Colleges where soccer is popular

What colleges have popular soccer teams (either men’s or women’s) - well-attended games, popular players, etc?
At any level of play – ie., D1, D2, D3, highly ranked, unranked team… What matters is that the team is beloved or players popular.

None?

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Well, there HAS TO be places where soccer is popular…
(I’m not talking pup tent at Duke level, I’m talking “beloved”, “players known” “people go to the games”…)

Maryland, Wake Forest, Creighton, others mentioned.

Or see this list from 2015 Notre Dame, UCLA… https://www.collegemagazine.com/top-10-colleges-for-soccer/

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AWESOME!!
thank you :)))

http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/w_soccer_RB/2019/Attendance.pdf

http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/m_soccer_RB/2018/2017attend.pdf

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Thank you!

D1 – ACC soccer is a great conference with great rivalries.
D3 – OWU (Ohio Wesleyan) is a storied program with great student turn out. As a D3 soccer family, we’ve seen a lot of empty stands or stands with just parents and roommates. OWU takes it to a different level.

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@MYOS1634 Santa Clara women’s soccer just won D1 nationals, so I bet they will have quite a following going forward :slight_smile:

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It’s nuts that that article didn’t mention Cal Poly!!! The Cal Poly vs. UCSB game both in SLO and in SB is Legendary! Of the three largest attendance games in 2018, two of them were Gauchos/Mustangs. Of the top 25 all time largest non-NCAA tournament crowds, 16 are CP/UCSB!

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Cal Poly v UC Santa Barbara is an amazingly fun soccer rivalry.

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Connecticut College’s soccer field is part of the main quad, so smack in the middle of campus. And, they don’t have a football team. (And, their last ranking was in the top 10 in the country). That said, I don’t have a child there, so am guessing soccer is relatively popular there.

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Yes, the Men’s coach at Conn Coll touted the match field’s location in the middle of the quad as a plus – easy for students to just hang out and watch matches and, in bad weather, can cheer from the warmth of their dorm windows. My kid found it a little odd to have students walking across the field on their way to class, especially after seeing the reverence some teams have for their field (St Lawrence – just gorgeous!)

Edited to add – I think the field is set down a bit, in a bowl, so it’s not like students are actually walking across the Varsity field . . . .

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Both the Stanford men’s and especially women’s soccer teams are always highly ranked, both having won multiple national championships recently and get consistently large audiences.

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OOPS, already linked, so deleted.