Maryland Soccer Is Doing It Again, and This Time Nobody’s Surprised

Three games into the 2026 season, Maryland men’s soccer looks exactly like a team that finished last year one bracket short of everything. The Terps are 3-0-0, they’ve beaten a ranked opponent, and they’ve done it the way Sasho Cirovski teams have made a habit of doing it for three decades: gritty, occasionally ugly, and somehow always finding the goal that matters.

The résumé so far

Start with the opener. Maryland went on the road to Pitt — no gimme, a program that had beaten a Big Ten team in a season opener the year before — and got two goals from a true freshman making his college debut. Said El Eyssami scored in the 12th minute (Maryland’s own play-by-play has it there; Yahoo Sports and Testudo Times both list it as the 11th) and again just after halftime, and Maryland held on for a 2-1 win despite getting thoroughly outshot, 14-6. Cirovski wasn’t shy about the ugliness of it afterward, calling it a game where the Terps “had to make the right plays at the right time and absorb some pressure.” That’s a coach’s way of saying: we survived, and survival counts.

Then came the home opener against New Haven, which turned into the kind of six-minute stretch that makes fans forget the first half ever happened. Maryland trailed at the break, then scored three goals in a six-minute burst early in the second half — Henry Bernstein, Dominic Ayella, and Leon Koehl all finding the net — to escape with a 3-2 win. It was Maryland’s first 2-0 start since 2022, and it kept a regular-season unbeaten streak alive that’s now up to 17 matches.

The one that actually moved the needle nationally came Saturday against No. 9 High Point. Eighty minutes of nothing — a genuine defensive standoff between two top-10 teams — before Rodrigo Neri beat a defender and the keeper to net the only goal of the match in the 81st minute. Cirovski called it his team’s best performance of the season so far, which is a notable thing to say about a scoreless-until-the-final-ten-minutes affair. The win pushed Maryland to No. 4 in the country, gave the program its first top-10 win since a 3-0 dismantling of Wisconsin back in September 2024, and extended a home winning streak that’s now at ten straight.

Why this feels different from the usual preseason hype

Maryland enters practically every season with some form of national expectation attached to it — that’s what 34 years of Cirovski and three national titles buys you. But this group is coming off something specific: a 13-2-4 campaign, an undefeated regular season, a Big Ten title, and a trip to the NCAA quarterfinals. They opened 2026 as the preseason No. 7 team and have already climbed to No. 4 without playing a soft schedule to get there.

What’s notable is how they’re winning. This isn’t a team steamrolling overmatched opponents by three goals a night. It’s 2-1, 3-2, 1-0 — close, tense, veteran-program soccer where somebody different steps up each time. A freshman in game one. A late-game six-minute explosion in game two. A grinding, single-goal decision in game three. That’s not luck repeating itself three times; that’s depth, and it’s exactly what Cirovski has been promising reporters all preseason when he talked about being “much deeper than we’ve been.”

The schedule gets real

None of this erases the fact that the softest part of the slate is behind them. Delaware comes to Ludwig Field next, then a home date with a ranked Georgetown team looms as a genuine measuring stick — the kind of DMV rivalry game that tends to sort out who’s actually elite this early in a season versus who’s just beating up on favorable matchups. Big Ten play brings Wisconsin, UCLA, Michigan State, Ohio State, and Penn State to College Park, plus a trip to defending national champion Washington at the end of October.

Three games isn’t a verdict. But for a program that opened last season unranked and finished it one win from the College Cup, starting 2026 at No. 4 with a signature win already on the résumé is about as loud a statement as you can make in August. The Terps have made a habit of being the team nobody wants to see in November. Right now, they’re building the case to be that team again.