By Brianna Brents, UK AthleticsFreshmen have a choice in joining a college team for the first time: act their age or take control.Taylor Braun has chosen the latter.The goalkeeper is stepping up to the plate as a new freshman on the team that lets hard work speak for itself. In spite of the attitude, Braun was still a little shocked when she was named Co-Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Week only three weeks into the season. “I have to give credit to my team and my defenders helping me out throughout preseason and through the first couple of our games, but it was definitely an awesome feeling,” said Braun. Braun spent a lot of her summer training and growing to become better at her skill. She selected Kentucky because she wanted to be a part of a team that was continuing to build, and with Jon Lipsitz as the head coach, she wanted to be a part of making a legacy. Lipsitz said he wasn’t surprised at all by the way Braun has stepped up and made big saves. “Our plan for all of our players is to first get better every day, and she’s been looking at a lot of film and seeing the things that she has been doing well, and the things that she’s not doing well,” Lipsitz said. “We go out on the field and work on it; it’s just a part of the process.” Reacting positively to short-term failure is what Kentucky women’s soccer is all about. “We lost a game at the beginning of the year and we learned from it,” Lipsitz said. “I’m not a believer in you have to lose to be motivated. I’m glad that we’ve continued to learn from the first game, and the difference is we’re learning in victory rather than defeat now”. UK has done plenty of that since that season-opening 4-1 loss at Washington. The Wildcats have won five games in a row, the last four coming in shutout fashion with Braun in goal. “I just wanted to come in and make a statement that it doesn’t matter what age you are, you can be a factor in the game,” Braun said.UK will look to cap a successful run through nonconference play on Sunday at noon ET at home against Pepperdine. After that, it’s on to conference play in the always challenging SEC. The Cats’ goals through all of that are simple.”We want to get better every day and we want to win every game and that never changes,” Lipsitz said. “That’s a part of the process of being in the culture of our team. We’re going to be great teammates to one another, we’re going to be a family and we’re going to work incredibly hard to get better every day.”At Kentucky, that team mentality is fueled by an individually focused approach, counterintuitive as that may seem.”We take pride in our girls in this program on the individual development of our players, and because of the players developing so much individually, the team gets better also,” said Lipsitz. UK’s precocious goalkeeper is an important part of that process.”Bigger things are coming for our team individually and collectively,” Braun said. “It takes a lot of discipline and work ethic to play at this level and you have to do a lot of work on your own. You have to grind when there are days when you’re tired, have a lot of homework or didn’t get much sleep; you just have to press through. Every day I go in focused and try to get better and learn the aspects of the game and become a student of the game every day.”