Over the past four years, women’s soccer has consistently challenged Brown’s reputation as a middling sports school. They’re one of the winningest teams in the University’s athletics department.
The Bears have been undefeated in the regular season for the past four years against Ivy League opposition. They had been undefeated to Ivy opponents in all competitions until their loss to Columbia in the Ivy tournament last season.
This offseason saw the exit of Sheyenne Allen ’23.5, Ava Seelenfreund ’23.5 and three-time All-American Brittany Raphino ’23.5, all of whom now play professionally in Portugal. With the loss of that powerhouse trio and eight other graduating seniors, Bears fans look to new leadership to continue the program’s winning traditions.
But Head Coach Kia McNeill does not worry much about the high expectations set by the former group.
“We are trying to get away from the idea that this team has big shoes to fill from the past, and focus more on the fact that each player has their own shoes to fill for the present,” McNeil wrote in an email to The Herald. “We have a lot of talent and potential with this group, and if we find our stride, we can contend to win the Ivy League for the fifth year in a row.”
Despite last year’s tournament exit, the Bears have won the league for the past four consecutive years.
“This is my last year of playing soccer (ever!), so for me, the most important thing that I am focusing on is enjoying it and being a support system for my teammates,” Kira Maguire ’25 wrote. “Ten years from now, it is incredibly important to me that my teammates remember me for who I was as a person and as a captain.”
Under Maguire and her fellow captains— Naya Cardoza ’26, Miya Grant-Clavijo ’25, and Alexis “Lexi” Quinn ’25 — the team is setting its sights on another coveted Ivy League title.
“The experiences I have had being a student athlete at two different Division 1 programs was a big reason why my teammates voted me as a captain,” Maguire, who played two seasons at the University of Virginia before coming to Brown, wrote in an email to The Herald. “Having such seniority has helped me guide some of our younger players through the challenges of playing a Division 1 sport in college.”
Every captain brings their own unique perspective on the game that builds out this new group of leaders.
“Just within the group of captains, we all bring a different leadership style and also offer different aspects on the pitch,” Cardoza added. “Knowing ourselves and our strengths and how we want to show up as our best self is essential for continuing to be a winning program.”
For those Bears fans who worry the absence of the old leadership group spells danger for the upcoming team, Quinn encourages them to change their tune.
“We lost a lot of key players last year and everybody's looking at us acting like we're lambs being led to the slaughter,” she wrote. “But that isn't true in the slightest. This year we have the opportunity to reshape our program's style completely.”
Both McNeil and Cardoza emphasized their “winning mindset” coming into this season.
“Coming off of another undefeated streak in the Ivy league is just another accolade that proves the embedded DNA of Brown is just truly uncommon,” Cardoza wrote. “Being a ‘winning’ program is so much more than just the score at the end of a game, but rather everything that goes into getting there.”
“We want to be a multi-dimensional team that can score goals in a variety of different ways,” McNeil wrote. “We have speed up top to get in behind, but we also have some very technical and savvy forwards and midfielders that can beat players 1 vs. 1, and break players down that way.”
But mindset isn’t the only thing that wins games. Teams do. Beyond the proven veterans of this Bears side, there is an incoming class of first-years that both Quinn and McNeil believe are the future of this program.
“We have a tremendously talented freshman class,” McNeil wrote. “It has been great to see the immediate impact many of them have already been making in our program.”
In the early season, the Bears are still trying to find their feet. Through three games, they have registered two draws and a loss in the season opener to URI. But despite the early disappointments, McNeil maintains the strength of this budding Bears side.
“I have been pleased with the way the team has played these opening games. Obviously it was disappointing to start the season with a loss to URI, but at that point of the season the team had trained together less than two weeks,” McNeil wrote. “The reality is we graduated 11 seniors last year, which is about 1/3 of the team, so getting the chemistry, leadership, line-up/formation and experience that we need takes time.”
The Bears look ahead to Ivy Play with the opener against Harvard on Sept. 28 with the hopes of preserving their Ivy League title for another consecutive year.
Dennis Carey is a Sports editor who enjoys playing volleyball, listening to and collecting vinyl records and poorly playing the guitar in his spare time.
