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Afterward, lying on the couch watching the World Cup, Hood reconsidered the wisdom of her decision. “That night I was dying,” she recalls. “It was awful.”

Still, she says, the surgery was worth it in order to ensure that she won’t miss any of the upcoming season. After playing “almost every minute” of the 2005 season, according to head coach Mikki Denney Wright (B.A. ’97) and working harder than even her coaches had asked, fatigue finally caught up with Hood in the form of tonsillitis. “At the Big Ten tournament she couldn’t give the effort she wanted,” remembers Denney Wright. In spite of her ailment, Hood earned Freshman all–Big Ten honors at the tournament.

Little can separate Hood from a soccer ball. She honed her skills during the summer by playing for the elite-level Minnesota Lightning of the United Soccer League. “It’s really hard for her to miss anything,” Denney Wright says. “She has an unbelievable desire to be great. That’s something you can’t coach; you have to recruit.” Denney Wright had been recruiting Hood for years, even before the coach joined the Gophers in 2004. “She was one of my favorite players right away,” says Denney Wright, then the top assistant at Missouri. “She’s one of those great competitors.”

Hood, from Ankeny, Iowa, was intrigued enough at the prospect of being a Gopher to visit Minnesota. Eventually, the special education major turned down offers from Auburn, Kansas, and West Virginia and a promise from Florida in favor of the hard-working vibe at Minnesota and the chance to pioneer a new era of Gophers soccer.

As the program’s first national top-100 recruit, Hood represents a turning point in Minnesota’s recruiting. Her class of 14 included four of the five finalists for Minnesota’s Ms. Soccer award. This year’s incoming class looks even more formidable on paper: With five national top-100 players, including the players of the year from Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, it earned accolades as the 13th best recruiting class in the nation and third best in the Big Ten.

It is a bonus for Hood that her family lives just three and a half hours away in Ankeny. Her sister, who played center midfield for Missouri State, moved to Minnesota this summer so she could watch Kelsey play, at the U’s Elizabeth Lyle Robbie Stadium, in the fall. Early in Hood’s freshman season, the Gophers played Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, in front of the team’s largest crowd ever. Hood’s family came, of course; former teammates came; girls she’d coached in youth soccer came waving signs and screaming.

Hood admits that she had some initial misgivings about turning down offers from more nationally prominent programs. “Coming in I was, like, maybe I should have gone somewhere else,” she says. “But at the first practice I knew I’d made the right choice. I’ve never played with players so intense, so willing to push you to your limits. I think a lot of the games we won because we worked harder than the other team. We weren’t more skilled; we just worked way harder.”

Fans are tuned into and turned on by that work ethic and how it’s paying off. Minnesota was second in the conference only to NCAA runner-up Penn State in the average number of fans it drew to its home games. Minnesota finished the 2005 season with a 9–8–2 overall record and 6–4–0 in the Big Ten, its most victories since 1999, qualifying for the Big Ten Tournament for the first time since 2000. Hood started 18 of the Gophers’ 19 games. But perhaps the most encouraging match of the year was a loss. The regular season culminated in a double-overtime defeat to Penn State, then undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the nation.

“That’s the game that proved that we can hang,” Hood says. “We had no-namers shutting down big-timers. People were saying, oh my god, Minnesota just took Penn State to double overtime.” Hood herself was surprised. “I learned that you don’t necessarily win with the most talented players,” she says. “The team that works the hardest can win.”

This year, Hood expects to win the close contests. “I have no doubt we can pull off some of the games we lost last year,” she says. In order to do so, she knows she’ll be looked to as a leader on a very young team consisting of mostly freshmen and sophomores with three juniors and no seniors. “Kelsey’s a good motivator, and she’ll bark orders to you, even if you’re older than she is,” says Jackie Hood.

Hood knows there’s a lot of work ahead: By her senior season, she expects the Gophers to be in the top 25 consistently and competing for a national championship. But she also knows, with her tonsils out of the way, that nothing will hold her back. 

Sheila Mulrooney Eldred is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis.