The Massachusetts men’s soccer team is leaving the Atlantic 10 after its loss to Saint Louis in a penalty shootout on Saturday in the A-10 quarterfinals. With the closing of this chapter, the Minutemen are not yet assigned to a conference for the upcoming season.

UMass had a successful tenure as a member of the A-10, with three conference tournament championships and five NCAA tournament appearances.

Alec Hughes recently broke the UMass goal-scoring record with 49, passing longtime leader Jeff Deren.

Although the Minutemen have been in the A-10 for decades, they’ve only had three head coaches during this time, with Sam Koch and current head coach Fran O’Leary combining for 33 years.

Koch, who died in 2014 after battling sinus cancer, led the team to two conference championships in the span of six years.

His legacy on the team is long-lasting; the home field was renamed Rudd Field, Home of Sam Koch, in 2015.

The 2000s under Koch were about turning a struggling UMass soccer program into a competitive group that played for A-10 and national titles, with the 2007 A-10 championship-winning team making it all the way to the College Cup semifinals.

The 2007 season did not start off on the note it ended on, however. The Minutemen were 2-4 going into an important stretch of games in October. This did not deter them though, as they ended up winning a program-record 17 games en route to the A-10 championship and, subsequently, the College Cup.

That season had many impressive results, like a win against No. 1 Boston College and an away win against No. 12 Saint Louis.

Rudd Field was chosen to host the first round of the NCAA tournament, and many fans joined to watch this impressive UMass team beat Central Connecticut and Illinois-Chicago to get to the College Cup. This successful season ended at the hands of Roger Espinoza’s Ohio State.

Goalkeeper Zack Simmons was outstanding for the team; he was awarded Atlantic 10 Player of the Tournament among other achievements in 2007.

It took a decade for the Minutemen to win the A-10 title again, this time with Fran O’Leary at the helm. The resourceful and innovative coach took the job in 2014 following Koch’s death, and while it took a little while for things to get rolling, in 2017, O’Leary led the Minutemen to their first winning season since 2008. They won the A-10 championship that year and went on to compete in the NCAA tournament.

In their journey to winning the A-10 championship, they beat Saint Louis 1-0 at home in the quarterfinals. In similarly gritty fashion, they bested Fordham in the semifinals by the same 1-0 scoreline. They defeated VCU in the A-10 championship 3-1.

In the NCAA tournament, it was all too much, and they were eliminated after just one game against Colgate.

In a conference that Saint Louis had made its own with multiple titles, UMass became a top competitor under O’Leary. His versatile and fluid style of play makes his teams virtually impossible to game-plan against.

O’Leary has taken this current group of players from middling in the A-10 to one of the potential at-large bids for this season’s NCAA tournament.

Spearheaded by talismanic forward Alec Hughes, the last few iterations of UMass men’s soccer have been very direct and organized teams that enjoy stretching their opponents out with long passes. Hughes and the center-back pairing of Aiden Kelly and Matt Fordham have been mainstays in these last few successful seasons.

While their new conference home may not yet be settled, the Minutemen will always have a fond chapter to look back on in the Atlantic 10.

Dylan Shalom can be reached at [email protected] and followed on X @dylan_third