The field for the 58th edition of the NCAA Division I Men’s Soccer Championship has been set. Out of a possible 203 teams, 48 have been selected to compete to in the single-elimination tournament. Early round matches are held at the higher seed’s home field, while the four-team College Cup will be held at BBVA Compass Stadium in Houston, TX from December 9th to the 11th.
The 48-team field is made up from 24 conferences across the country. Each conference winner automatically received an invitation to compete in the tournament. 24 other teams were selected as at-large bids. The teams deemed the top 16 in the field are seeded and receive first round byes.
The University of Washington Huskies finished second in the PAC-12 behind defending National Champions Stanford. The Huskies finished the season 13-6 overall and 7-4 in PAC 12.
The Dawgs were seeded 11th and will take on the winner of New Mexico and Portland. That game will be played on Sunday, November 20th at Husky Soccer Stadium, with kickoff scheduled for 5:00 pm PT. This will be the Huskies 23rd appearance in the tournament, and their first since 2014. Academy alums Henry Wingo, Handwalla Bwana, Kasey French, John Magnus, Saif Kerawala, and Ryan Degroot will look to help the Dawgs in the tourney.
"I'm excited for this team to be back in the NCAA tournament," said head coach Jamie Clark. "Last year's hiatus made us hungrier and our great regular-season earned us a high seed in the tournament."
"We will have an extremely difficult second round game," said Clark. "Portland and New Mexico are undoubtedly the two hottest teams on the West Coast right now. [That] matchup should be a great one, so we will wait and see who wins out, and be ready for a tough matchup come Sunday."
Joining them from the Pac-12 conference will be San Diego State (Mac Clarke, Keenan Townsend), UCLA (Seyi Adekoya), and the aforementioned Stanford (Quentin Chi). The Portland Pilots (Paul Christensen) will also be joining the field, as they won the West Coast Conference title after going 12-5-1 overall and 6-1-0 in conference play. They will be joined from the WCC by Pacific.
Seattle University (David Olsen, Kyle Bjornethun, Connor Noblat, Isidro Prado-Huerta, RJ Noll, Sam Langston) did not get selected for this year’s tournament despite having a record of 11-6-2 overall and going 7-1-2 in the conference play. Oregon State (Jalen Markey) also was not one of the at-large teams selected for this year’s tournament. They finished the season with a record of 7-8-3 overall and went 3-5-2 in conference play.
Other teams around the country with Sounders Academy alums that made the tournament are Denver (Tobi Jnohope, Tosh Samkange, Ryan Schaeffer), Akron (Nick Hinds), UNLV (Maliq Cooper), Dartmouth (Henry Baldwin) and Clemson (Harrison Kurtz).
UConn’s Huskies (Jacob Hauser-Ramsey), Santa Clara (Satoshi Chaffin), Harvard (Justin Crichlow), Gonzaga (Ben Willis, Dennis Kalamar, Davis Behnke) and Davidson (Matt Reinika) did not qualify.