In May, the NCAA announced that the Division I men's college soccer schedule was set to change. What exists currently -- a 10- to 13-week season in the fall -- would be replaced by a campaign that spans both fall and spring semesters.
But because the act didn't get more than 75% of the Division I Cabinet vote in October, it was subject to a 30-day rescission period during which it could be rejected if 241 of 361 Division I schools voted against the change. Following Friday's 5 p.m. ET deadline, the NCAA announced that the threshold had been reached and the proposal has been rejected.
So, what happened, how did we get here and why does it matter?
Why was there a push to change the schedule?
Maryland men's coach Sasho Cirovski, a major proponent for alterations to the schedule, joined ESPN FC this week to discuss why changes were being made.
"We currently play in a soccer season that is archaic," he said. "It's been the same since 1959, and everyone who has ever played college soccer at any level knows that this model needed to be modernized."
Among the reasons to make alterations: decompressing the schedule would allow for more recovery and training between games, more time to develop players, less roster turnover with one annual transfer window instead of two, and a more balanced college life that allows additional time for academics.
U.S. Soccer Federation CEO JT Batson also backed the change.
"I love the idea of our college kids having time to go to college, not just play games all week, as well as not have their bodies overtrained because they are playing too many games in too short a period of time," he told ESPN. "It's also better developmentally. No other league in the world has such a schedule."
So why is it now being rejected?
To quote the University of Toledo: "Expanding the men's soccer season will create increased costs, reduce experiential opportunities for student-athletes out of season, create facility conflicts with spring sports, heighten staffing demands, and affect competition schedules due to weather at northern institutions."
Elsewhere, the University of Idaho noted a worry regarding a "massive request for other sports to make similar requests, and support staffing would be spread very thin to cover another spring sport."
This thinking is in line with reporting from Goal.com on Thursday, which noted that sources discussed "the supposed strain" for university staff and the precedent it might set going forward. But Cirovski disagrees with the concerns.
"Everybody's worried about Pandora's box, but nothing would ever happen if you sit in fear of Pandora's box," Cirovski said. "Perfection should not be the enemy of progress."
Why does it matter?
There's evidence that suggests there would be fewer injuries with a schedule that isn't as condensed, and with more time to recover and train, there would be a larger window to fine-tune talents and skills.
Studies have pointed to consistent minutes in stable environments during this stage of player development as benefiting long-term careers. At the moment in college soccer, those minutes are packed into the fall, leading to lengthy gaps of noncompetitive games for the rest of the year. Players could move to the semiprofessional USL League Two in the spring and summer, but that represents a new surrounding and league when stability would be more positive for growth.
There's also something to be said about mirroring the global soccer schedule that traditionally runs from the summer to spring for most major leagues. MLS itself, the top tier of American soccer, will switch to this format next year after 30 years of running from spring through fall.
To prepare athletes for a step up to professionalism, it would make sense to familiarize them with the sort of scheduling they can expect at the next level.
All that said, it's clear that many schools are hesitant to embrace change. Nevertheless, soccer is rapidly evolving nationally and internationally, and the sport won't wait for the NCAA to catch up.
For Cirovski, sticking with the format from the 1950s has only made men's Division I schools less relevant when it comes to developing players.
"About 20 years ago ... there was five or six of the top kids who would skip college. Now it's like 95 of the top 100 kids are skipping college because they're playing MLS Next Pro, MLS Next, or they're playing at top levels here, and they're looking at the 2½-month season and saying, 'Wait a second. I have a higher risk of getting injured in a 2½-month competitive season, and I don't play another meaningful game for eight months, so this maybe isn't the best platform for me to go to,'" Cirovski said.
"So we're losing a lot of our domestic players in large part because of the imbalance and the lack of proper periodization during the week to develop our players, which is what the new model gives us."
What's next?
With the proposed schedule change rejected, Cirovski said he'll seek other avenues to split the season over two semesters.
"Everything else will be on the table in terms of what happens," he said, "because I still believe there's very, very many motivated schools right now that want to do this, and we'll start exploring different opportunities to play in a split season."
