Photo: Jeremy Fleming
The Sweet 16 for Division I men’s soccer is set, and with it comes our head coach nominees for the Bob Bradner Coach of the Year Award.
Bob Bradner was the founder of College Soccer News and known by many as “Coach”. His tireless effort and passion for creating top-notch college soccer coverage are why CSN has nationwide credibility. Because of the work Bob put into this project for so many years, and because of the affinity he had for coaching, we thought it fitting to name our DI men’s soccer Coach of the Year Award after him.
As the CSN founder, Bob gave us two gifts: “One is roots, and the other is wings”.
Coach of the Year Nominee Criteria
Many traits make up a successful coaching campaign; results, development, tactics, and recruiting are just a few examples. The most important trait, when highlighting an individual season, is results. So, our initial criteria to create our nominees is advancing to the Sweet 16. The NCAA Tournament is the climactic finale to the college season, and to earn a spot as a COTY contender, we felt the requirement should include placing in this round of the tournament at a minimum.
From those 16 teams, we narrowed down the list using season-long metrics to ensure we included coaches who led their teams to greater heights by achieving other notable results in 2025. Out of the Sweet 16 teams, our final list consists of those who won either their conference regular season or conference tournament. To account for the possibility that a team had an outstanding season without winning either of those championships, we also include teams that finished top 10 in RPI.
Given all of these results-based criteria, here are our nine Bob Bradner Coach of the Year nominees:
Doug Allison – Furman (Pictured above) – Won the Southern Conference Double
Nick Carlin-Voigt – Portland – Is ranked 8th in RPI
Sasho Cirovski – Maryland – Won the Big Ten Regular Season
Zach Haines – High Point – Won the Big South Double
Kevin Kalish – Saint Louis – Won the A10 Double
George Kiefer – Grand Canyon – Won the WAC Tournament
Richard Nuttall – Hofstra – First in the CAA North Division and most conference points overall in the CAA
Ruben Resendes – Bryant – Is ranked 6th in RPI
Brian Wiese – Georgetown – Won the Big East Double
How the Coach of the Year will be selected
Now that we have our nine nominees, we will ask all Division I men’s soccer coaching staffs to vote for their Coach of the Year. We used a set of criteria to create a final list, but ultimately, we want coaches’ input to help decide the winner, as they are the experts who better understand the day-to-day of coaching and what it takes to achieve the outstanding results of all the above candidates.
