AMHERST — There may be plenty of reasons for UMass fans to lament the athletic department over the past two weeks – a third-straight disappointing football season and a subpar men’s basketball start (3-5 record) among the results-based reasons outside of the off field ones. But several UMass’ fall sports programs have helped put the university under a positive national spotlight in 2024 – something that deserves a considerable amount of attention.

Between the Minutewomen field hockey program dancing its way into the NCAA Division 1 Final Four, the Minutemen men’s soccer team fighting for a spot in another national semifinal and both UMass cross country teams posting terrific seasons, the university has had one of its most successful Olympic sport semesters in quite some time.

It’s more than fair to those athletes that they get their shine, too, as they wrap up their final season in the Atlantic 10.

“I’m so proud of our fall group,” UMass Director of Athletics Ryan Bamford said. “We talked about finishing up strong in our last year in the league. We talked about it as a department and sport-by-sport with our fall teams. To go out and win multiple Atlantic 10 titles, have a bunch of teams go to NCAA tournaments and to now make deep runs in field hockey and men’s soccer – it’s been arguably our best fall in the last 30 or so years. That’s a credit to our coaches and our student-athletes, a lot of them who have been building for this moment.”

The Minutemen and Minutewomen cross country teams each had their best seasons in at least 15 years. For the men, they closed out the year with a 7th-place finish at the NCAA Northeast Regional Championships – their best since 2008. On the women’s side, their second-best Atlantic 10 finish of this century came in 2024. Not at all a bad way to go out.

Minutemen field hockey head coach Barb Weinberg led the UMass field hockey team all the way to the Final Four, a place it hadn’t been since 1992. The tournament – which UMass entered as an at-large bid following a heartbreaking 2-1 loss to Saint Joseph’s in the A-10 championship game – was set up perfectly for the Minutewomen’s ‘revenge tour,’ as they called it.

The Minutewomen lost to UConn, Harvard and Northwestern in the regular season, and that ironically laid out UMass’ path to the national title game – although the tournament still had to play out properly. But the fact that the bracket fell into place that way was the exact motivation the Minutewomen needed. They took out UConn 2-1 in the Round of 16 after trailing 1-0 entering the fourth, then bounced Harvard in a 1-0 dog fight to advance to the national semifinals.

“We knew the potential of this team as a coaching staff,” Weinberg said. “If you look at the credentials on paper and the resumes of our roster, it was looking really, really strong. But we all know there’s way more to building a team than what is on paper.”

UMass ultimately fell to eventual-national champion Northwestern, 1-0, in the Final Four – ending its season with a 17-6 record that included a regular season A-10 title.

Compared to how the Minutewomen’s season started, playing toe-to-toe with the best team in the country for a spot in the national championship didn’t seem like a reality. UMass fell 2-1 to Maine in overtime in its first game of the year, then followed that up with an upsetting 6-1 blowout loss to none other than Northwestern. 

But the Minutewomen responded with a seven-game winning streak, scoring 27 goals over that span including 19 in a four-game stretch. That opening weekend was a wake-up call to say the least.

“I look at that weekend as the first turning point of our season,” Weinberg said. “If you come out of that weekend 2-0 or even 1-1, maybe you don’t look at things as closely in terms of what we need to train. Our goal scoring needed a lot of work, and then we came back in the next four games and scored 19 goals.”

That spring-boarded UMass to a 7-0 conference record, and a 2-1 road win over top-5 Saint Joseph’s highlighted the Minutewomen’s regular-season slate. 

Sure, hoisting the national championship trophy to cap off the season was the ultimate goal, but going from a team that lost 6-1 to Northwestern to a team that played right with them on the biggest stage confirmed to Weinberg everything she already knew about her team: they are a group of battlers.

“Maybe not fully,” Weinberg said when asked if her team’s historical season has sunk in. “The last few weeks feel surreal, and I just watched our semifinal game back. I said it to the team before we played against Northwestern, our goal in that game was to leave it all out on the field and to walk away, win or loss, knowing that we had given that game everything we've got. And I believe the team truly did that. They've made history at UMass. No team’s done this in a lifetime, and a lot of things have to line up for you to have a season like this team did, and they made it happen.”

And while the Minutewomen wrapped up their tournament run, the UMass men’s soccer team was just beginning its.

The Minutemen defeated Evansville 2-1 at Rudd Field in Amherst on Nov. 21 before upsetting No. 6 Penn days later on the road, 1-0. A week following one upset win, UMass ripped off another, this time getting the best of No. 11 Virginia, again by the score of 1-0, to advance to the Elite Eight. UMass travels to Colorado to battle Denver, the third-ranked team in the country, on Saturday with a spot in the Final Four on the line – the Minutemen looking to become the second UMass program to punch a ticket to the national semifinals this fall.

“It's been a great ride for our guys,” UMass head coach Fran O’Leary said. “I think they're thoroughly enjoying it. To be sitting in the Elite Eight, having won two games against seeded opponents on the road, I think everyone's very, very happy.”

The UMass women’s soccer team also had an impressive 2024 campaign. The Minutewomen posted a 13-5-3 overall record, reaching the championship game of the Atlantic 10 Tournament before falling to Saint Louis, 3-1.

Along the way, UMass took down Loyola-Chicago and Dayton in the conference tourney, and also snagged non-conference victories over power conference foes Boston College and Rutgers.

A more in depth story on the UMass men’s soccer season and a preview of its upcoming game with Denver will be coming later this week.