By Brian Maurer | @BAMaurerMedia
Making changes to the current college soccer schedule has been a debate with multiple proposals for well over a decade. Especially in men’s soccer where the vast majority of the sport around the world is played on an elongated fall-to-spring year long calendar. The United States’ most popular professional league, Major League Soccer (MLS), is one of the most recent professional leagues to change to this schedule. They begin their new calendar format in July, 2027.
College soccer has always been on a compressed fall calendar for both men and women. The compressed schedule requires programs to play their full season of generally 17-20 regular season games in an 11-12 week season, before postseason action. This compression requires soccer teams to play two or sometimes three games per week.
Under the current calendar structure there is a spring schedule that can include up to five games. However, those games do not count towards a competitive format and are more or less exhibitions that help coaches and players continue to get training reps to fill the eight month gap between August and November.
The longstanding compressed soccer calendar has led to an Oversight Committee tasked with bringing a proposal of a new decompressed schedule that can help relieve some of the pressure the current calendar puts on student-athletes.
“This current iteration of this model that we’re looking at is something that the Men’s Soccer Oversight Committee put forward into the governance structure. It’s something that was built off of what has been done for a longtime. I think this concept has been discussed for about ten, fifteen years at least in an opportunity to decompress the current men’s soccer college season,” said Chris Schneider, the Chair of the Men’s Soccer Oversight Committee.
The primary goal of this redistribution model is to decompress the soccer schedule for student athletes to improve their college experience on the field and in the classroom.
“We call this the Redistribution Model, the flexibility model, because it is not a year round soccer model. It is not an expansion of what we currently do. Currently, we have one hundred and thirty two days to participate in men’s soccer. And that’s what’s within your twenty hour a week window. You get one hundred and thirty two days for that. And this maintains that you have the same hundred and thirty two days. We also maintain the same number of contests. Twenty-five contests,” continued Schneider. “That was important, but we wanted to spread it out. So what you see within this model is the opportunity to do just that. But it also provides an opportunity for those conferences or institutions that may not want to go heavy into the spring to maintain a fall competition season and keep that relatively similar to what they’re doing now. So conferences do have the flexibility to conduct a fall competition, conduct a fall conference tournament to determine their automatic qualifier. And then those teams would only need to participate in a minimum of three contests in the spring.”
With this proposed Redistribution Model, the fall preseason and first competitions wouldn’t start till late August or early September depending on the school. The fall segment would then end the week before Thanksgiving. Play would then be open to resume during the spring semester starting in mid-February and the regular season would end at the end of April, concluding with the NCAA Tournament in May.
Bullet point breakdown of proposed redistribution schedule:
- Fall season: 11 Weeks to schedule a maximum of 15 games (Late-August to November)
- Spring season: 9 Weeks to schedule a maximum of 10 games (Mid-February to April; minimum 3 games)
- NCAA Tournament at conclusion of spring season in May.
* Schools and conferences would be allowed to choose how heavy or light to schedule their games and tournaments based on resources available to them.
Men’s college soccer has been looking at options for changing their calendar for over a decade, and this most recent proposal looked to make a competitive shift while also limiting changes to cost, and make sure individual programs and conferences have the flexibility to do what is best for them within a new format.
“When we formulated this plan from the beginning…we considered all of these options when this was presented to us…after a decade, over a decade of data, research, we knew that as senior level administrators, that there would be challenges that would be presented to all of the leagues and the schools as this came to them and was proposed…those knee jerk reactions of what a full season model would look like and what that branding was like…We called it redistribution, a flex model.” says Rob Emmerich, Deputy Director of Athletics at Stony Brook and Oversight Committee representive. “So immediately we went into this can’t be expensive. It can’t increase costs. We have to consider weather, staffing, facilities…there are different demands all across the country. So we acknowledge the merits in those arguments. That’s built in and baked into this plan which preserves league autonomy and school autonomy within the league autonomy structure to allow the best interest of particular leagues and schools while at the same time decreasing costs.” continued Emerich.
While the changes on paper are minimal compared to what men’s college soccer programs are already doing in terms of weeks and games, it is unprecedented in terms of a fall sport adding a competitive spring term to the calendar. Fall sports have pushed into winter by adding an additional couple of weeks (football), and winter sports have pushed a couple of weeks into spring (basketball). In over a century of college athletics, no sport has been able to make the calendar shift to two completely separate, disconnected terms, like the proposed fall and spring calendar in the Redistribution Model.
“When I think of unprecedented, I hope that’s the case, but not in the case that was presented in the media or in that [Henry Bushnell article for The Athletic]. I hope it’s unprecedented in that it’s looked at that this particular oversight committee basically took modern college athletics leadership and redefined it. Because I think if you look over the last ten to fifteen years, if you would have said to us ten years ago or fifteen years ago we’d be paying players or NIL or RevShare, you would probably say, ‘What? How can that be?’ We took a proposal, gave it flexibility, took a modern look on leadership, what the best interest of the men’s soccer student athlete looks like.” stated Emerich.
From a strictly sporting perspective based on on-field product, the switch to a fall/spring model makes a ton of sense when you compare the sport of soccer to how it is trained and played in youth development within the United States and around the world.
“We just want a soccer season. I mean, we got nailed and pegged in 1959 a seasonal model that never, not even in 1955, was appropriately put together for a soccer player. It’s just not. That’s why you don’t see my son playing in a season that way at fifteen years old. That’s why you don’t see Rob’s son playing in a season that way. That’s why you don’t see professional athletes playing in a season that way from youth to a professional from the United States to Europe to South America. Soccer is not appropriately played in a ten to twelve week season and then taking nine months off of, you know, very little, minimal to little competition.” said Carlos Somoano Head Coach of North Carolina and Oversight Committee member. “We all know that our whole job is to maximize the experience for these kids and to do better. And that’s what I appreciate of our administrators here. They’re looking to make it better.” Somoano continued.
Men’s college soccer product would improve but could it End Men’s College Soccer as We KNow It?
The on-field product would almost certainly improve by a substantial margin with the new proposed model, but schedules on paper do not mirror the bureaucracy that occurs when trying to make changes.
What makes this proposal particularly confusing is that players, coaches, and many involved directly in soccer think these changes would benefit the college sport. The problem is that many programs fear being folded because of incurred cost and the added difficulty of mapping out a spring schedule that could put them at a competitive disadvantage.
This creates a unique scenario where the vast majority of Athletic Departments with men’s soccer teams are interested in a change similar to the new Redistribution Model proposed. According to a source, 92% of men’s soccer coaches want a new model, but are willing to vote this proposal down because it could lead to their program being folded.
This leads to a scenario where a lesser on-field product is preferred to no product at all. When discussing how real the concerns are to coaches within Division I men’s soccer, the sentiment has been discussed by sources that up to 40-50 programs could fold relatively quickly if the Redistribution Model were to pass.
The reasoning for this is nuanced but there are two overarching arguments that have generally risen over the rest:
- Added cost – adding an athletic trainer for the spring as well as an additional Sports Information Director (SID). Estimated added cost of around $100,000 per year.
- Competitive disadvantage – around half of Division I programs would struggle to schedule home games during February and early March due to inclement weather which could cause a competitive disadvantage if they have to bulk a bunch of road games together when they are trying to compete and qualify for the NCAA Tournament.
The cost is minimal for many of the larger schools and those with more prominent soccer programs, but for those men’s soccer teams that are already being strung to tight budgets any added cost or competitive disadvantage could be seen as a good enough reason to dissolve the program. Athletic Directors can easily see these changes as something they are being asked to invest in, but have no way of seeing a reasonable return. This is where a significant portion of the pushback for the proposed Redistribution Model has been coming from.
The Friction Of This Proposal Will Last Far Beyond This Vote Regardless of Outcome
According to sources, 208 programs have voted against the Redistribution Model. 241 “no’s” would rescind the Redistribution Model proposal. Many of those programs do not currently have men’s soccer, but well over 100 programs with men’s soccer voted “no”. This means that the majority of men’s soccer programs have voted to oppose to the calendar shift as things stand, even if they agree the product of college men’s soccer would improve with the changes.
This also means that there are two large conglomerates with men’s soccer on either side of this vote that are creating a ton of friction, which can be seen boiling over on social media, and has for the last couple weeks. This vote will likely come down to the wire, and regardless of outcome men’s college soccer appears to be at a crossroads from which there is no turning back.
