College Soccer

Last week, one of the greatest players in University of North Carolina and USWNT history announced that she’s returning to her old stomping grounds. This time, Heather O’Reilly will be telling others to “get on the line.”

O’Reilly is joining the UNC women’s soccer team alongside Anson Dorrance as the assistant coach. Dorrance’s introduction of O’Reilly truly explained her importance to both the UNC squad and the USWNT — along with, of course, calling her out for mistakes.

Youth soccer in America is changing. Over the past few years, U.S. soccer has moved to profoundly address the exclusivity of high-level grass roots play. Talented footballers at the high school age can get offered to play for a program known as a Development Academy (DA). Both Major League Soccer and other youth clubs all over the U.S. have Development Academy teams, from the high school age all the way down to U-12. 

The college admissions bribery and cheating scandal that gave the U.S. a rare opportunity for everyone to come together in outrage last week isn’t a story that’s going away anytime soon, from the celebrities and college soccer coaches implicated to the state of college admissions in the country. 

A number of college soccer coaches have been indicted in the massive college admissions bribery and cheating scandal that became public Tuesday. 

In American men’s soccer, the path to turning pro has never been clearer. The MLS SuperDraft, the general means for college players to enter the league, has always been somewhat irrelevant, but now it’s by and large obsolete. Talent is coming through the league's Development Academies, where players are working year-round on the quest to becoming world-class, not unlike professionals themselves.

With the first pick of the 2019 MLS Draft, FC Cincinnati takes … a timeout. 

As if you needed any more proof of the superfluous nature of the MLS SuperDraft these days, expansion club FC Cincinnati needed to take a timeout before making the first pick of the 2019 draft on Friday in Chicago — not to mention the quirk of even being able to call a timeout. 

When Tierna Davidson made official her decision to forgo her senior season at Stanford and enter the 2019 NWSL College Draft days before the draft, it became pretty apparent who Chicago would take with the No. 1 pick.

Stanford, thank you for everything you have given me. You’ve changed my life. Looking forward to a new chapter this year! #gocard pic.twitter.com/bgAjKX4ZPQ

As has been well-documented, the emergence of signing young international players with Targeted Allocation Money and the increased regularity of moving Homegrown Players up the ranks has made the MLS SuperDraft less meaningful than ever (not that signing a 22-year-old who’s spent the last four years playing a three-month long season was ever a recipe for success). That’s not to say that a few of the 2019 selections won’t contribute in meaningful ways, but it’s just that — a few.

In an unexpected announcement, Sigi Schmid, an incredibly important figure in American soccer, passed away at the age of 65 on Tuesday. It was reported that he was admitted to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center due to a heart-related condition.