M Soccer makes NCAA Tournament!

Submitted by Wolverine Devotee on

On the NCAA Men's Soccer selection show earlier, Michigan (10-9-1) makes the tournament.

They will host niagara out of the MAAC on 11/15 at 7pm. If Michigan wins, they will face a very familiar team in 5 seed akron (17-1-2). Michigan played the zips, a soccer powerhouse, back on October 16th and came up short 1-0 against #3 at the time.

akron is also the team that ended Michigan's dream season in 2010 in the College Cup (NCAA Semifinals). However last season, Michigan upset akron 1-0 in OT at home. Despite the rankings and the fact Michigan has always been the underdog, these games are mostly tight contests.

Got to take care of niagara first though. Pretty remarkable Coach Daley has taken a 5-14-1 team from a year ago led them to a 3rd place finish in the B1G, wins over both rivals, a near B1G Tournament Championship and an NCAA Tournament bid. This is only a sign of great things to come, IMO.

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cclittle

November 12th, 2012 at 8:43 PM ^

How often does a 10-9 team make the tournament? As someone who doesn't follow college soccer that seems like a not so great record for a tournament team... Congrats to them nonetheless.

Joined: 10/04/2009

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UMRecruitingFannatic

November 12th, 2012 at 8:49 PM ^

What are our chances, realistically?  I'm not too familiar with college soccer but I love watching Michigan play any sport, so I might have to flip it on just to see what is happening.  Also, how in the world is Akron a soccer powerhouse?  I mean, it's not like Northern Ohio is a hotbed of soccer players or Akron is particularly.... attractive, so what gives?

Joined: 11/12/2012

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Volverine

November 12th, 2012 at 9:33 PM ^

Northern Ohio actually is pretty good for soccer. Not only that, but soccer players are a relatively small group and they tend to know of each other. All you have to do is land one big name recruit and the rest come too. Also, if you can establish a good relationship with a club, like Akron has with Crew and Magic from Chicago, you can land lots of top talent.

As for our tourney chances: they're not good.

Joined: 05/07/2011

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Volverine

November 14th, 2012 at 12:56 PM ^

As a former Illinois soccer player, I definitely agree that Illinois and Michigan are the cream of the crop in the Midwest. However, our ODP region 2 team is usually made up of a pretty good number of Northern Ohio kids, too. Certainly it's lacking club teams like Magic, Sockers, Vardar, Wolves, Crew, etc. but NOrthern Ohio tends to spit out a few really good players.

I agree with everyone suggesting that having Porter as your coach is probably the best recruiting pitch around. 

 

EDIT: I should probably also mention Fire as a top club, although I always laugh at the thought. They sucked when I played lol

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Jehu the Damaja

November 13th, 2012 at 12:38 PM ^

I grew up in SoCal and played baseball all my life. The talent pool out there is incredible and kids can play year-round. Only so many of them can play at USC, UCLA or Stanford so it makes sense for the kids who still have D1 talent that want to stay closer to home or maybe can't afford the bigger schools

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michigandadof4

November 13th, 2012 at 9:08 AM ^

When we faced Akron in the NCAA a couple of years ago I asked a friend who is very active in club soccer.  He explained that Akron and some other small schools effectively have more scholarships to offer than some of the larger schools.

He explained that soccer gives out a lot of partial scholarshipsbut as a non-revenue sport if a kid receives an academic scholarship that scholarship does not count against your teams scholarship allotment.

Where Akron has an advantage is that Akron is a school that allows out-of-state kids who reach a certain high school grade point to pay in-state tuition.  If we assume that in-state tuition is 50% of out of state tuition (I don't know what it really is but I picked 50% to make the math easy), then if an out-of-state recruit qualifies for in-state tuition, Akron can award the kid a 100% tuition scholarship that only counts as a 50% scholarship for NCAA purposes.

Michigan can do the same, but unless the kid is  a National Merit Scholar there is not much chance that there will be an academic scholarship.

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