Wayne State University will add a varsity women’s soccer team next year, marking the first new sport on campus in more than a decade.
“In the Detroit area, the sport of women’s soccer is widely supported and so it just kind of made sense for us to add women’s soccer,” said Wayne State Athletic Director Erika Wallace.
The school is launching a search for a coach this summer and hopes to have that person in place by this fall to begin recruiting.
Like most Division II schools, Wayne State doesn’t typically offer full scholarships to athletes. Instead, it pays a portion of their expenses. To fill its roster, the team will have tryouts and may allow players from other schools to transfer to Wayne. A typical women’s soccer team has 25-35 players.
The school also plans upgrades to the field that will host home games. It’s on Trumbull just south of Interstate 94 and just west of the Tom Adams Field, where Wayne plays its football games. The field is currently used by several sports, including club-level teams playing soccer and lacrosse. The school’s football and cross-country teams practice on it as well.
“The nice thing about that field is that it has lights already so we’ll be able to have night games and have lights in the city. It’ll be a really cool atmosphere,” Wallace said. “We’re going to have to add some stands for seating and a scoreboard, obviously, and things like that, in order to enhance the field. But it’s pretty much ready to go to be a home site for a women’s soccer program.”
Wallace said the move also helps Wayne State meet its obligations under Title IX, which requires equal opportunities for male and female athletes at schools that receive federal funding.
With the addition, Wayne will have 11 women’s sports and eight men’s sports.
The team will play a schedule of between 20 and 25 games in the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, (GLIAC). The league includes other Division II schools in Michigan like Northern Michigan, Michigan Tech and Grand Valley State University.
“The GLIAC has a long-standing history of actually having some teams win national championships in women’s soccer,” Wallace said. “So the GLIAC is a very, very strong league in women’s soccer and that’s another exciting thing about adding it.”
Contact John Wisely: jwisely@freepress.com. On X: @jwisely
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Wayne State to add varsity women’s soccer team next year
Reporting by John Wisely, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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