At first glance, junior Baylee Nielsen can be either intimidating or welcoming and open — it just depends on when you look.
On the soccer field, Nielsen is a 5-foot-10-inch, fast, aggressive forward who likes to cause problems for the opponents’ defense.
“When she does play with that passion and the physicality, then she’s really tough to stop,” head coach Rich Manning said.
Off the field, she is kind, warm-hearted, gentle and interested in getting to know everyone around her.
“She just always had a way with people,” Nielsen’s mother Dayna Powell said. “She just has a gift to really connect with people. She loves to hear people’s stories. She is a talker.”
Sometimes Nielsen’s gentle giant side leaks onto the field, which has caused assistant coach Gabe Smart to giver her the nickname of “Ferdinand the Bull.”
The Story of Ferdinand is a children’s story written by Munro Leaf. It’s a story about a bull that would rather be gentle and smell the flowers than be a symbol of strength like other bulls.
Smart and Manning try and bring the bull side out of Nielsen.
“When she gets that rage going, then she is pretty tough to beat,” Manning said.
After the season-ending injury to starting forward Ashton Hall, Nielsen has been promoted to the premier attacker — where she must become the bull.
“I came into this year accepting that I wasn’t starting at the beginning,” Nielsen said. “I kind of took on that role as coming in off the bench and knowing that I can still make an impact. Unfortunately, with Ashton’s injury, I was starting after that, and I’m excited about it. I rose to the occasion, and it is fun to be out there, starting lineup and getting to start the game.”
So far Manning is pleased with what he’s seeing from Nielsen as a starter.
“Baylee has improved a lot since last year,” Manning said. “She’s playing with more confidence. She is doing a lot of things that help the team in little ways, holding the ball for us, winning air balls, working hard. I would say her one-on-one dribbling is getting better. We’ve moved her out to the wing this year, for the most part. I think she’s starting to get a feel for how she can use her best qualities out there, which is really just going at people one-on-one. I’ve been pleased with a lot of it.”
Once game time is over, the bull leaves and Nielsen goes back to her regular personality. At home games, fans can easily point out Nielsen because of all the children flocking around her, many of them with the number 12 painted on their faces in support of the Ute forward.
Nielsen has had a love for children for a long while.
Even though soccer is one of Nielsen’s passions, her true love is teaching kids. She is majoring in elementary education, and her mother can’t imagine a better profession for Nielsen.
“She has always, always wanted to be a teacher,” Powell said. “She has this imagination — she would just make the playroom come to life. Every kid, the nieces and nephews, just loved to play because she just has such an imagination and is so creative. She was always such a good babysitter.”
Powell remembers how Nielsen would always be bummed at the end of the school year growing up. Throughout the year Nielsen would become so attached to her teacher that she wouldn’t want to leave. Nielsen wanted to know as much about her teachers as she could: their kids’ names, their ages and whether they were on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“She’s not a surface person,” Powell said. “She’s really a ‘get to meet and know’ kind of person. She just loves people, and she has such great energy.”
Nielsen’s interest in teaching likely formed because she is the oldest of six siblings.
“I honestly love being the oldest,” Nielsen said. “I’ve just loved watching them grow up. It’s actually given me a lot of pressure, but a good kind of pressure, to be the role model and to be the good example to my siblings. I love that because I love seeing them at my events and at my achievements and seeing them light up.”
Nielsen has always been a strong athlete. Her mother remembers noticing Nielsen’s athleticism early on while she was running track.
“Her [track] coach, he came up to me pretty early on, and he said ‘I have done this for 40 years. In those years I have seen probably four athletes that could compete on a college and Olympic level, and she’s one of them,’ ” Powell said. “I remember just going ‘What? She’s nine.’ He said, ‘She is just a natural.’ ”
Nielsen, being the people-person that she is, never really enjoyed track because it wasn’t a team sport. So she decided to dedicate herself to soccer.
The speed she gained from running track helped her excel in soccer. Again, Nielsen’s soccer coach approached her mother and shared her opinion of Nielsen — that she could play at the college level.
When Nielsen isn’t playing soccer or teaching kids at a camp, she probably can be found watching Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Nielsen’s father is a personal basketball coach who helps train players who want to compete at a higher level, whether it is high school to college or college to the NBA. Once Nielsen heard about her father’s meeting with Durant, she became obsessed.
“I just fell in love with Kevin Durant and the Thunder, and I just followed them ever since,” Nielsen said. “Kevin Durant has just been my favorite player. He is such an inspirational athlete on and off the court, and that’s what I love about him. He just inspires me even though we are completely different sports. I’ve just always looked up to him.”
Nielsen can be described as a gentle giant or Ferdinand the Bull. She can be found on the soccer field, teaching kids or cheering on her favorite NBA player. She may come off as intimidating on the field, but she will show interest in anyone she meets.
[email protected]
@dominic2295