The road to glory: How Spokane’s Jadon Bowton gained the tools to become UW’s champion goalie

As Jadon Bowton thrust the NCAA Division I trophy into the nighttime sky in Cary, North Carolina, at WakeMed Soccer Park, he shed the dark memories from 2021 when they were runners-up.

Four years ago, when the Washington Huskies ascended to their first College Cup soccer final, they fell just short, dropping the championship 2-0 to the Clemson Tigers.

This go-around, Bowton and the Huskies avenged themselves with a 3-2 overtime victory over the North Carolina State Wolfpack in the NCAA championship game Dec. 15 and the graduate senior finished his college career on top.

He had five saves and finished his season 13-5-1.

“It’s what you work your whole college career for, it is pretty crazy, it’s pretty awesome,” Bowton said.

“It feels surreal, I am a national champion.”

Bowton, a Spokane native, was a standout goalkeeper for the Ferris Saxons, graduating in 2021 after playing four seasons under Spokane soccer legend Robin Crain.

As a freshman in 2021, Bowton witnessed UW make it to the finals from the sidelines as a redshirt, before they dropped the final game to Clemson 2-0.

Then, in 2022, the Huskies lost their first game against Creighton in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.

It was a shocking result for a team that had just reached the championship and had its sights set to compete at that level again.

With each loss in the tournament, it gave UW plenty to learn from and work on.

“We knew what it took to advance,” Bowton said.

It still took a few more years before that work added up to some hardware.

During those runs, Bowton grew behind the scenes. He admitted that he wasn’t ready to take the reins as a college keeper right away, his skills were raw.

His time as a Saxon was a completely different experience as he was a locked-in four-year starter. It gave him a powerful foundation, but the rigors of organizing a college backline, making saves from talented forwards and feeling the pressure from rabid Husky fans is distinctly different than facing the Greater Spokane League.

Even his time as a club player for the Spokane Sounders was naturally different.

Bowton made six starts as a sophomore, going 4-0-2 with 14 saves. His first career start was a clean sheet against No. 5 Stanford. He also shut out Gonzaga a week later.

As a junior, he only started twice as the returning goalie, Sam Fowler, came back for his fifth season, which was a bit of a surprise. Fowler turned that into a haul of pre- and postseason awards.

For Bowton, the mental hurdles over his five seasons were by far the most difficult obstacles as a five-year player who only started his final two years. But UW head coach Jamie Clark said Bowton handled the process just about as well as any player he has coached.

“I think it says a lot about him in a lot of ways,” Clark said. “He has been given nothing.”

Bowton believed he was ready to take over but he kept working and said it gave him time to refine the skills he thought he had mastered.

“In the long run, everything worked out, I wouldn’t have changed it for anything else,” Bowton said.

Clark and the UW staff were honest with Bowton during the recruitment process, telling the Ferris goalie that he would have to put in the work to find himself as the leader for the Huskies.

“We didn’t paint some rosy picture to him,” Clark said.

The staff told him he would have to come in and work, learn the ropes and absorb as much as he could from the other solid choices UW had above him like Fowler and Andrew Morrison, who came before Fowler.

Bowton knew UW was a reach school for him and he wasn’t entirely sure he was good enough to play for the Huskies.

But the coaches did and when the time came, he was ready.

With it, he earned second-team All-Big Ten in 2025 and multiple goalkeeper of the week awards.

As a fifth-year senior, Bowton gave the Huskies the opportunity to see what they have for goalie options now that his eligibility is up. A few times throughout the season, Levi Bieber and Jaeger Felton started games, just as Bowton did as a lower classman.

“I’ve dedicated so much time to this program and on the soccer side, I have met some of my best friends here,” Bowton said. “I will be in contact with these coaches for the rest of my life.”

The work culminated in 2025 as Bowton and the Huskies took down five ranked seeds on their way to a national championship, the first in school history.

Compare that to UW winning only one of its first five games and this year was a tale of two seasons.

Still, as the final preparations were being made pregame, Bowton found himself a little nervous, which was rare for a player who is very regimented.

One of Bowton’s specialties – self-proclaimed and coach-described – is how he stays grounded, with an ability to settle down his Husky teammates in the face of adversity.

So often, goalies have a fire constantly burning, waiting for a chance to let it burst out at a moment’s notice. But Bowton has never been that sort of netminder.

Bowton said Clark has a quote that says no low is too low and no high is too high. He wants his players to control both the physical side of the game, but also their mental ups and downs.

He prefers to keep on schedule no matter the magnitude of the game.

He still ate his pregame meal at the same time, he reviewed the scouting report, did his pregame routine and then went out to warm up. He tried to make the moment as normal-sized as he could.

“Anything can happen and to me, I just like to remain calm, it is just another game,” Bowton said.

“We hadn’t won a national championship, you can’t really get too hyped up because at the end of the day, if you do what you know how to do and treat it like any other game, the nerves won’t get to you.”

As the game stretched into overtime, with a golden goal all that was needed to etch their names in history, Bowton reverted to his childhood backyard.

There he was, with the clock winding down, and the game was hanging in the balance. Bowton, a goalie at heart, had dreamed of this moment. While he didn’t score the game-winning goal, one of his teammates did and the Huskies won in the most dramatic fashion, with a sudden -death goal.

It was the same storybook ending he crafted in the backyard years ago.

“It’s crazy to think that this adventure is over because this is what I have been doing for the past four and a half years,” he said.

His parents might have to find a new hobby, though, as they witnessed every game live and his siblings too, who watched every game from afar.

“My family’s my biggest supporter, especially my parents,” Bowton said. “My siblings watch all of my games and my oldest sister has two little boys and she sent me a picture of them watching the TV when I am playing. It is really cute. I have so much love around me.”

Bowton, a computer science major, will finish his college career with almost 4,500 minutes, allowing 51 goals, saving 121 shots, with 17 clean sheets and an overall 25-12-11 record.

“I think I have made my coaches happy, but I also wanted to represent my state,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else honestly.”