Roster size

I started a spreadsheet to track how many recruits each of the 64 teams that made the tourney has, along with how many were on their roster last year and how many seniors will be graduating. I had to do this all by hand and some of the sites you cannot sort by class so please double check the work. Also, not all the schools have posted their recruiting class yet. You can see who has on the spreadsheet that tracks recruits. We don't know how many of the other schools under class will graduate early like Korie N. did at U of P. She is listed on our roster as a JR.

What you can see is that a lot of teams are carrying a lot of players compared to U of P . With everything that comes up it will be nice to have some cushion for a change with the new classes to arrive the next couple of years. I also noticed that teams seem to be heavily loaded toward FR and SO. Are they cutting SR's from scholarship when they are not starters?

		2009	2008	2008
School	Conf	recruits	# roster	Seniors
Boston College	ACC	3	25	5
Duke	ACC	6	24	6
Miami	ACC	10	23	3
Wake Forest	ACC	7	25	6
Vir Tech	ACC		26	6
Florida State	ACC		18	0
North Carolina	ACC		33	4
Virgina	ACC		24	7
Boston University	Am East		29	6
Charlotte	Alantic 10		28	4
Belmont	Atlantic Sun	11	21	3
Marquette	Big East		27	3
Notre Dame	Big East	4	29	6
Rutgers	Big East		25	4
West Virginia	Big East	9	26	8
Northern Arizona	Big Sky		31	1
Radford	Big South	5	26	4
Minnesota	Big 10	5	22	8
Penn State	Big 10	11	29	4
Michigan State	Big 10	6	31	5
Illinois	Big 10	6	22	5
UC Santa Barbara	Big West	6	21	0
LB St	Big West		27	11
Colorado	Big 12	6	19	8
Kansas	Big 12	6	28	5
Oklahoma State	Big 12	5	28	4
Texas	Big 12	8	26	5
Texas A&M	Big 12	7	25	2
James Madison	Colonial	3	30	3
Northeastern	Colonial		29	5
William & Mary	Colonial	3	28	5
Memphis	Conf USA	6	27	4
UCF	Conf USA	10	23	4
Wis-Milwaukie	Horizon	9	25	5
Princeton	Ivy		20	4
Harvard	Ivy		26	5
Fairfield	MAAC	3	20	4
Toledo	MAC	5	27	5
BYU	MT West	8	25	5
Evansville	Missouri Valley		25	8
Central Conn St	Northeast		23	4
Morehead St	Ohio Valley		26	5
UCLA	Pac 10	8	28	7
USC	Pac 10		28	8
Cal	Pac 10		26	3
Stanford	Pac 10		24	5
WSU	Pac 10		23	0
UW	Pac 10	4	29	4
Army	Patriot		29	6
Auburn	SEC	8	26	4
FL	SEC	11	30	3
Georgia	SEC	5	23	8
LSU	SEC	9	21	3
SC	SEC	7	28	1
Tennessee	SEC	5	26	5
W Carolina	Southern	6	27	2
Texas St	Southland		24	4
SD St	Summit	8	26	9
Denver	Sunbelt	4	28	8
Mississippi Valley SC	SWAC		24	6
Fresno St	WAC	4	24	3
Portland	WCC	5	21	3
San Diego	WCC		29	6
		6.5	25.7	4.7

The last line is the average.


The teams like UNC and FL who carry 30+ seem gross to me. I think of my daughter's U12 team where we have 16 and that works well even when we have a kid or two out sick. Why would you go to one of these places when they don't even have enough room on the bench for the whole team? Why not go somewhere where you have a chance of playing time. Makes no sense to me.

Santa Clara had 14 healthy players at the end of last season. That's with 2 walk-ons.

UP only had 3 or so players on the bench in the tournament, and we cosider the injury rate wasn't too bad (we did have 3 on YNT duty)


The college game is a LOT roughr than your daughter's u12 team.

That model doesn't work.

I think regarding your last comment in the second paragraph, gnarly, it's important to remember that players now have the one year obligation of college before entering the NBA. That's why the Pac-10, for example suffered this year with Kevin Love, OJ Mayo, the Lopez twins, Westbrook, and others entering the NBA. It's extremely rare for players to stay all 4 years now if they have the talent to leave early. (I know that not all of those players were freshman, but, you understand my point.) That's why Tyler H. is the all-time leading scorer at UNC instead of Jordan, James Worthy, or someone else...

While I agree that attrition has something to do with the front loading, I think that it is not a reasonable comparison to compare these stats to sports like Men's basketball. Most women soccer players stay all 4 years unless a) they wash out due to grades or other eligibility issues b) they transfer to another school c) they do not have the skill to stay.

Also to Gnarly's point about Sr. scholarships. I think a lot of people have the misconception that scholarships are for the entire time you attend a University. In reality any student athlete who signs a letter of intent is agreeing to a 1 year agreement with the University for athletic based scholarships. Universities as I understand it cannot commit to multi year athletic scholarships.

You should post this on B.S., love to see what kind of an uproar it might create .

Oh, and FSU lost 3 seniors along with Sanna using up her eligibility and our goalie graduating, so 5 total, 18 is the updated roster as of today. I think we have about 6 new girls coming in, although that is yet to be confirmed.

I can see where this can get confusing. Penn State only has 5 official 2009 recruits. They have 2 other players that were 2008 recruits, but did not enroll until Jan 2009 and one other that enrolled early and did not count. So 6 that are 2009 recruits and 8 new in total.

Never mind, I thought we were talking Womens Soccer....

Penn State/UP Fan wrote:Never mind, I thought we were talking Womens Soccer....

We were and still are. I believe your numbers are correct.

Agreed on posting this on BigSoccer, perhaps once better numbers are in.

aleppiek wrote:While I agree that attrition has something to do with the front loading, I think that it is not a reasonable comparison to compare these stats to sports like Men's basketball. Most women soccer players stay all 4 years unless a) they wash out due to grades or other eligibility issues b) they transfer to another school c) they do not have the skill to stay.

Also to Gnarly's point about Sr. scholarships. I think a lot of people have the misconception that scholarships are for the entire time you attend a University. In reality any student athlete who signs a letter of intent is agreeing to a 1 year agreement with the University for athletic based scholarships. Universities as I understand it cannot commit to multi year athletic scholarships.

Please disregard my above post regarding the basketball thing. I was flipping back and forth between men's b-ball and women's soccer in my postings and clearly not paying much attention...blogging like a borracho.

I'm impressed that you took the time to do the whole spreadsheet and analysis, gnarly...

I will second aleppiek' point about scholarships being year to year. When you are awarded a "full college scholarship" you are counting on the coaches reputation for keeping his or her word. The ugly truth in the NCAA is some coaches offer the"full ride" then cut back or eliminate the scholarship if the player does not pan out as anticipated. Its a shame for players who need the money to continue with their education.

I second the thanks for your great work, gnarly. I hope you'll update your list from time to time. It makes for a really interesting discussion.

My view is that a roster in the 21-23 range is the best. It provides enough players to allow for injuries and national team commitments, but not for so many as to make it impractical for the coaches to spend quality time with each player and as to make it hard to nurture team unity.

21-23 seems more than reasonable to me... Growing up the squads were limited to 18 and we never really had an issue even with diff players going to different HS, ODP competitions and different sports... 21-23 seems the best as far as having a squad with enough depth, while at the same time small enough so that even those 20-23 players on the depth chart can still contribute when called upon... anything over 25 just seems like absolute overkill and ultimately seems more to serve the institution, not the individual players or the game as a whole... And as UPSF noted, you can only have so many hours for the coach to dedicate to individual instruciton, the more on the squad, the less time spent developing the individual player

Also disregard my post about "I thought we were talking Womens Soccer....". I was doing the same as UPSoccerFanatic and looking at mens basketball. This is a great list! Have seen too many teams play where the bench is loaded with players that stay there the whole game...

With respect to the issue of coaching time, do the schools with the large rosters also have more coaches?