The news slipped my eye when it was announced, but I happened to see in Al’s preview of the first week of UNC sports this academic year a nugget about men’s college soccer: namely, that starting in 2027, the sport’s season will likely be extended over the course of two semesters to better align with the global men’s soccer calendar (if you saw a version of that article that mentioned the same for women’s soccer, the change has currently only been proposed for the men’s game — and it’s not finalized; after initially being pushed through, the proposal has been remanded and is currently in limbo). The change makes some sense, not just from a workload perspective but because the sport is becoming increasingly international; about half of Carolina’s current roster hails from overseas and some of the program’s best players the past few years — Martin Vician, Quenzi Huermann, Bertil Rygaard Hansen, to name a few — have been international prospects. But it was also quite a surprise, because changing when a sport’s season happens seems like such a seismic shift. When something has been done in one way for so long, inertia is a powerful thing.
But now, it’s clearly been shown to be possible — and that means it’s projectable. And thus, in the spirit of that projection, I got to wondering what other sports could do with a scheduling change. Obviously, football and basketball are non-starters — there’s no sport that more epitomizes fall than football, and ditto for winter and basketball. I’d love if college baseball could be more of a summer sport than a spring one (and it’d also be much fairer to teams further north), but the college schedule makes that impossible, so what we’ve got is probably the best it could be. And of course, college softball is the epicenter of the sport, so it has to stay where it is. Beyond that, though? Whether it’s to optimize one’s own year around the sports they enjoy the most, or to align with other versions of the sport, or just on vibes, surely there are changes that could be made.
The most obvious one to me is volleyball. Right now, it’s a fall sport, but indoor volleyball reads a lot more winter to me. It’s played in the Winter Olympics, it’s played entirely indoors and thus gives crowds a way to hide from the cold, and putting it in the winter contrasts well with its beachy counterpart that’s so obviously a symbol of summer. Of course, that creates scheduling complications because of all the winter sports — including men’s and women’s basketball, wrestling, and gymnastics — that often share venues, but that’s for somebody else to figure out. It’d work particularly well at UNC in a few years if and when men’s and women’s basketball move to a new stadium, as Carmichael Arena would then be freed up for winter volleyball. On a similar note, field hockey feels like it could share the spring with lacrosse and baseball. Based on the Olympic logic and having a counterpart that’s obviously a winter sport, it would make sense to me to do with field hockey what we do with baseball and place it in the spring as a summer sport. This doesn’t feel as good to me, though, because I think the field hockey and lacrosse fanbases probably have a lot of overlap and for the good of the sports, I wouldn’t want to split their attention.
What about you? Any radical schedule changes you’d like to see made? Or even just that you’ve wondered about?
