Macalester, despite some claims to the contrary, has Division I sports.
Spring 2024 saw Women’s Club Lacrosse join the North Central Women’s Lacrosse League’s D-I division. Now, Macalester’s men’s club soccer team, the White Squirrels, is joining the Upper Midwest Collegiate Soccer League (UMCSL), a D-I club league.
The promotion comes after a strong 5-1 season last year, the team’s first official season. They are the school’s second youngest club team, after the women’s club team, the Clementines.
The UMCSL consists of teams from Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas. The highest-ranked teams in the North Division include St. Thomas University and two teams from the University of Minnesota, both D-I schools. Macalester is smaller than most schools in the league by thousands of students. Still, that does not deter Captain Riley Woods ’27.
“When I look at bigger schools, I feel a bit sorry for them because they don’t know what’s coming,” Woods said. “We have an underdog mentality, and I think that’s essential to our culture: being a small school, being the underdogs, being a scrappy little team and kicking ass.”
The 2024 season marked the team’s first formal year as a club sport. They held open pick-up games and had a more competitive try-out for the travel team.
The team had a dramatic first season; five wins, none of them close. Captain Xander Lytle ’27 argued their lone loss at Carleton was due to the condition of the field, as they had already beaten Carleton in the first match of the season. It is Lytle’s favorite memory from the year.
“We thought t
hat we were good, but we hadn’t been tested yet,” he said. “We weren’t really sure. And the way that we won was just amazing. And all the fans that came — I was not expecting that many people to show up, but they did. Being able to make your friends proud and give them a good time. That was amazing.”
Perhaps the biggest win for the young team was against St. Thomas, an established member of the UMCSL. For Woods, the game was momentous.
“That game will live in infamy, I think, for the rest of the White Squirrels’ existence,” he said. “It was pouring rain from the get-go.
We were the obvious underdog. St. Thomas had been at the top of the table for [the UMCSL] … It was thundering and lightning and pouring rain, and we were coming off of a game earlier that week, so everyone was sore, but I think the mentality in that game was just to go, go, go. From the start, advance. It was hectic and it was messy, and if the field had been grass, we would have been covered in mud. It was a spectacle, for sure. I think that game really brought us together and showed us that we can compete in a D-I league.”
The lightning and hazardous conditions shut the game down early for a 1-0 Squirrels win.
One of the head administrators of UMCSL is the St. Thomas coach, and Woods identified this win as a great moment to show him that the Squirrels could hold their own against the other teams in the league. All Macalester club sports need to join a league, and UMCSL was the best suited geographically for the team. There were not many other options had UMCSL not worked out.
It is a jump in the level of competition they will be playing against. To Lytle, this will not integrally change the team.
“I think at the core of it, nothing [will change],” he said. “I think we have our principles that I know I want to stick by, and that’s inclusion and community above competition … we know it’s going to be really, really challenging, every single game we play, because most of the teams are probably getting favored against us.
“But I don’t want that to get in the way of the community. Certainly, I hope it doesn’t. Because, for me, there’s a reason [this is] club soccer, not varsity. For me, we meet to have fun and play soccer, and sometimes we go off and we play, and hopefully, we win.”
The team is conscious that they serve a wide range of interest levels. Some players are looking for a competitive environment where they can play hard, many coming from intense high school careers. Even though they aren’t varsity athletes at Macalester, they’re serious about the game. Others play and enjoy soccer as a less competitive activity. They join a club team for fun, some still learning the game. Some just don’t have the time for the traveling team.
“Having that space to play and just express ourselves is way more important than the competitiveness,” Lytle said.
They want the t
eam to work for everybody interested in soccer, even when the wants of different members sometimes conflict.
“We are trying very hard to find ways to not let joining this league and doing competitive things remove that spirit of pickup soccer,” Woods said.
And while balancing competitiveness and club sports can be a challenge, Captain Bruno Guiduli ’26 values the diversity of the community.
“Club soccer is much more than just the competitive team that plays in games,” Guiduli wrote in a message to The Mac Weekly. “We have built a very big community of soccer players who just love the game, and it really shows during open pickup. When arriving at Macalester I could not have asked for a better community to play soccer with. Everyone is so supportive and nice, players are always quick with a smile and a joke and tension rarely breaks through.”
The team is still young. They’re starting new traditions, such as a costumed Halloween game against the women’s club team, the Clementines. They’re finding the team’s identity and the place they’ll take in this new league.
Woods thinks the way Macalester stands out in the league — as the youngest and smallest team — will be a benefit:
“I think one thing we really pride ourselves on, and one thing I think gives us an edge, is that Macalester is a scrappy, small, school. It’s very easy to look at bigger schools and say, ‘oh, they have a larger talent pool, they have more training facilities.’
“But I think the thing that caused the White Squirrels to be founded in the first place, and the thing that allows us to win games is that we are a small, scrappy team that is not founded in a huge talent pool, in a huge school, but founded in people that just really want to play soccer.”
