2025 Schedules

[Kuiper]

Southwestern

The other Texas school leaving the SCAC for the SAA with Trinity. It is playing most of the out-of-state and non-conference Texas teams mentioned as Trinity opponents in my earlier post, including Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (which is apparently not playing St. Thomas as I suggested might be the case), St. Thomas, Kalamazoo, Concordia (TX), Texas Lutheran, Mary Hardin-Baylor, and UC Santa Cruz.  It departs from Trinity in also playing Howard Payne, LeTourneau, Austin College, and East Texas Baptist.  They have 14 home games out of 19 total, including the first 7 and 9 out of the first 10, plus it's hosting the SAA tournament.  It kind of feels like Trinity and Southwestern left the SCAC and got the best of both worlds.  At least this year, they both are playing a ton of home games and they still get all the games against SCAC and ASC schools they want.  As much drama as Texas conferences have had over the years with teams switching from one to the other, they basically all need each other to fill out their schedules (at least in soccer).

[Kuiper]

Some NESCAC schedules

Connecticut College

Drops Western New England (the only non-conference team to score a goal off Conn last season) and adds University of Hartford (which beat Trinity (CT) last season, but lost to Western New England).  National Championship rematch is the second game of the season at Conn, so that will be on everyone's must-see list.  Their double game weekend is at home against Colby and Tufts

Colby

Drops RPI and adds St. Joseph's College of Maine (a team that was merely average last season, but did hand Babson a 0-0 tie in the opening game of the season).  Starts the season with 5 straight at home, which includes Bowdoin and Tufts

[Kuiper]

Ohio Wesleyan

Year one of the Matt Weiss era at OWU (I hear that the last guy occupied the job for 47 years and was the NCAA career leader in wins, so no pressure  ).  This year, they drop Mount Union, John Carroll, and Stevens and pick up Berea, Bethany, and Wilmington.  That's a pretty noticeable decline in opponent pedigree, but they still have a plenty tough schedule with returning opponents Hope and Calvin (away on opening weekend) as well as Otterbein, Carnegie Mellon, Ohio Northern, and Marietta. 

Mary Hardin-Baylor

With only 6 conference games this season now that LeTourneau has left and McMurry and Schreiner won't come back to the ASC until Fall 2026, Mary Hardin-Baylor had to load up on non-conference games this season.  They make a big trip to Colorado Springs the second weekend of the season to play Whitman and Colorado College and they travel to Memphis to play Rhodes and Jackson to play Belhaven, but otherwise they just load up on Texas opponents.  They drop UT Dallas and LeTourneau, but play Schreiner, Texas Lutheran, Concordia (TX), St. Thomas, Austin College, Southwestern, and Trinity.  With 18 games total and only 4 teams in the ASC, it looks like there may not be an ASC tournament this year, which means the Mary Hardin-Baylor game at Hardin-Simmons on Nov. 1 to end the regular season could be the de facto championship game.

UPDATE:  According to the East Texas Baptist schedule, the ASC is having a conference tournament this year Nov. 6-8.  Presumably, everyone will make it, which is how LeTourneau got to the championship game last season.

[Kuiper]

Maryville

Drops Southern Virginia, Greenville, Bob Jones, Oglethorpe, Greensboro and Rhodes with Lynchburg on opening day, Johnson University (TN) (NAIA), Spalding, Emory, LeTourneau, and Warren Wilson.  They are playing LeTourneau in the Berry University Classic in Georgia, which makes this the second year in a row that LeTourneau makes an out-of-state trip after traveling to Michigan last year to play Calvin and Hope.  Maryville is a more competitive matchup for them and Georgia is only a 9-10 hour bus ride, but I still wonder what changed for a program that almost never traveled as far as they have last year and this year.

[Kuiper]

Buffalo State

After a 16-3-4 season in which they beat Tufts in the NCAA tournament in the second round on PKs before losing to Dickinson in the Sweet 16, I wondered if Buffalo State would up the quality of their schedule this season.  They're typically going to have some decent games in the SUNYAC with Cortland, Oneonta, Plattsburgh, but their non-conference schedule was pretty pedestrian.  It appears not much has changed.  They drop Elmira and Mt. Aloysius in favor of New Jersey City University and SUNY Geneseo, but otherwise it is the same as last year, playing Alfred and Bryant & Stratton in the Fredonia Classic and then SUNY Brockport, Houghton, and Hilbert at home and Grove City away.  They had 12 seniors last season, so it will be interesting to see if last season was a one-hit wonder or something to build upon.  Diego Rivera, their first team All-American forward who scored 18 goals and had 8 assists, was only a junior, but I think they are losing Manu Prieto, their second team All-American Portuguese midfielder who had 10 goals and 17 assists (he played 1 year at NAIA Mount Mercy before 3 years at Buff State), who is going to be really difficult to replace.  Not many people manage 17 assists in a college career, let alone a single season.  They also may be losing Shae Wirt, their GK, who was an underrated key to their success after starting his career at D1 Presbyterian (he was at Presbyterian for two years, but that includes a Covid year, so maybe he redshirted the second year and still has a year left).  Wirt made some strong saves in PKs against Tufts to allow Buff State to advance.

Mississippi University for Women

(BACKGROUND:  Yes, that is still its name.  Yes, they have a men's team.  Yes, it is 2025.  Yes, there were proposals to change its name, but they were withdrawn because of criticism from alumni.  Yes, there was a bill last year to merge it with Mississippi State, but the bill died in the Senate.  Apparently, it is now known for athletics purposes as the "W," but a recently released internal memo written while the proposed merger was under consideration reveals that Mississippi State University officials had considered making "W" official, but as a designation for "Workforce," rather than "Women," because they proposed to focus the campus on nursing, speech pathology, and culinary arts)

MUW was 0-17 last season.  They were bad.  Like, historically bad.  Like, Lewis & Clark might have actually had a chance of beating them bad (seriously, we need these two teams to play each other).  MUW scored 11 goals and gave up 100 goals.  And if you take out the Ecclesia game, where they scored 3 goals after an Ecclesia player was red carded, but still lost 5-3, and the Principia game, where they scored 2 goals after being down 7-1, they only scored 5 goals in 15 games.  They had 18 players listed on the roster, including only 1 player listed as a GK (a 5'9" freshman) and they used a midfielder in goal in the one game the regular GK was unavailable. The bench was pretty thin some games, including one game they lost 11-0 with only one player on the bench according to the box score.  They listed a 2025 Spring roster with 10 players.  And with the legislative battle in March of 2024 about whether the school would even continue to exist as a separate entity, I wouldn't be surprised if recruiting was less than stellar. 

So, the bottom line is that there may be no schedule that MUW could construct for 2025 that would allow them to be competitive or even find a win.  They do still have "TBA"s on their schedule for 9/21 and 9/28 if you're a coach looking for, shall we say, a less stressful game.  Nevertheless, they do have a schedule.  They drop Centenary (LA), Ecclesia, Austin College, and Belhaven and add Millsaps, Warren Wilson, and Toccoa Falls College (NCCAA).  Warren Wilson, which was 0-6 last season before the flooding in western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene forced the cancellation of the remainder of the season, seems like MUW's best chance for a victory.  Toccoa Falls, which lost to Huntington 4-0 and Bob Jones 8-0, is the next best chance.  I'll be rooting for them.  I like underdogs.