Bearcat soccer goals leader Claire Warthen talks leadership, filling the scoring vacuum

Claire Warthen ('27, left-front) hypes up her teammate during walkouts on Sept. 18, 2024. Photo by Keenan Yoshizawa.

Coming into 2025, Willamette women’s soccer found itself in a bit of a scoring vacuum. 

Last season, center forward Nina Krassner-Cybulski (’25) bagged a whopping 11 of the team’s 20 total goals on the season, ranking in the top 3 in the Northwest Conference in multiple individual offensive categories. This year, the team has struggled to find an attacking authority adequate to fill Krassner-Cybulski’s cleats. But the stats are more evenly divided across the board: despite the Bearcats’ lack of Krassner Cybulski, the team has managed to score nearly the same number of total goals this season as last year. Attempting to fill this vacuum is midfielder Claire Warthen (’27), who has proven herself to be a force of nature in her own right.

Warthen has been playing soccer since she could walk. Soccer is a major constant in her life, but this year she’s stepped up as an offensive powerhouse in a way not normally seen from the “8” position, more classically understood as a box-to-box midfielder. She sits at five goals on the season as of Nov. 6, a stat that ranks her tied for No. 5 in the conference, and in total points she’s ranked No. 8 with 10. These stats outpace not only the rest of her teammates but also her own goal total from last year — Warthen bagged only one goal on the season in 2024. 

The gap left behind by Krassner-Cybulski and the other graduated senior players was an opportunity for Warthen to step up and be the person she looked up to. Now that Warthen is a junior, she has a different perspective on being a leader: "Freshman year, you don’t know what you’re doing. Sophomore year, there are two years of people ahead of you who are telling you what to do. This year, it’s like you don’t have someone telling you what to do, and you have to do it yourself.”

When asked why this year has been more successful for her, Warthen explained, “You have to be the leader you always looked up to.” This year, stepping into that leadership role on the soccer team has helped her become more confident. For Warthen, that confidence has aided her both in her leadership roles around campus as well as in her offensive efforts on the pitch.

Warthen is a Politics, Policy, Law, and Ethics (PPLE) major and finds that a lot of her studies involve “learning how to interact with people and learning how to interact with the world around us, along with how to do so in an equitable and fair way.” Interacting with her teammates and seeing who works well together on the field has emulated the aspect of PPLE that involves understanding people and figuring out how they click. 

For Warthen, the team aspect of soccer is one of her favorite parts of the game; she enjoys figuring out “all the team dynamics and team chemistry.” Learning about why a certain formation works better with certain players has helped her become a better leader, she said. 

In these ways, soccer has helped Warthen with soft skills that she has been able to apply to her life and major. For example, playing a team sport has taught her to navigate everyday life by being as clear as possible with her communication. “In soccer, I don’t always have time to tell you all the specific details, so you learn how to communicate concisely,” she said. 

She lives her life based on a piece of advice her father has always said: “Everyday is an opportunity for learning and growth.” Warthen applies the motto to every test and conversation she has, good or bad. Through all the things she is involved in, from being on Willamette’s women's soccer team to being a Resident Advisor and working at the Capitol, Warthen learns from these opportunities and applies them to her people skills, something that she credits soccer for helping her with. 

Despite not adding any goals to pad her stats over the weekend of Nov. 8-9, Warthen continued to demonstrate her offensive prowess, adding two shots to round out her season total to a solid 36.

The squad rounded out the conference season at two wins, six losses and eight ties.