The quarter-century movement to establish year-round men’s collegiate soccer has gained new momentum in the past year, with the U.S. Soccer Federation having discussed with the Big Ten and ACC ways to launch a pilot program.
Since mid-2024, the two power conferences have held regular talks with soccer’s national governing body about initially inviting 32 schools to participate in a two-semester trial run, seeking to bypass the traditional NCAA legislative process that has halted previous attempts to put the year-round model into play.
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“These past failures are part of the foundation for the ongoing conversation,” said Chad Hawley, the Big Ten’s senior vice president for policy and compliance, who has been the league office’s point person on the initiative.
The goal is to alleviate “match compression” in the current, cramped 12-week fall NCAA season, thereby fostering improved player training and recovery while better aligning the collegiate calendar with professional leagues around the world. The conversations come as U.S. Soccer has demonstrated a new interest in helping to boost the United States’ collegiate game.
“As U.S. Soccer exists in service to soccer, we are committed to supporting the long-term sustainability of men’s and women’s college soccer, across all levels of the game,” the federation said in a statement.
In the summer of 2024, there was a push to see if the pilot program could get off the ground for the 2025-26 academic year, timed to coincide with the start of the 2026 World Cup in North America. As part of this initiative, a document obtained by Sportico presented a 32-team, four-region structure that included all 15 men’s soccer programs from the ACC, all 11 from the Big Ten, as well as West Virginia, Oregon State, San Diego State, South Carolina, Kentucky and UCF.
However, by the end of last year, that ambitious timeline had been put on indefinite hold to allow for, among other things, a clearer understanding of the NCAA’s evolving governance structure.
A Good College Try
The concept for the pilot program was introduced to a broader audience of college coaches at last month’s United Soccer Coaches Convention in Chicago, during a slide presentation led by Emily Cosler, U.S. Soccer’s senior director of strategy. But sources emphasized that the federation’s role in the presentation was largely driven by its efforts to support the financially struggling coaches’ group, which has been at the forefront of previous efforts advocating for the two-semester model.
Maryland’s Sasho Cirovski and North Carolina’s Carlos Somoano, both long-time proponents of the two-semester model, remain the key driving forces behind the pilot program within the coaching community. (Neither university made the coaches available for interviews with Sportico.)
Arguably the most influential figure in this equation, however, is a relatively new one: JT Batson, U.S. Soccer’s CEO and secretary general, now in his third year at the helm. A Stanford graduate and tech entrepreneur, Batson has taken an active interest in both the pilot program and the broader landscape of intercollegiate soccer.
“Batson and [U.S. Soccer president] Cindy Parlow Cone, working hand-in-hand, has been the greatest change in the landscape and breadth of fresh air in United States soccer in last 30 years,” said Rusty Oglesby, head women’s soccer coach at Hardin-Simmons University and immediate past president of United Soccer Coaches. “The federation is finally doing what the federation should be doing, which is worrying about the landscape of soccer in the United States and not just the [U.S.] national team.”
U.S. Soccer noted that as part of last year’s “ecosystem review process,” its membership “reaffirmed the strategic importance of college soccer to the entire American soccer landscape.”
While U.S. Soccer declined to comment on specific inquiries regarding the pilot program, it did point out that it has recently launched several college soccer working groups.
With the organization experiencing notable financial growth in recent years, including hefty contributions from billionaire donors, sources say U.S. Soccer is considering whether to allocate as much as a seven- or eight-figure portion of its annual talent development budget toward college soccer and, more specifically, funding changes to the men’s model. Until last year, U.S. Soccer had shown little interest in offering any support for such initiatives, let alone investing millions of dollars to make it happen.
“Historically, for whatever the reasons, there hasn’t been a great deal of integration between the NCAA and national governing bodies,” Hawley said. “So, this is a new thing for everybody. But I think we are at a point in time where it behooves everybody to be open-minded about opportunities that make sense on a sport-by-sport basis.”
Goal-line Shift
The latest attempt at the two-semester model comes at a pivotal moment for non-revenue intercollegiate sports, which are grappling with heightened uncertainty amid rapid economic shifts in the NCAA Division I structure. The NCAA has informed schools they must confirm by March 1 their intentions to opt in to the House v. NCAA settlement, which would enable each to disperse nearly $21 million in total payments to their athletes next year. The settlement would also entail changes to roster limits for most sports, including men’s soccer, which would see its limit more than triple to 28 players.
While the NCAA has not been directly involved in the brainstorm, Hawley says the association has been kept abreast along the way.
“Notwithstanding the challenges of getting the legislation voted on, I don’t think there is an affirmative desire to move soccer outside the NCAA,” Hawley said, though he added that the College Football Playoff currently exists outside the association’s auspices.
Other sources speaking with Sportico highlighted a key point of contention beyond U.S. Soccer’s financial commitment: whether the proposed model would be better aligned with the structure of FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, than the NCAA’s. The former could offer greater flexibility and open new revenue streams for participating programs, such as the prospect of schools receiving transfer fees for players who leave to join professional clubs.
Hawley contends it doesn’t necessarily have to be an either-or proposition, noting how all NCAA tennis also falls under the dominion of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association.
History of Rejection
The push for two-semester soccer has been underway since at least 2000, when a group of men’s coaches, led by Maryland’s Cirovski, first presented the idea to the NCAA. However, their pitch was met with a firm rejection, and subsequent efforts over the years have foundered.
The most advanced proposal was the “21st Century Model,” which was set to be voted on by the NCAA in April 2020 before being derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. If not for that, Hawley believes the vote would have been at least close. A 2022 proposal to the Division I council was again tabled, and the Division I Student-Athlete Experience Committee declined to sponsor the proposal in late 2023.
Given the trend, Hawley said the inside joke among proponents is that they may need to start planning to call for a “22nd Century Model.”
U.S. Soccer’s direct involvement in the college game could be significant in other ways. Intercollegiate programs once stocked the U.S. men’s national team with talent. Players who came up through the college ranks—including Tony Meola (Virginia), Tab Ramos (NC State) and Paul Caligiuri (UCLA)— were part of a generation that put America on the global soccer map, helping end a 40-year World Cup qualifying drought in 1990. NCAA veterans such as Clint Dempsey (Furman) and Oguchi Onyewu (Clemson) continued to be instrumental in a quarter-century run that saw the Yanks qualify for the next seven World Cups.
Yet as the men’s game has grown in the U.S., with more Americans than ever playing for big clubs in Europe’s best leagues, the college game has seen its influence wither. MLS, the U.S. pro league, has developed a European-style academy system to identify and train teenage prospects, and by the mid-2010s, nearly all of the better players chose to turn pro as teenagers via the academy system rather than deal with NCAA restrictions on training time, NIL and pay-for-play. Other top youth players, such as American superstar Christian Pulisic, have left the U.S. altogether, opting to sign and train as teens with European clubs.
Still, the professional system misses out on identifying potential national team-level players, especially late bloomers, and some USMNT members have used college as a stepping stone, including goalkeeper Matt Turner, who vaulted from Fairfield University to eventually starting for the U.S. in the 2022 World Cup.
The existing college infrastructure, with its established facilities, housing and coaching, offers a potential outlet to expand the U.S. player pool. But nowadays it’s almost impossible to develop top players who can only train and compete for four or five months a year. The two-semester model is an effort to remedy that.
“It would be a huge statement to Europe and Central America and some of these continents where we are getting a lot of players from,” said Rob Dow, the head men’s coach at Vermont, which won last year’s College Cup with a roster featuring 12 foreign-born players.
Dow also attended the pilot program presentation in Chicago last month, and he said that although his school hasn’t been mentioned as one of the prospective 32, he would like it to be in consideration.
“University of Vermont soccer is a priority, and we have great support from people in and around the department wanting to have these conversations about how we can continue to win national championships at the highest level,” Dow said. “But we have challenges, and we will have to continue to be creative to exist in this space.”
What Women Want
The two-semester soccer model has not garnered the same kind of interest on the women’s side, which has taken a much more surgical approach to decompressing its schedule. Last month, the NCAA’s Division I council approved a proposal to extend the D-I women’s soccer season by two weeks, from 12 to 14, which would take effect for the 2026-2027. (As of now, the men’s season will stay 12 weeks long.)
Texas A&M women’s soccer head coach G Guerrieri, the recently named director of women’s college services for United Soccer Coaches, pointed to the significant differences in the talent pool demographics and the number of Division I programs as key reasons why the two-semester concept has not broken the gender barrier.
Currently, there are 212 D-I men’s programs compared to 350 women’s. Additionally, the men’s game leans more heavily on international players: In 2018, NCAA data revealed that 34% of men’s D-I soccer players were from abroad, while only 11% of women’s players were international. According to Guerrieri, this gap has only continued to expand in the years since.
Guerrieri says he doesn’t begrudge men’s college soccer for pursuing a new format, but that there are good reasons why it has so far not materialized.
“One of the hard details to get over—but what the women are firmly aware of—is that (this is) an academic model,” Guerrieri said. “We have to fit what we do into an academic program. And as cool as it could be to do something else, we are still bound by the fact we work for universities.”
The NCAA D-I women’s soccer committee is proposing to hold the future women’s College Cup on the same weekend and in the same location, Cary, N.C., as the men’s. Last year, the women’s finals were played a week prior to the men’s in Cary, while the 2025 women’s championship is set to take place in Kansas City. Guerrieri said ESPN, which broadcasts both championships, is supportive of consolidating them. That, however, would likely be confounded by a dramatic change to the men’s schedule.
Extra Time
Just as the proposal has largely remained unchanged over the years, so too have the concerns about it.
Spring soccer would compete for athletic department resources along with 10 other sports that take place then, including baseball, softball, lacrosse and outdoor track and field. For many schools, this would necessitate additional staffing requirements—for example, it’s fairly common for the designated men’s soccer team trainer in the fall to handle lacrosse or another sport in the spring.
In 2022, College Sports Communicators, a college athletics communications trade group then known as CoSIDA, took the notable step of writing to the NCAA Division I council to formally object to the 21st Century Model on account of bandwidth limitations.
“Our members nearly unanimously report the college athletics industry is facing a crisis with employee burnout and mental health,” the letter stated, “and the stresses of a change like this, without proper changes in support, will add to those issues.”
Beyond personnel, there also could be facility hurdles, as soccer often shares the same practice and playing fields as lacrosse.
Additionally, the MLS Draft is currently held in late December, raising the question of how programs would need to plan for and adapt to a potential talent drain mid-season.
“Who is going to manage it from a rules committee standpoint?” Dow said. “Is there going to be an NCAA championship, are there going to be conference championships, or is this going to be a [new] championship segment under U.S. Soccer?”
With the 2025-26 pilot program now all but officially off the table, there’s time to address some of these issues—though time itself has never been the real problem.
“There are no deadlines,” Hawley said. “But I do think the longer runway provides an opportunity to have more [talks] with U.S. Soccer and to enhance the involvement of the NCAA or even other conversations. So I don’t think the discussion will be put on pause.”
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