WKU soccer ready to kick off 2026 season

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – It’s almost go time for WKU soccer, who’s fresh off of winning the 2025 Conference USA regular-season championship.

The Tops are bringing back many members of that team and are ready to hit the ground running when game one arrives in just over a week.

“ Our standards are just higher. We come off a championship season, you know, it’s great, and we went undefeated in conference, and now it’s time to up it,” senior midfielder Amanda Simpson said.

“Now we want to go further in the conference tournament, further into the NCAA tournament. So, our standards are higher, expectations are higher. That starts from day one, as soon as we get here.”

After winning just one CUSA match in 2024, the Tops turned things around in 2025, going a spotless 6-0-2 in the league, capturing the school’s fourth conference regular season title in its 25-year history.

Midfielder Georgia Liapis, who enters the fall as a four-year member on the Western roster, had a huge impact on that shift, and the work she put in, along with the rest of her teammates, was satisfying to see pay off.

“We didn’t have as quite a good of a start that we planned on. You know, at the beginning of the season, we weren’t winning too many games, and then conference started and we locked in a little bit, and we got the job done,” Liapis said. “I think because of, you know, the ups and downs that we had throughout the year, it made it so much more rewarding to get first place.”

As WKU looks to replicate those efforts this season, familiarity on the pitch will pay dividends.

Head coach Jason Neidell believes those returners can make quite an impact on the new faces to the field.

“I think the biggest thing is the mentorship that returning players offer the younger players of how we do things, how we do things on the field, how we do things off the field,” Neidell said.

On the field, the Hilltoppers want to win, and off the field is where the winning starts.

Neidell says it’s about work, about bringing intensity and grinding out every day at practice, and doing so can result in another memorable year for the group.

“Every day’s a new day, so win the day, move forward,” Simpson said.

“I’m as excited as I’ve ever been to start the season, trying to build on what we did last year,” Neidell said. “I think this is a special group that has a chance to do some really great things this year.”

WKU will play two exhibition matchups this week, facing Murray State on August 5 and Samford on August 7, before opening the season at the WKU Soccer Complex against Missouri on August 13.