Schools that Should Be Better

[Ejay]

I agree with Muhlenberg and Haverford. Not trying to get too hung up on their respective fields, but particularly Haverford, that field has deteriorated to an embarrassingly low level.

I'll throw a name that rarely gets discussed of late, from the Landmark Conference... Susquehanna. Ten years ago, this team went 18(!)-3-1 and made it out of the first weekend in the NCAA's with wins over Cabrini and Paywall U. before falling to Ohio Northern. This year, they are 2-11-2... Going back to 2017: 26-53-8.

It's a beautiful campus and a decent turf field. They just seem stuck in a rut.

I agree with Haverford and Swarthmore. Elite institutions that should have a better product consistently. I know there's been a lot of divisiveness between athletes and non-athletes at those schools so maybe that plays into it some?

Susquehanna is a very nice campus and did have a few good years. But to me that's not a reason they should be better. There's not really anything unique about the school that makes it more attractive than many others. Saying they should be better is like saying Randolph-Macon should be better, which also has a beatifiul campus and nice turf field.

[PaulNewman]

PN - curious as to your logic on Kean and RUC.

Yeah, I'm no Reg 4/5 expert.  RUC has had a couple of decent years but overall has fallen off from being a 2013 national finalist.

Kean had good year last year and I think made tournament one other year (lost 1st round UMass-Boston 3-0) in past decade but a lot of very mediocre (or worse) years.

I don't see the appeal of Kean or RUC. Students looking to stay in-state are better served by TCNJ, Rowan and Montclair. The latter two are historically very good, and the former is on my list for should be good but isn't.  All other NJAC schools can have a good year (or few years) every now again, but I  wouldn't expect them to be consistently strong.

Oh, OK, gotcha.

I wasn't including them because of appeal but because of past history.  I think Kean won a national title and had a pretty famous coach.  RUC I believe still has the same coach that got them to prominence.  Messiah barely, barely beat RUC in the 2013 final.  But then again, Loras should have won the semi with RUC imo.  And yes, RUC had some D1 transfers although iirc stud striker Mike Ryan was there as a frosh and maybe was a soph that year.

[camosfan]

How does one recruit to Camden,NJ? The 2013 team had a couple transfers from Rutgers did they not?

I have a kid at Camden and went to the Rowan game this season, I could not believe the obvious disparity in spending between the two state institutions.

[PaulNewman]

Swat is a good one.  I've always thought of Swat as just too brutal academically to be truly devoted to a sports team there.  But I've also wondered the same thing about Chicago and obviously they've figured it out.  There are D3s that are stellar academically (NESCACs and others) and then there are D3s that are stellar and brutal, and that's how Swat, Chicago, maybe Carleton, and a few others seem to me.

[Hopkins92]

I agree with Muhlenberg and Haverford. Not trying to get too hung up on their respective fields, but particularly Haverford, that field has deteriorated to an embarrassingly low level.

I'll throw a name that rarely gets discussed of late, from the Landmark Conference... Susquehanna. Ten years ago, this team went 18(!)-3-1 and made it out of the first weekend in the NCAA's with wins over Cabrini and Paywall U. before falling to Ohio Northern. This year, they are 2-11-2... Going back to 2017: 26-53-8.

It's a beautiful campus and a decent turf field. They just seem stuck in a rut.

I agree with Haverford and Swarthmore. Elite institutions that should have a better product consistently. I know there's been a lot of divisiveness between athletes and non-athletes at those schools so maybe that plays into it some?

Susquehanna is a very nice campus and did have a few good years. But to me that's not a reason they should be better. There's not really anything unique about the school that makes it more attractive than many others. Saying they should be better is like saying Randolph-Macon should be better, which also has a beatifiul campus and nice turf field.

Valid points, but I guess we should drill down a bit more on how we're filtering these schools. Lots and lots of schools have a crappy or non-existent campus and/or gnarly fields and down-trodden facilities.

In no particular order:

* Location
* Academics
* Specialized School/Study Area
* Field/Athletic Facility
* Student Body Size/Demographics
* Coach (playing style, temperament)
* Roster Size
* Tradition (of winning)

I'm sure there are more... And I doubt many of us are going to sit here and drill down too far on all these fronts.

[camosfan]

Vassar and Stevens are two solid academic programs that seems to be making the move in the sport.

[jknezek]

B-SC and Berry. There are some D2 and NAIA schools floating around in Alabama and Georgia, but few D1 soccer schools. UAB is the only D1 men's soccer playing school in AL I believe. With no SEC men's soccer, B-SC and Berry are just the type of regional pull, good academic reputation schools that appeal to suburban soccer parents. And there is a lot of good suburban soccer played around here. Strong clubs, strong facilities, strong paid for coaching at the youth level.

Neither Berry or B-SC is bad, both are generally competitive in the SAA, but I feel like there are a lot of athletes down here that could play after h.s. if you could get some coaches in these programs that could convince a few more of these elite kids playing the sport you love in D3 is better than watching SEC football.

[Another Mom]

Those schools with off the charts academics should be able to attract quality players both domestic and international. 

I am curious, are there examples of off the charts academics that recruit internationals well?  With students who would, in many cases, choose to pay tuition rather than staying home or going Division II?

W&L has kids from Estonia, Spain, England,  Zambia and Zimbabwe on it's roster, although there isn't a distinct pipeline to one country


I would put W&L as a team that should be better. They have a lot of talented players, but have seemed shaky, none more so than last night of course. And I am not enough of a soccer expert to understand why so many shots on goal fail to result in a score, but for W&L, they don't.

[camosfan]

B-SC and Berry. There are some D2 and NAIA schools floating around in Alabama and Georgia, but few D1 soccer schools. UAB is the only D1 men's soccer playing school in AL I believe. With no SEC men's soccer, B-SC and Berry are just the type of regional pull, good academic reputation schools that appeal to suburban soccer parents. And there is a lot of good suburban soccer played around here. Strong clubs, strong facilities, strong paid for coaching at the youth level.

Neither Berry or B-SC is bad, both are generally competitive in the SAA, but I feel like there are a lot of athletes down here that could play after h.s. if you could get some coaches in these programs that could convince a few more of these elite kids playing the sport you love in D3 is better than watching SEC football.

There is a very good youth club in Birmingham, saw them at a few showcase tournaments, 2-3 years ago ,South Carolina also has a good team in Charleston area and there is also a solid  one in Tennessee.

[Ejay]

PN - curious as to your logic on Kean and RUC.

Yeah, I'm no Reg 4/5 expert.  RUC has had a couple of decent years but overall has fallen off from being a 2013 national finalist.

Kean had good year last year and I think made tournament one other year (lost 1st round UMass-Boston 3-0) in past decade but a lot of very mediocre (or worse) years.

I don't see the appeal of Kean or RUC. Students looking to stay in-state are better served by TCNJ, Rowan and Montclair. The latter two are historically very good, and the former is on my list for should be good but isn't.  All other NJAC schools can have a good year (or few years) every now again, but I  wouldn't expect them to be consistently strong.

Oh, OK, gotcha.

I wasn't including them because of appeal but because of past history.  I think Kean won a national title and had a pretty famous coach.  RUC I believe still has the same coach that got them to prominence.  Messiah barely, barely beat RUC in the 2013 final.  But then again, Loras should have won the semi with RUC imo.  And yes, RUC had some D1 transfers although iirc stud striker Mike Ryan was there as a frosh and maybe was a soph that year.

Kean won the championship at home in 92 against OWU I believe. They had Fredy Gurian, who was/is the greatest D3 striker I've ever seen. I played against him in HS and College - he was like a man amongst boys. He was a 2x first team AA and had 72 goals and 36 assists in only 3 years (24-12 average). I believe he left to play pro in Colombia and soon after broke his leg that effectively ended his career.

[Gregory Sager]

Those schools with off the charts academics should be able to attract quality players both domestic and international.  I would include Swat whose record between 2015 and 2021 is 49-45-15, just about .500, and whose record this year is 6-6-4 with a finish near the bottom of Centennial in sight.   I would also add Pomona whose record since 2015 has been under .500.  Perhaps there should also be a thread for over-achievers. How does a school like North Park become a bastion for D3 men's soccer--it is certainly not academics or location.

Your thinking about college soccer solely being the province of high-cachet institutions of higher learning (i.e., a sport of privilege) is outdated. Nowadays, even the schools that cater to the lumpenproletariat are casting their eye towards achieving success on the soccer pitch.

And you're very much mistaken about North Park's location working against it in terms of soccer recruiting. While Chicago does have a bad rap for crime -- and the city as a whole does have a serious crime problem -- the North Park campus is located in a relatively safe middle-class neighborhood on the far north side of the city, many miles away from the danger zones of the West Side and South Side. More importantly, Chicago is a feature, not a bug, for a lot of young people looking for a school. The opportunities for internships, field education, etc., are unparalleled in a place like Chicago, and there's a heckuva lot more to do and see in Chicago than there is in Waverly or Northfield or Ada or Adrian or Hanover. Plus, if you're an international student, Chicago is exactly the kind of place where you want to be, as opposed to some anonymous suburb or a small town out in the middle of nowhere.

North Park's location is a definite liability as far as football recruiting is concerned. But it's an asset as far as soccer recruiting is concerned.

That school has 30+ on the roster from Sweden and Denmark, they have some feeder system!

No, it doesn't. It's Sweden and Norway, not Sweden and Denmark. Our Norwegian student-athletes would be very, very unhappy with you for mistaking them for Danes. I don't want to get into details, but battle axes, mead intoxication, and blood eagles might be involved.

(Also, for the record, there aren't 30+ Scandinavians on the Vikings men's soccer roster. NPU has twelve Norwegians, ten Swedes, two Dutch, a Brit, a Lithuanian, a Filipino, a Nigerian, and a Portuguese listed on the roster. There are also a couple of other guys who list a foreign city as their hometown but who graduated from local Chicagoland high schools; i.e., they're from immigrant families. NPU gets a lot of them, both athletes and non-athletes. Such is life in and around a world-class city.)

[Kuiper]

I agree with Deutschfan and have long thought strong academic schools that attract nationally are a natural fit for a strong D3 soccer program.  I personally know many D1 caliber players who are focused on strong academic schools and actively consider both D1 and D3 schools that meet that criteria.  In fact, for all the "right fit" mantra and the "D1 or bust" concern, this is the group that worries the least about division label and, while they generally would put Ivy League schools above all, it's not because they are laser focused on D1 per se and they don't consider many D3 schools to be much of a consolation prize, if any.  This is the demographic most likely to (1) be fully mobile and willing to go far away from home for school, (2) not need the D1/D2 scholarship $ (either because they have family resources or because they have strong enough academics to get academic merit $ + financial need $ to do better than most men's scholarship $ available), and (3) generally of interest to a lot of strong academic schools' admissions departments anyway.  So, while admissions standards might be high at these schools, the coaches can recruit nationally and often get players of a higher caliber than they might otherwise get.  Many of the NESCACs and UAA schools fit this profile of a strong academic AND strong soccer program, plus Johns Hopkins, Kenyon, Swarthmore etc.  One difference between academically strong D3s who have and don't have strong soccer programs seems to be recruiting presence.  The best ones travel to events and really recruit, the others seem not to have the budget or ambition for that. So, who more or less fits the profile but hasn't had as strong a soccer program?

Pomona-Pitzer

First of all, it's two REALLY strong academic schools (Pomona higher than Pitzer) that are entirely different in orientation, meaning they are attractive to a broader group of prospective students and provide two different admissions departments for a kid to try.  They also share the campus of the Claremont Schools, which is beautiful.   The classes are small and the schools have a small college liberal arts school feel with the resources of the the larger Claremont campus.  It's also close enough to Los Angeles to not feel remote and provide multiple airport access options and both schools already recruit nationally.  Plus, the women's program has been strong recently and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps has been strong for a long time (although perhaps that will turn with the hazing suspensions and the coaching churn), so it certainly can be done even though SoCal D3 is sort of on an island.  Pomona-Pitzer men's soccer has seemed to hang around the lower middle of SCIAC in recent years because they luck into some strong players through the attraction of the schools alone, but they attend very few recruiting events, maybe hold one poorly-publicized ID camp a year that gets 15-20 kids, and basically just coast.  Bill Swartz has been head coach for a long time (37+ years) and things may have grown stagnant.  He hasn't been on the sideline for several weeks, so I don't know what is going on there, but the associate head coach, Mike Ditta, who was an assistant for a long time at UC Irvine and has been running the team on the sidelines when Swartz has been absent, has been working to turn things around and has been a bit more ambitious in recruiting.  Pomona-Pitzer just opened an expanded and revamped athletics facility with team locker rooms (that they didn't have before), a huge D1-caliber weight room, and film rooms etc, so perhaps they will be able to jump start things.  One drawback is that, unlike other top SCIAC programs, including Redlands and C-M-S, the soccer team hasn't taken the trips necessary to build up it's strength of schedule.  I don't know if that's lack of athletic program support or lack of ambition, but that's likely a turnoff to a prospective student serious about both academic and soccer.  The field is also nice and well-maintained, but fan support is pretty limited and the field is kind of set up to limit fan access, with the team benches literally in front of and obscuring the one small set of bleachers and fans prohibited from sitting on the very small sideline on the opposite side of the field, which leaves a hilly area behind the goal as basically the only area to watch the game and not be in the way of warmups among the players on the team bench side.

Occidental 

It's not as strong academically as Pomona-Pitzer or Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, but it's strong enough to be competitive with a lot of east coast D3 schools, it does recruit well nationally (especially since Obama, who went there), and it's basically the only small liberal arts college local to Los Angeles, a massive area to recruit from if students want to stay local.  Also, since the school dropped football, the facilities are basically all available to them and they were renovated not that long ago, giving the whole program a D1 feel.  I do think they are on the upswing a little because they've opened up a pipeline with a local MLS Next program where the head coach, Rod Lafaurie, is Director of Elite Programming (who, I should point out, is a presence at showcases and recruiting events, which is not the case at some of these other schools).  One of the three freshman Lafaurie brought in from the U19 MLS Next team he coached there last year is tied for Oxy's leading goal scorer this year and another started almost all games, playing full 90s every game, and is tied for the team lead in assists at Oxy this season.  I tend to think the team is a bit less than the sum of its parts because the playing style is kind of an awkward mix between the high-skilled passing game of their best players, and fouling and kick and run among their lesser-skilled players, but that might change as they continue to upgrade.

Oberlin

Oberlin is a school that is relatively close to Cleveland, attracts students from both coasts with a high academic profile, and should be at least as competitive recruiting locally with programs like Denison, Ohio Wesleyan, Ohio Northern, Kenyon, and Case Western Reserve.  I don't know if that is lack of support for athletics at the school, or lack of ambition on the part of the coach, Blake New, who has a pro soccer pedigree, but it seems to just skate by year after year.

Grinnell

It's in Iowa, which may mean flyover country for a lot of people, but the student body certainly attracts nationally and it has a good academic profile.  Their record isn't bad over the years, but they don't seem to have gotten any traction toward establishing a stronger soccer program.  Their non-conference travel schedule isn't particularly ambitious beyond attending an occasional weekend tournament that brings together stronger programs, but there are certainly strong soccer programs in the midwest where they could challenge themselves.  They tend not to play the Luther or Loras programs, though, and they don't seem to have University of Chicago or Washington University on recent schedules, both of which are probably about 5 hour drives away.  In the West coast, that would be considered a quite reasonable drive for better competition and higher profile games.

Sarah Lawrence

Solid academic school that both attracts students nationally and is well positioned geographically to pick off strong players in the New York City/Long Island area.  They have a relatively new coach with a D1 background who may be laying the foundation for a culture change.  I see that freshman and sophomores started a decent amount of games this year.

UC Santa Cruz

I get that it has all sorts of structural obstacles.  The nearest D3 program is like 500 miles away.  Its conference, the Coast-to-Coast conference, is basically just an end of season tournament, often in Virginia.  Nevertheless, it's a state school with effectively a built-in-scholarship for California residents, it's academics are at least decent for a UC and there's a huge population of base of students who apply to it every year through the UC common app.  Some of its structural obstacles could be viewed as an advantage, since they come down to Los Angeles at least 3 times a year for at least 1-2 games each time, and up to Oregon or Washington for a 2-3 games, making it attractive for students who want to go away for school, but still want their parents to be able to watch a bunch of their games locally.  They've even traveled to Texas a couple of times over the years.  Plus, the conference tournament certainly feels like an NCAA tournament trip given the travel, making it sort of D1-lite end-of-season travel.  It's certainly no worse travel than Colorado College, and probably better, in a similarly beautiful (although very different) location.

Wells College

Other than a period from about 2013-2016, they have never been very strong, but since 2016, they've fallen off a cliff.  This year, they are 0-14 right now and the most wins they have had in a season since 2016 is 5.  It's not an uber strong academic school, but it was always viewed as a pretty good school and the cross enrollment options with Cornell and Ithaca might make it more attractive for some students who want the small liberal arts college and more academic options.  What happened to them?  I only count 17 players on their current roster (maybe 15 are real players) and almost all are freshman and sophomores.

[Pilsner]

Offering Salisbury (MD) Seagulls as a school that should be better.  Academics not part of the equation unless you are looking for high acceptance rate, but it checks the box for a lot of kids and parents. State school, inexpensive, large student body, good recruiting base for players and coaches.  And they beat Mary Washington this week so congrats despite a poor record.

[camosfan]

Offering Salisbury (MD) Seagulls as a school that should be better.  Academics not part of the equation unless you are looking for high acceptance rate, but it checks the box for a lot of kids and parents. State school, inexpensive, large student body, good recruiting base for players and coaches.  And they beat Mary Washington this week so congrats despite a poor record.

Tons of Maryland kids in NESCAC,but Maryland has a lot of youth players so they should be competitive .

[Hopkins92]

Regarding crime. Hell, if that were a true issue, no one would ever go near places like Baltimore, Philly, New York, St. Louis, Boston, Atlanta and other areas with groups of D3 schools. I think we could certainly find campuses that aren't in a great part of a given city (Penn/Drexel pops to mind), but I know most universities aren't smack dab in the middle of areas of those cities with high crime rates.

I'm not even sure if that's what deutchfan was even saying about location, but I'd look to him to clarify. I DO know that there are lots of prospective students, (and/or their parents) that simply won't even consider going to school in, or very much adjacent, to a large city. It's just not what they want out of the collegiate experience.