yet far from weary, she woke up excited in Tallahassee. A new day brought the opportunity to play against an opponent she grew up watching on the big stage, a program that has long defined college soccer excellence. She all but fizzed with anticipation as she listened to music, styled her familiar gameday braids, stretched and took the field.

“Walking onto the field, the excitement was at its peak, for sure,” Wojdelko said.

By comparison, the moments just before the penalty shootout required after Vanderbilt played the top seed to a 3-3 draw might have been the calmest she felt during her entire stay in Florida’s panhandle. She had already made 14 saves by then, the most by a Commodore in more than 30 years—often in highlight-reel fashion. With teammates’ stomachs in knots and fans pacing or unable to watch, she calmly dove to her right to turn away Florida State’s final attempt in the shootout and send Vanderbilt to its first Sweet 16.

“Being in that moment in the penalty kicks, I’m not thinking about being nervous,” Wojdelko said. “All of the pressure is on the shooter, and I’m going to do everything I can to put my team in the best spot I can. That part of it is enjoyable.”

 

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She had one more reason to feel at peace in that moment. Whatever the outcome, the senior knew it wasn’t the final time she would wear a Vanderbilt uniform. Wojdelko already knew what is now official, that she will return to the Commodores as a graduate student in 2025-26 and utilize eligibility preserved when she didn’t play a minute in her first season.

The Florida State epic notwithstanding, Wojdelko’s Vanderbilt story has been more realism than fairytale. Not everything has gone her way. She hasn’t always started. She wasn’t always healthy when she did. She had to find joy in the process and shrug off setbacks. She endured—and then excelled. It tells you something that, for all her travails, she was at home in one of the biggest moments in program history. In the age of the transfer portal, it tells you more that she was never going to call anywhere home but Vanderbilt.

“To be a Vanderbilt goalkeeper, you’re going to have to work hard and compete every day—and you have to be comfortable with competing and maybe not getting what you want,” said assistant coach and goalkeeping guru Daniel O’Hare. “But you support each other and want what’s best for our group, because at the end of the day, we want to showcase ourselves well. And whoever does that on the day, that individual’s success is the byproduct of the hard work they’ve all done together.”

The Making of a Keeper

Perhaps foreshadowing the ordeals to come, Wojdelko got her start as a goalkeeper after she was diagnosed with asthma as a child. She played in the field up to that point, but her coach suggested a position that required less running was a better fit. She long ago learned to manage asthma as an athlete, playing multiple sports in high school, but she fell in love with the role of goalkeeper almost from the moment she donned the gloves.

“Once I dove for the first time, I was like ‘Wow, that is so fun; I want to do that again,’” Wojdelko recalled. “I never lost that spark. That’s allowed me to play the game at the highest level because if you don’t love what you do when you’re dedicating 30 hours a week to it, you’re not going to be able to perform. I grew to love the willingness to do anything to put my body on the line.”

Goalkeeping also shaped her academic path, again in less than storybook fashion. A serious injury as a high school sophomore required multiple ophthalmological procedures. A nurse’s daughter, she had always been interested in medicine, but her experiences following the injury turned general interest into fascination with ophthalmology.

Vanderbilt offered everything she was looking for in a student-athlete experience, the chance to compete for a proven winner in one of the nation’s best conferences and pursue a pre-med path at an elite academic institution. Although rare, there are a handful of soccer programs that blend elite athletics and academics. What set Vanderbilt apart, aside from Nashville’s appeal to a city girl raised in Detroit and Chicago, was the human touch.

“You want that those type of familial bonds with your teammates, people who care about you—especially because you’re a long way from home,” Wojdelko said. “That’s one thing I was looking for, the community, both in athletics and within the soccer team.”

Ups and Downs

Wojdelko was an accomplished youth player, like everyone on a Division I roster. But there isn’t room for all of them on the field at the same time in college, certainly not in their first years. That’s all the more true for goalkeepers. A coach can find eight or nine minutes a game for a midfielder or defender to get her feet wet. For goalkeepers, it’s more often all or nothing. The transition was rough for Wojdelko, who didn’t play a minute in 2021.

“Looking back, I don’t think I was ready,” Wojdelko said. “I think if I would’ve been thrown into a game, I would have been overwhelmed and not performed well. … I think it was a learning curve for me, just getting into the schedule of being a Division I athlete and understanding that my role right now is to support my teammates who are playing.”

She rebounded with aplomb as a sophomore in 2022. After initially splitting time, she played the bulk of the key minutes late in the season after Kate Devine was slowed by injury. In the SEC Tournament, she made a save in a penalty shootout to clinch an upset against Arkansas. A week later, in her first career NCAA Tournament game, she kept a clean sheet to help the Commodores stun Clemson on the road.

But instead of a springboard to continued success, Wojdelko played those games knowing she needed offseason rotator cuff surgery. She wasn’t able to participate in the spring season or much of the summer as she rehabbed her shoulder. Devine was sharper mentally and physically as the 2023 season got underway and claimed the starting job.

“To not kick on and develop from what you’ve done,” O’Hare said of Wojdelko, “I think that was difficult for her to take.”

Wojdelko works with O’Hare, left, in practice (Truman McDaniel/Vanderbilt Athletics). 

Wojdelko’s time at Vanderbilt has been marked by continuity at goalkeeper that is unusual in college athletics. Devine arrived the year before Wojdelko but sat out her first year due to illness. Alexa Gianoplus then arrived in 2022, meaning that for the past three seasons, the same three people competed for what can only be one place on the field.

Each level of community shaped Wojdelko’s experience in Nashville—from the university as a whole to the athletics community in the Frist Athletics Village to the members of the soccer team. But none had as much power to make or break her experience as the smallest of those communities, her fellow goalkeepers and O’Hare. They challenged her, the keepers sometimes brutally honest with each other when focus faltered. And they supported her, even knowing her opportunity might come at their expense.

“I’m closest with the other goalkeepers that I train with,” Wojdelko said. “Even though we’re competing for the same spot, we care about each other off the field. And even when we train, we’re not training to beat each other out necessarily. We’re training to make each other better.”

The Conversation

Limited playing time in 2023 left Wojdelko at a crossroads, one in which many of her peers around the country increasingly look for a fresh start and more time at a new school. She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to disrupt her academic path or leave the people she valued. She just wanted to play more, to scratch the itch that set in the first time she dove for a ball and kept it out of the net.

In what she described as “one of the pivotal moments” of her time at Vanderbilt, she and O’Hare had an unreservedly frank conversation about past, present and future on the field.

“If you’re going to be a goalkeeper, you have to be very self-aware,” O’Hare said. “It wasn’t a coach-led conversation. It was just a very open discussion about what she needed to do to be better. There were obviously technical and tactical elements of it, but I think a lot of it was just instilling confidence in her to become what she can be and putting a lot of trust and faith in her.”

Wojdelko said her offseason didn’t look all that much different than any other offseason. There weren’t any secret training tips or unduly punishing workout regimens. She just tried to break things down into manageable, quantifiable components. O’Hare told her one issue was that she needed to be more consistent, so she tried to focus on becoming more consistent in her footwork, for example. Most of all, she prepared with confidence. She had weathered a lot and come through it, body, mind and life all finally aligned.

“It was kind of a clarifying moment to hear it from someone else,” Wojdelko said, “We’re aware of our own personal flaws and where we need to improve. But hearing it from someone else, especially someone that I look up to as much as Daniel, gave me clarity. I left with goals in mind. I knew what I needed to do over the summer to prepare to put myself in back into a position to compete.”

A Season Worth Waiting For

Preseason results were promising enough that Wojdelko earned the starting role for the season opener against 15th-ranked Georgetown, her first start since the 2022 NCAA Tournament loss against Northwestern roughly 600 days previously. Still, O’Hare acknowledged, there was some sense of waiting to see which version of the goalkeeper emerged against the Hoyas. She was fantastic, making key saves to preserve a scoreless draw.

She briefly ceded time to Devine as the SEC schedule got underway, less from her own play than Devine’s strong practice performances and experience. Even so, O’Hare noted, Wojdelko’s confidence never wavered in practice. And when the team needed a spark entering a road game at Texas A&M on Oct. 10, the coaches went back to her in goal. Vanderbilt won 2-0 behind Wojdelko’s five saves, the program’s first win in College Station, and never looked back.

“You can’t really match her energy,” said midfielder Maci Teater. “Even if you go back and watch her games this season, her confidence shines through—it gives other people power and strength. The way that she holds herself in games, and off the field, she’s a great leader and great person.”

One More Fall

Wojdelko will return next year to complete Vanderbilt’s 4+1 program that allows students majoring in medicine, health and society to earn their B.A. and M.A. in five years. Along the way, she’ll begin applying to medical schools—and while facing Florida State in a shootout didn’t faze her, taking the MCAT stirs butterflies.

She’ll also be back in goal for the Commodores as they look to build on the past season’s unforgettable finish. She knows better than most, of course, that past success guarantees little. Everything must be earned anew. She also knows better than most that Vanderbilt is a place where the people around you will bring out your best. It’s why she’s still here.

“I want to strengthen my connections off the field and make sure that people feel comfortable coming to me,” Wojdelko said of her ambitions for 2025. “That personal growth aspect I think can definitely carry into my life—off the field in my personal life and, hopefully, my life in medicine after I finish my degree.”