2025 Schedules

[SierraFD3soccer]

York

After a tie against Washington College last season, York decides to load up on Centennial opponents, playing Franklin & Marshall and Gettysburg, in addition to hosting Washington College. Also adds Rochester instead of Carnegie Mellon from the UAA, and St. Mary's (MD) instead of Penn State Abington frmo the United East.  After not qualifying for the NCAA's last season with a 14-2-5 record, they'll have to hope these additions are enough to push them up the ladder if they can't get by Messiah.

Maybe so, definitely more successful teams with F&M, WC and Rochester (WC and R made it to the tournament 2 years ago).  Pretty amazing that they will only have to leave PA twice (play opening weekend in Salisbury, MD and Hood in Fredrick, MD). However, it will still take a lot to make it to the tournament. So much D3 soccer in PA. As to qual and not beating Messiah, looks like for years only the team that wins the MACC Commonwealth makes it. So we will see.

As to playing F&M, they are about 45 min apart and I was surprised that they had not played more often. F&M generally plays Leb Valley and Lancaster Bible every year which are very near. 

[Kuiper]

Ohio Northern

ONU doesn't shy away from a strong schedule and this year is no exception.  Gone from the schedule are Oberlin, Colorado College, UT Dallas, Calvin, Washington (MO), and Greenville, but they add games @Mary Washington (opening game), @Randolph-Macon, @Albion, @Trine, and v. Adrian, while still playing @Hope, @Ohio Wesleyan, and v. Kenyon.  The three game sequence in 7 days of OAC play - 10/18 v. Capital, 10/22 @Otterbein, and 10/25 @Mount Union - could be a preview of the OAC tournament this year.

Tufts

Drops Salem St. in favor of U Mass Boston, which is a decent upgrade, and plays Babson away this year.  In conference, the schedule isn't so front-loaded.  Last year, they played three conference games before their second non-conference game, while this year they alternate between non-conference and conference games for the first few weeks.

Bowdoin

Trades Wheaton (MA) for Endicott, which is probably an upgrade if for no other reason that Endicott is away and Wheaton was at home. They get Bates at home this year, where they will surely be eager to avenge a 1-0 loss from last season.

Wesleyan

Trades Eastern Connecticut for Brandeis, but otherwise plays the same non-conference foes.  Babson is an away game this year.  The double NESCAC weekend is brutal, playing at Tufts and at Middlebury on the last weekend of September.

Bates

I posted a partial schedule for Bates earlier and now they have added their non-conference games.  Only switch was replacing Emerson, which handed Bates their one non-conference loss last season, with Husson.

Husson

Husson is a very popular opponent among NESCAC teams.  They added Bates and Williams and continue to play Bowdoin and Tufts.  Williams even agreed to travel almost 6 hours to Bangor, ME to play them.  I'm sure it's to pay homage to the Paul Bunyon statue on Main Street and not because they (or any of the others) are eager for a win to bolster their record for conference play. 

Moravian

Last year was a decent year for Moravian until late in the season, when they went winless in the last four games, including losing to Elizabethtown in the conference tourney after beating them in the regular season.  This year, they start with games at Stevenson and Washington College (instead of Widener and Swarthmore) and they drop Bryn Athyn (or, more precisely, Bryn Athyn dropped all sports), Penn St. Abington, and Gwynedd Mercy in favor of Eastern, Kean, Ithaca, and Maywood, while still playing Muhlenberg and Montclair St. 

[Kuiper]

Rockford

After a 3-13-1 season, they shed some of the non-conference opponents that beat them - Wisconsin-Whitewater, Knox and Illinois Wesleyan, replacing them with Beloit, Marantha Baptist, Elmhurst, and Olivet.

The College of New Jersey

After a 2-12-5 season, TCNJ also looks for more competitive games.  They drop St. Mary's (MD), Salisbury, Drew, Union, and Muhlenberg, and add Immaculata, Penn State Berks, Keystone, Haverford, and Penn State Harrisburg

[jknezek]

Having an actual soccer coach will probably help TCNJ as much as anything else.

[Kuiper]

St. Scholastica

They start with a an England trip, which sounds fun, and then face an almost entirely new set of non-conference opponents (Loras, Luther, Carroll, Marian, Crown, Central, and Carleton, instead of Edgewood, Coe, Wisconsin-Platteville, Northwestern (MN), Wartburg, Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and Wisconsin-River Falls).  I guess if I went 3-15-1, I might want to try a new set of teams, but they didn't exactly pick easy ones.  This might be a situation where better teams called St. Scholastica looking for a game to beef up their record.

[Kuiper]

Ithaca

Opening at home against Elizabethtown and Elmira.  Replaces Brockport and Fredonia with Geneseo among the SUNYs.  Replaces Kings with Wilkes and Moravian instead of Eastern. Has to travel to Cortland and Hamilton this year, instead of hosting them.

Martin Luther

Drops Dakota Wesleyan and Wisconsin Lutheran in favor of UW-Stout, Lakeland, and Waldorf (an NAIA team from Iowa that went 0-15-1 last season)

Marian

Adds Carthage and St. Scholastica instead of Manchester and Lawrence.  Retains some tough games against UW-PLatteville, UW-Stevens Point, and Carroll.

[Kuiper]

East Texas Baptist

The non-conference schedule is very similar to last year, with Millsaps and Belhaven visiting Marshall, TX this season.  They replace the home-and-away conference games against UT Dallas and LeTourneau with games against Southwestern, Austin, Lyon, and Hendrix.  In the ASC, they are listed as playing both conference games against Mary Hardin-Baylor at home.  Unless this is a mistake or UMHB is doing construction on its field, I'm not sure why they would agree to play both ETBU games away.

Austin College

Replaces Concordia-Moorhead, Fontbonne, UT Dallas, Nelson, Mississippi University for Women, and Ouachita Baptist with Dallas Christian (NCCAA), Southwestern (as a non-conference game), East Texas Baptist, and Howard Payne as non-conference games and Hendrix and LeTourneau as conference games.

Centenary (NJ)

One way to cut your losses after a 5-11-4 season is just to play fewer games.  They drop two of the teams that handed them their largest losses last year - Eastern and Haverford - plus Kean and Delaware Valley and add only  Lancaster Bible among non-conference teams and new Atlantic East member Saint Elizabeth.

[stlawus]

Plattsburgh

Plenty of Liberty League on the docket, and they keep Manhattanville from last year.  They lose some good players from last season including their top scorer but they bring a pretty good amount back, including a few players that had great freshman campaigns.

Glad to see SLU on the schedule early in the season, last few matchups have been extremely late in the season with one or both teams sitting out a lot of players.   That's also usually the weekend that SLU plays the Oneonta tournament, I wonder if this means they're not playing that.  Oneonta is always good to keep on the schedule but playing them 7 times in a row on the road has to change at some point.

[Kuiper]

A couple of Centennial conference schedules

Franklin & Marshall

I thought F&M's non-conference schedule last season was tough, but you could make an argument that every single game before Centennial play starts is going to be tricky:

8/29 v. Stockton (9-6-6; tied Christopher Newport away 0-0, beat Montclair twice; lost in NJAC finals to Rowan))
8/31 @ Rowan (12-5-5; tied F&M 2-2 in Lancaster, NCAA tournament 1st round))
9/5 @ Denison (15-2-6; NCAA Elite 8)
9/7 @ Kenyon (13-3-5; tied F&M 1-1 in Lancaster, NCAA 3rd round)
9/13 Elizabethtown (7-9-3, but tied F&M at home and won the Smith-Herr Boot in a PK shootout)
9/17 @ York (14-2-5; lost in MAC Commonwealth Final to Messiah 2-1)

Plus, they got to ease into conference play against Haverford last season, whereas this season they host Muhlenberg, which knocked them out of the Centennial Conference tournament last season in the semifinals

Muhlenberg

Drops Scranton, Kean, TCNJ, and Salisbury for Neumann, FDU-Florham, Rutgers-Camden, and Widener.  In conference, starting with Franklin & Marshall and finishing with Johns Hopkins (at the end of a three game week of games against Washington College and Haverford) and Dickinson, is going to put some pressure on them to win a lot of games in the middle of conference play so they aren't counting on those last games to earn a conference tournament bid.

[Kuiper]

Willamette

Willamette tries to rebound from a tough season last year and with NWC's round robin schedule of 16 conference games, that doesn't leave a lot of room to improve by scheduling differently.  Nevertheless, Willamette does appear to have deliberately reduced the degree of difficulty of their non-conference schedule.  Gone are Calvin, Occidental, and Cal Lutheran and in their place are Pomona-Pitzer, La Verne, and Whittier.  Basically, nationally ranked and top half of the SCIAC exchanged for bottom half of the SCIAC.

Crown

Pretty complete turnover of non-conference opponents for a team that had a long run in the NCCAA national championships after winning the north regional final. Gone are Wisconsin-River Falls, Augsburg, Bethel, and Buena Vista and new are Wisconsin-Stout, Saint John's, Faith Baptist, and Coe.

[Kuiper]

Williams

Starts the season with exactly the same teams as last season, although it is even tougher because they are playing @Tufts in game #2 and @Amherst in game #4.  The non-conference schedule is a step down as they drop Cortland and add Husson.

Keene State

The non-conference game @Williams in the middle of conference play seems kind of brutal, but at least they aren't playing Middlebury this season, which beat them 5-1 last year.  They also add Colby-Sawyer, Fitchburg State, and Russell Sage instead of Rivier, Lesley, MCLA, and RIT.

Oglethorpe

Lots of interesting matchups in this schedule.  In the Sonny Carter Invitational to open the season at Emory, they play Covenant and Washington & Lee. A week later at Oglethorpe's own invitational, they play Wisconsin Lutheran and North Carolina Wesleyan.  A week after that, they host Babson, which is also playing Covenant on its trip to Atlanta.  Two weeks after that, they host Trinity and Southwestern in their first away trip in the SAA.

[Kuiper]

McDaniel

Some teams view difficult non-conference games as the best preparation for conference play in a conference where many teams are traditionally very strong regionally and nationally.  I've never been convinced that is the right approach unless you already know your team is a top team that might be tempted to play down to the level of their opponent.  McDaniel seemed to subscribe to the opposite theory last season.  This is the view that it's better to play a somewhat weaker (but not non-competitive) non-conference schedule to give the team time to organize, build a winning culture (especially where there wasn't one before), and pull together in preparation for tough conference games.  You then use winnable non-conference games after games against difficult non-conference foes to rebuild confidence and perhaps to allow some starters to ease up a bit.  For example, they played Hood (3-0 W) after F&M (3-1 L) and played Stevenson (2-0 W) after Dickinson (1-0 L).  I won't say that this always works, since McDaniel has had years with winning records only because of their non-conference creampuff schedule and they have had very few conference wins.  Nevertheless, something worked last season because for the first time since 2005 they qualified for the conference tournament and they did not have a losing record in conference.

In 2025, McDaniel is following the same formula that led them to their historic season in 2024.  Very similar non-conference schedule except they replaced Eastern Mennonite with Albright and Penn State Altoona.  Plus, they have Shenandoah and Goucher - their only two non-wins out of conference last year other than Eastern Mennonite - at home instead of away this season.  They end conference play with Dickinson and F&M this season, though, so if they haven't sewed up a conference tourney spot before that point, they may have an uphill climb without any relatively easier non-conference games between those games to give them a chance to regroup.

Albright

Adds Rosemont to the schedule in the second game of the season, which will be interesting since this will be the last season for the soccer team before they are absorbed by Villanova. I don't know how many players transferred after the school's announcement, but they surely don't have an incoming freshman class.  They had 7 seniors last season on a roster of 30 and only 3 juniors (the class most likely to stay and finish up their careers with the team), so they could be pretty depleted if freshman and sophomores left.  In addition to adding Rosemont and McDaniel, they drop Berkeley College and and Delaware Valley.

[SierraFD3soccer]

W&L Year 2 Schedule

https://generalssports.com/sports/mens-soccer/schedule

Solid schedule with Emory, Oglethorpe back to back to open in Atlanta. 

Then Covenant which had a very good season last year.  Two days later they travel to play Univ. of Mary Wash which is the first time since 2019 (maybe they can get Wash College as well to cover the Wash colleges minus Wash and Jefferson next year).

Catholic next who beat W&L 2-1 last year. Regent which is another VA school and pretty new to sports.

Quirk of the ODAC, W&L plays Roanoke in a non-ODAC game and later plays them again which counts for ODAC.

They still play the powers of the ODAC (Roanoke, Lynchburg and VA Wes.) which is good for its SOS. They have to go to VWU, but later play Chris Newport at home in the middle of the week.

IMO, they will definitely need to do well in non conf. games if they don't win the ODACs. W&L have a great goal scorer and 3 backs graduating while a small rising senior class along with a big junior class.

[SierraFD3soccer]

McDaniel

Some teams view difficult non-conference games as the best preparation for conference play in a conference where many teams are traditionally very strong regionally and nationally.  I've never been convinced that is the right approach unless you already know your team is a top team that might be tempted to play down to the level of their opponent.  McDaniel seemed to subscribe to the opposite theory last season.  This is the view that it's better to play a somewhat weaker (but not non-competitive) non-conference schedule to give the team time to organize, build a winning culture (especially where there wasn't one before), and pull together in preparation for tough conference games.  You then use winnable non-conference games after games against difficult non-conference foes to rebuild confidence and perhaps to allow some starters to ease up a bit.  For example, they played Hood (3-0 W) after F&M (3-1 L) and played Stevenson (2-0 W) after Dickinson (1-0 L).  I won't say that this always works, since McDaniel has had years with winning records only because of their non-conference creampuff schedule and they have had very few conference wins.  Nevertheless, something worked last season because for the first time since 2005 they qualified for the conference tournament and they did not have a losing record in conference.

In 2025, McDaniel is following the same formula that led them to their historic season in 2024.  Very similar non-conference schedule except they replaced Eastern Mennonite with Albright and Penn State Altoona.  Plus, they have Shenandoah and Albright - their only two non-wins out of conference last year other than Eastern Mennonite - at home instead of away this season.  They end conference play with Dickinson and F&M this season, though, so if they haven't sewed up a conference tourney spot before that point, they may have an uphill climb without any relatively easier non-conference games between those games to give them a chance to regroup.

McDaniels has been doing this for years. They generally go into Cent. Conf. play with a winning record. They actually made it to the CC playoffs as the 6th seed for the first time in years last year. I think it also could be a budget thing.  Pretty much all non-conf are less than 100 miles away in MD, northern VA and southern PA. 

Ursinus does this as well.

[SKUD]

https://athletics.middlebury.edu/sports/msoc/schedule/2024