A committee working on behalf of U.S. Soccer has recommended that men's college soccer switch to a season that stretches across the full academic year beginning fall 2026.
The recommendation comes after U.S. Soccer tasked the 17-person "NexGen College Soccer Committee" with finding solutions to evolve college soccer to, among other things, better prepare players to turn professional and compete at the international level.
The committee recommended that more time is needed to evaluate the best future construct of women's college soccer, although the result could be the same recommendation as the men's game. Regardless of how the college game evolves, the committee said in its report, which was released on Thursday, that it "believes strongly that any of these [four proposed] options are far superior to the status quo."
Any changes, which still need clear the major hurdle of NCAA approval, would overhaul a college soccer system that has historically served as a development pathway for American pro players -- especially women -- but has not evolved with the modern professional game. Longstanding issues with college soccer include a truncated season played entirely in the fall, which puts heavy demand on athletes during that time and leaves them largely without competition for most of the year.
"The recommendations were designed to be able to deliver a better student athlete experience, to be able to provide financial stability, and to provide player development opportunities -- which are the three things that everyone in college sports said they wanted," U.S. Soccer CEO and secretary general JT Batson told ESPN. "We're optimistic for this to be able to move at pace."
Batson was not part of the committee. Dan Helfrich, principal and former CEO of Deloitte Consulting, chaired the group, which included club and league leaders from MLS, NWSL and USL, as well as athletic directors and a school president, among other stakeholders.
Under the proposal for men's soccer, all 213 Division 1 men's programs would still compete for the same championship, but in place of their traditional conferences, they would play regionally and within tiers of similarly competitive teams. Those tiers could change over time in a system similar to promotion and relegation.
Preliminary estimates in the committee's report say that such a system could save programs $25,000 to $350,000 annually in operational costs depending on their current travel. Many current conferences, driven by college football, have been realigned with disregard for geography, creating cross-country trips for in-conference games.
Helfrich said two major "pain points" for college soccer are the condensed schedules that limit athlete recovery, as well as increasing costs associated with travel and preseason starting prior to convocation of schools.
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"The ultimate solution is a response to that," he said.
The changes would only apply to NCAA Division 1 soccer.
Preseason would begin in mid-to-late August and the regular season would run until April, with a break from games and training in December and January. Games would largely be played on weekends, rather than the current structure of jamming multiple games into each week between August and December.
A championship would be played in May, which Helfrich said would give it a greater platform by not overlapping other college championships. That, too, Helfrich said, would have commercial benefits and give college soccer a greater platform for fan support, media visibility and sponsorship.
This proposed model would be better for everyone in college soccer, Helfrich said, not just the select few who are chasing professional careers.
"The experiences and the implications on all 14,000-15,000 Division 1 American soccer players, versus the hundreds that will or could play professionally, was a dominant part of the committee's debate," Helfrich told ESPN. "That was front of mind always: How do we make sure the solutions that we build are thoughtful to both of those constituencies?"
The 17-person committee held mostly virtual meetings every few weeks this year to work on the proposal and analyze four different potential options for college soccer's evolution. The most conservative option that was analyzed, which could still happen on the women's side, is a slightly expanded fall season with an added spring competition for elite teams.
Federation president Cindy Parlow Cone, who won three NCAA titles at North Carolina in addition to winning a World Cup and a pair of Olympic gold medals, initially brought the idea to Batson & VP of strategy Emily Cosler to see how the federation could help. Cone had been speaking with University of North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham about the team's budget and realized how unsustainable it was in the current model. That was Cone's first "What if?" moment.
The women's game is unique in several ways, including that it's much larger at the college level with 350 D-1 programs -- and the gap in quality between the national contenders and mid-major schools is much wider.
Batson said it is "a huge red flag" that American women's players in that college age range (roughly 18-22 years old) are not playing the same number of minutes as their peers in Europe.
Cone and Helfrich both said they hope to have a recommendation in place to implement in women's college soccer for the 2027-28 academic year.
"There are more challenges on the women's side, so we feel like we needed to have more discussions, more learnings there, until we put out, 'this is best for the women's game,'" Cone told ESPN. "It could be different from the men's game. It could be exactly the same. But we need to take a look at it, as Emma [Hayes, USWNT coach] likes to say, through the female lens. There's still more to do there, so we are going to do that work."
The next challenge in the entire process is the NCAA, which has historically been slow to evolve and included significant bureaucratic red tape, as evidenced with how women's college basketball had to force structural changes in recent years. There have been major overhauls of late in the NIL (name, image, likeness) era, however, which has left everyone at U.S. Soccer confident that these changes could be implemented quickly. Cone said everyone in the process is "leaning in."
Helfrich said the next step in the men's college soccer process should be the committee holding formal conversations with NCAA soccer sub-committees in the coming weeks, and that wider group drafting legislative proposals and timelines before the end of the calendar year. The goal is to have the new system launch next August.
"I will tell you confidently that neither the conferences nor the NCAA will be surprised by this release, because we've been collaborative," Helfrich said. "Part of the reason we've done that is to create a smoother on-ramp to governance conversations."
Among the ideas in the proposal is increased flexibility around player eligibility, which is specifically a pain point in soccer, where players sometimes turn professional as teenagers and sacrifice their college eligibility. The ideas include a "second chance" pathway for players have a stalled professional career, as well as increased opportunities with professional teams without sacrificing college eligibility.
These proposals come at a time when development leagues continue to sprout up in the U.S. MLS Next and multiple tiers of USL already exist on the men's side, while the NWSL has said it plans to launch a second division in the coming years, in addition to WPSL Pro -- which combined would add over 1,000 new professional roster spots on the women's side.
U.S. Soccer believes these can all co-exist with college soccer -- and that the federation's responsibility is to unite them.
"It's an example of when you bring all of the parts of the American soccer ecosystem together, you can come up with ways to drive greater impact and greater outcomes," Batson said. "The American soccer market has grown tremendously over the last couple of decades.
"However, there's a lot of fragmentation. The role of U.S. Soccer here is one of a convener, an aligner, and ultimately our goal is to catalyze that great energy into the outcomes that everyone cares about. We want soccer everywhere in this country, and we want our teams to win. We are now a soccer country."