2026 D3 Men's Soccer National Perspective

[Kuiper]

French National Team moves home base from Babson to Bentley

https://thewellesleynews.com/23335/news-investigation/french-national-football-team-chooses-bentley-over-babson/

Not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but it would have fun to have the top ranked team in the world training at a D3 school

"The men's French national football team, Les Bleus, will train at Bentley University in Waltham during the World Cup this summer, despite having previously committed to training at Babson College. According to French football reports, the change was sparked by prolonged financial negotiations and an impasse between Babson, the French Football Federation (FFF) and FIFA.

Les Bleus are the top-ranked team in the World Cup as of April 14.

On March 26, Bentley's athletic director, Vaughn Williams, announced that the French team will arrive on June 10 and train at Bentley for the duration of the World Cup. The university will serve as a training site that the team will return to, no matter how far they travel for their tournaments, which are scheduled to happen across the country."

[SierraFD3soccer]

Yeah, I know lacrosse, but what most of us. or at least me, hear when watching D3 soccer online. https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CdSmtZmMV/

[Gregory Sager]

Yeah, I know lacrosse, but what most of us. or at least me, hear when watching D3 soccer online. https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CdSmtZmMV/

Heh! On one level, that's a pretty funny clip.

But in terms of the professionalism, or lack thereof, exhibited by the two people behind the mic, yeah ... speaking as a D3 play-by-play guy, it makes me cringe. As the note accompanying the clip indicates, this really gives D3 a bad name. And I agree with you that it's sadly all-too-common among the D3 schools that let students do their play-by-play.

Don't get me wrong; some students are fairly adept at calling a game properly, and kudos to the schools that actually try to train their student broadcasters before putting them on the air. But this kind of stuff is depressingly widespread across the division.

[Ejay]

See now, I loved it. I love student announcers, especially when they're homers.

[BaboNation]

French National Team moves home base from Babson to Bentley

https://thewellesleynews.com/23335/news-investigation/french-national-football-team-chooses-bentley-over-babson/

Not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but it would have fun to have the top ranked team in the world training at a D3 school

"The men's French national football team, Les Bleus, will train at Bentley University in Waltham during the World Cup this summer, despite having previously committed to training at Babson College. According to French football reports, the change was sparked by prolonged financial negotiations and an impasse between Babson, the French Football Federation (FFF) and FIFA.

Les Bleus are the top-ranked team in the World Cup as of April 14.

On March 26, Bentley's athletic director, Vaughn Williams, announced that the French team will arrive on June 10 and train at Bentley for the duration of the World Cup. The university will serve as a training site that the team will return to, no matter how far they travel for their tournaments, which are scheduled to happen across the country."

Disappointing, but we'll probably never get the full story.  I too was looking forward to having a World Cup team train there as they have numerous times in the past, and not just for WC matches.  Babson has been very accommodating in the prior years.
I suspect and expect Babson will still get a team.

[Hopkins92]

See now, I loved it. I love student announcers, especially when they're homers.

Yeah, I've heard a LOT worse than that.

[Hopkins92]

French National Team moves home base from Babson to Bentley

https://thewellesleynews.com/23335/news-investigation/french-national-football-team-chooses-bentley-over-babson/

Not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but it would have fun to have the top ranked team in the world training at a D3 school

"The men's French national football team, Les Bleus, will train at Bentley University in Waltham during the World Cup this summer, despite having previously committed to training at Babson College. According to French football reports, the change was sparked by prolonged financial negotiations and an impasse between Babson, the French Football Federation (FFF) and FIFA.

Les Bleus are the top-ranked team in the World Cup as of April 14.

On March 26, Bentley's athletic director, Vaughn Williams, announced that the French team will arrive on June 10 and train at Bentley for the duration of the World Cup. The university will serve as a training site that the team will return to, no matter how far they travel for their tournaments, which are scheduled to happen across the country."

Disappointing, but we'll probably never get the full story.  I too was looking forward to having a World Cup team train there as they have numerous times in the past, and not just for WC matches.  Babson has been very accommodating in the prior years.
I suspect and expect Babson will still get a team.

Something I didn't know until just now: Bentley is D2 in 22 of 23 programs. I knew men's hockey is D1.

[SKUD]

https://newmacsports.com/news/2026/4/21/newmac-welcomes-saint-anselm-college-as-newest-member.aspx


NEWMAC Welcomes Saint Anselm College as Newest Member

[Kuiper]

Is Johns Hopkins so dominant that it should be kicked out of DIII?!  That's what a Dickinson athlete is apparently arguing in an article in their schools newspaper.  It's certainly not true in men's soccer, where they are historically strong, but nothing in either the Centennial Conference or the Division itself that would merit this reaction.

Just when every athlete at Dickinson thinks their season is going well, they realize their next match up is against Johns Hopkins University. I've felt it personally in both cross country and track, and I've heard the defeat in people's voices when they tell me they're playing Hopkins. I wasn't aware of Hopkins' athletic prowess until I got here, but watching how all of their seasons have panned out, regardless of the sport, the question came to me: why aren't they Division I? Their men's and women's lacrosse teams are both members of the Big 10 Conference, participating at the Division I level, and they are even ranked higher than schools several times their size in the Big 10, such as the University of Maryland and Rutgers.

Johns Hopkins currently has 22 varsity athletics teams at the DIII level and 2 teams at the D1 level. They have 57 national championship titles—two of those being won concurrently on November 23, 2019. Additionally, Johns Hopkins has amassed 314 conference titles, 179 of those being in the Centennial Conference. This is not very encouraging for anyone who faces Hopkins, as high-performing seasons are crushed to dust in the aftermath of getting whalloped by the Blue Jays. This serves as a slap in the face to sportsmanship as Hopkins has crafted such athletic gallantry to such a degree of punching above their weight class.

I acknowledge the benefits of being a Division III institution, but it is disheartening to toe the line with programs so clearly more dominant than you and who carry themselves in the same way as a DI school. Hopkins has a habit of using pacers during track conference championships, meaning they will ask an athlete to qualify for an event, thus taking a spot from someone else, for the sole purpose of helping their teammate hit a certain time. While not banned on paper, it introduces a new vector of competitiveness and questionable sportsmanship to the conference. Hopkins has shown that it can perform well against larger, arguably more competitive institutions and yet continues to come back to the Centennial Conference to assert dominance. The excuse of it being an academically rigorous and research-focused university loses weight when you acknowledge that every Ivy League school is Division I, holding their athletes to incredibly high standards. While I'm not in the NCAA board room calling the shots on who goes in what division, I think I speak for every frustrated athlete on this campus when I say the following: Johns Hopkins should transition to Division I athletics for all of their varsity teams.

[Ron Boerger]

The T&F students at Dickinson seem pretty out of touch.  There was a similar editorial from another in 2022.

Dickinson is competitive in some other sports so perhaps the issue is not with JHU so much as it is the Dickinson program.  Meanwhile, a little education to these student-athletes about what D3 is, what it takes to be D1, and how it is that Hopkins has a couple of D1 programs while still being a fully compliant and valued member of D3 is in order.   And maybe it's not anyone's fault other than their own for not looking at how Dickinson T&F has historically performed before they agreed to be students there.

EDIT:  In the latest NACDA Directors Cup standings, Dickinson is a very decent 51st overall (JHU, 4th) meaning that they can be competitive when they choose to be.

[Caz Bombers]

I think we all know that at the very least Hopkins should be in the UAA, they left for the Centennial in 2001 - I would have to assume they cited travel and missed class time as their reasoning. The CC is a very strong D3 conference, again as we all know, but not strong enough to contain them.

Kinda goofy to still pretend in 2026 Johns Hopkins is strongly aligned with Ursinus, Washington College, and Bryn Mawr, but not with Emory and NYU. I don't think the Dickinson student-athlete author is really in the wrong here.

[jknezek]

Look, JHU is not a "peer institution" for the CC. That doesn't mean they don't belong in DIII, it just means it can feel a little unfair to those other institutions. But that's a conference decision, and I suspect the Presidents in the CC like being under the halo of being spoken of in the same breath as JHU, even if it is in sports and not medical research.

So I get it from the athlete's point of view, many of whom are not real concerned about the "greater values" of DIII, just the possibility of winning titles, conference or otherwise. I do think JHU has advantages compared to many of the CC schools, I think it's obvious they "peer" better with the UAA, and I think JHU prefers the local, low travel, low expense, nature of the CC vs the UAA.

Should they be out of DIII? Of course not. Should they be in the CC? Well, that's a question for the CC, but I do understand the athletes' point of view.

[jknezek]

Caz Bombers beat me to it by a minute or two!

[Caz Bombers]

more than a men's soccer topic, but Merchant Marine in the Skyline Conference (and increasingly Cortland in the SUNYAC) are other examples of schools that are eating at the kiddie table when they should be taking their meals with the grownups.

[Gregory Sager]

Look, JHU is not a "peer institution" for the CC. That doesn't mean they don't belong in DIII, it just means it can feel a little unfair to those other institutions. But that's a conference decision, and I suspect the Presidents in the CC like being under the halo of being spoken of in the same breath as JHU, even if it is in sports and not medical research.

This halo effect works in reverse situations as well. Look no further than Caltech, which for decades has been dragged around like an anchor by the rest of the SCIAC, competitively speaking, because the cachet of sharing a conference with one of the most distinguished and prestigious research institutions on the entire planet was important enough for the rest of the SCIAC schools to retain the membership of an opponent that they beat like a rug in almost every sport year after year after year. To a lesser degree this halo effect characterized Macalester's relationship to the rest of the MIAC for many years as well, especially with regard to football.

It's common for current students to be somewhat myopic to the big-picture relationships that schools have with each other. There's certainly more to how schools relate to other institutions, both within and outside of conferences, than scoreboards and standings.