ROSEMONT, Ill. – Penn State women’s soccer landed a trio of student athletes as Big Ten Conference Players to Watch in the 2025 season, with the Nittany Lion program also selected to finish third in the league in a preseason poll of the league’s coaches, with both announcements made concurrently by the league office on Monday afternoon.
Graduate forward Kaitlyn MacBean, redshirt junior midfielder Molly Martin and senior forward Amelia White picked up preseason recognition from the league office as Big Ten Players to Watch. All 18 Big Ten Conference member institutions provided three student-athletes to the conference office that are expected to make an outsized impact on the team’s results in the upcoming 2025 campaign. MacBean is a two-time All-Big Ten Conference selection, while White secured her first individual recognition from the league office since being named an All-Freshman Team selection in the 2022 postseason.
MacBean, a native of Excelsior, Minnesota, is fresh off the most dominant statistical season by a Nittany Lion in over a decade, turning in a 34-point campaign in 2024 that featured 16 goals and a pair of assists. Her 34 points marked the most in a single season by a Nittany Lion since Maya Hayes logged 70 points over the course of her 2013 campaign. MacBean, who returns to University Park as the Nittany Lions’ lone returning All-American, also secured the third-longest goal scoring streak in program history spanning the 2023 and 2024 seasons, tallying in eight consecutive matches beginning in the second round of the 2023 NCAA Tournament and running through PSU’s non-conference match against Saint Louis in 2024. Her appointment to the B1G Preseason Watch List marks the second such accolade of that nature for MacBean in as many seasons.
Martin, a native of Acton, Massachusetts, is the latest in a long line of elite holding midfielders to don the Blue & White in their collegiate careers. Her efforts over the course of the 2024 season were instrumental in Penn State extending the nation’s longest active Sweet 16 appearance streak to eight-straight years, while lifting the Nittany Lions to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament for the second year in a row. Martin’s 2024 season was the most prolific of her career to date, starting and playing all 25 matches for the Nittany Lions last year. She ranked fourth among all Penn Staters in terms of minutes played, amassing 1,953 minutes on the pitch in PSU’s deep NCAA Tournament run. Martin garners the first preseason or postseason accolade from the Big Ten Conference office in her Nittany Lion career.
Hailing from Fort Wayne, Indiana, White enters her final season of collegiate soccer as one of the most enticing prospects in the Big Ten in 2025. Over last year’s NCAA Tournament Elite Eight run, White saw the most playing time in her collegiate career to date, appearing in 21 matches with a career-best 20 starts and 1,119 minutes of work on the pitch. She totaled seven points in the 2024 campaign, pairing her lone goal against Iowa with five assists, tied for the roster’s lead in terms of returning assist production alongside sophomore defender Bella Ayscue. White has totaled five goals and 10 assists for 20 points over her three prior campaigns in Happy Valley, and is poised for an exciting final season with the Blue & White as both an elite facilitator and goal-scoring threat.
In a preseason poll submitted by all 18 Big Ten Conference women’s soccer coaches, the Nittany Lions were tabbed to finish third in the nation’s largest league behind recent California additions in USC and UCLA. The Blue & White are the highest-touted B1G legacy program for the second year in a row, falling one spot behind their second-place projection in 2024. The Trojans picked up the top spot in the preseason coaches poll, with UCLA ranking second. Behind Penn State’s third-place nod, the league’s coaches selected Michigan State, Ohio State, Iowa, Wisconsin, Rutgers, Washington and Minnesota to round out the 10-team Big Ten Tournament field, respectively. The coaches completed the poll with Purdue, Nebraska, Michigan, Northwestern, Illinois, Oregon, Indiana and Maryland to round out the 18-member listing.
The 11th-ranked Penn State women’s soccer team kicks off its 2025 season with its trio of Big Ten Players to watch in tow, as the Nittany Lions open the regular season on Thursday, August 14, with a 7 p.m. (ET) fixture against the fourth-ranked and defending Women’s College Cup participant Duke Blue Devils from Koskinen Stadium in Durham, North Carolina. The match will stream live to a worldwide audience of authenticated subscribers via ACCNX and the ESPN app, with Dean Linke and Matt Stradley calling the action from Durham.
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Visit GoPSUSports.com for more information on Penn State women’s soccer. Fans can keep up to date with the Nittany Lion women’s soccer team on X and Instagram @PennStateWSOC, in addition to the team’s Facebook page at /PSUWomensSoccer.
The 2025 Penn State women's soccer season is presented by Highmark.