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Before tonight, I had not given a thought to women's soccer and any recruits that they might have lined up for 2024 and 2025. The men's soccer team currently has 5 recruits listed by Top Drawer Soccer (TDS) for 2024 and 1 recruit listed for 2025. If you look at the commitments link below, the zips women's have 1 recruit listed for 2024 and 3 recruits listed for 2025. https://www.topdrawersoccer.com/college-soccer/college-soccer-details/women/akron/clgid-128/tab-commitments#sectionblock I look at the TDS recruiting roundup every Monday morning. I will try to do a better job of looking for Akron in the list of Division 1 women's signings. The women's list is always much, much longer than the men (as Zippy-Claws educated us earlier - 347 womens team in RPI ; only 211 in men's soccer) I must admit that I did look at the TDS recruiting roundup for Sept. 25 to October 1. However, I must also admit that I completely missed that Akron had 2 recruits listed for 2025 in that weekly roundup. https://www.topdrawersoccer.com/club-soccer-articles/sima-recruiting-roundup:-sept-25-october-1_aid52532 for some reason, the women's commitments for 2025......have been much higher than the commitments for 2024 If you look at the TDS list for Sept. 25-October 1, they identify 57 division 1 women's soccer commitments in that week for 2025. If you look at the 2025 boys soccer commitments, there is 1 boy listed. The encouraging part to me.....on the women's commitments....is that TDS has 3 of the 4 commitments identified as 3 stars. Most of the recruits that that Akron Men...have been getting.....are almost all 3 stars. I believe that Caleb Borneo and Joshua Hardin were 4 star for this year. Carter Cormier, Matt Dreas, Nathan Ferguson, Alen Kapic, Ryan Kopay and Joshua Bartels were all listed as 3 star by TDS. Jackson Herbert was rated 2 stars by TDS. of the 6 men's commitments for 2024 and 2025, all are listed as 3 stars https://www.topdrawersoccer.com/college-soccer/college-soccer-details/men/akron/clgid-438/tab-commitments#sectionblock To me, it is encouraging, that Coach Simonetti is getting 3 star rated players. I know that TDS is not anywhere near perfect. FknBuflobo will point out correctly that the great DeAndre Yedlin was not highly rated by TDS. I am not familiar with Ohio Premier junior team . Bailey Kerins is a 2025 commitment from Ohio Premier. 3 star rated efender Addison Lambert is a 2024 commitment from Ohio Premier. 3 star rated midfielder Freya Blatz is a 3 star rated GK from Pennsylvania.....2025 commit....Century V FC club team the 3rd 2025 commitment is Luisa Fragnoli. She is an unknown quantity to TDS (no rating). She comes from the very familar Internationals SC. I believe that Luisa Fragnoli plays high school soccer last year for Highland. As a sophomore, she was selected first team all suburban league. If I look at the Girls high school soccer rankings for October 2nd, the Highland Hornets are 12-0-0 and they are ranked 10th in the state. I am encouraged to see that the women zips have landed a star player from a top local team. I also notice that the Medina girl's team is 10-0-0 and ranked number 1 in the state. I have no idea if any of the Medina girls star players have made college commitments. Walsh girls have a great team every year. Hopefully, Akron women can start getting top players from Walsh and Medina. Manchester also has an excellent team this year. I am sure that Coach Simonetti has more than one commitment currently for 2024. It is impossible for TDS to know about all commitments. I just thought that I would share some positive recruitng news (at least in my uneducated women's soccer opinion)....with each of you. https://ohsaaweb.blob.core.windows.net/files/Sports/Soccer/2023/OSSCAStateSoccerPollWeek5.pdf

Think David Harvey. Special Teams All-American during Brookhart's time. I watched that guy lay out on more plays as a WR. Great physical talent. Bad citizen. Probably why he ended up at Akron. Didn't last long.

If it was a publicity stunt, it worked short term. The university got a lot of publicity. The Acme-Zip game in 1987 against Kent was the third largest crowd to ever see a football game at the Rubber Bowl. Publicity stunts can work if there is a longer term plan around it and there is where it all fall apart. The problem was there were a few issues working against Akron. First, there were no adults asking questions about the future of the program. By adults, I mean the board of trustees. Questions would be: What makes a successful D1 program and do we have any of that? Can our personnel in the athletic department get this done? If we want a D1 program, are either Faust or Dennison the right person for the job? If we waited 4-5 years and built a foundation, could we pull this off? Why is the NCAA basically begging us not to jump to D1? Almost any questions leads to a "no". Looking back it was so obvious. I feel free to say this as a Catholic, but not a person who grew up in NE Ohio. Around Akron, there was and probably still is an overblown opinion of people who went/go to the local Catholic schools. Where I grew up, the religious private schools were neither as good at sports or educating kids as well as my public school. I know they are better than APS, but are Hoban, St. V and Walsh, but are they really any better at educating kids than Copley, Hudson, Medina or Stow? Add all of that to ND being a much more important part of college football than it is today, it makes influential people already predisposed to a certain belief that Faust's connection to Moeller and Notre Dame would be enough for success. To me, this is an under explored part of the beginning of the ongoing disaster that is the football program. I'd love to know who was on the BofT at the time and what their personal backgrounds were? We're there influential people around the City/University that has this background and maybe created a predisposition leading to bad decisions? There is a fantastic book to be written around the Akron football since 1986.

🫣🫠😭 They're spot on.

That name is never to be mentioned again. I would rather hear tales of Coleman Crawford than risk putting the Tater Tot back into the regular rotation on ZNO.

Zips need to continue the high-volume shooting. The more shots the better. Expect Akron to shoot at least 25 times against Cleveland State.

I like the idea of the Zips Today podcast. 50% of the podcast is commercials though. Thankfully you can skip them but it is like trying to watch a 15 second highlight on ESPN.com but the ad to get there is 30 seconds.

Like all Zips fans I'm demoralized. Deeply. Demoralized. And I have been since the 2nd half of the Temple game and only beating a 1-4 FCS (🤮🤮🤮) Morgan State by a stroke of luck and the skin of our teeth. But I still have faith in JoeMo. He's undoubtedly improved the talent level on the team & I still feel we're only a legit QB away from being 4-2 on the year. But we're not. And I'm still confused how JoeMo & Co. could have possibly thought a gimpy, injury-prone, post-surgery DJ Irons, Undercuffler, and/or Tahj were the QB's we needed to turn this ship around? So I put this season's debacle on the coaching staff for not brining in the plug-in-and-play transfer QB we so obviously and desperately needed. JoeMo's recruiting is light years better than his predecessor.. so how on earth is the product on the field still essentially the same?! My giving credit to JoeMo for his recruiting cuts both ways when the on-the-field product is still so poor. Idk, I'm frustrated, confused, disappointed, and even downright angry.... not a good time for me to be posting. Frustrated, confused, disappointed, angry. The annual experience of every Zips football fan. [sigh]