The conclusion of the 2025 Boston University men’s soccer season last month marked the end of a big part of my time at BU — it was the last time I would ever write about the team after three years of consistent coverage. And it’s really not about me, but in chronicling the team, I grew to care. A lot.

I became a soccer fan somewhat late in my life — just after 2020 or so — but it was, in a way, inevitable. 

In elementary school, my friends and neighbors all played the sport, so I played with them at recess or in our front yards. 

Realistically, highly-fluid, outdoor contact sports weren’t for me — I did gymnastics for 14 years, volleyball for three and track for a little bit, too — so I was usually doing something you could loosely call “defending.” 

Then I took a hiatus from even thinking about soccer until the summer before my senior year of high school. This was when my parents and I did college visits on the East Coast. It was at the same time as the UEFA Euro 2020 championship. 

During this trip, we always ended up at pubs, and they always seemed to broadcast these games. Soon enough, I started to become invested in the results, the teams, the players and their stories.

With this new interest, I went to games during my senior year of high school — helped by the fact that my best friend’s boyfriend played on the team. So there I was, once again with a group of friends that swayed my interest in the sport. 

When I decided to leave all of them in Colorado and come all the way to Boston for college, soccer was one of the few things that remained constant. 

Even before I joined The Daily Free Press, I was going to BU soccer games. It was a perfect way to settle into the new environment, especially since two of my freshman-year roommates also liked the sport. We had a shared interest and a growing tradition. 

That same fall, in my Kilachand Honors College first-semester writing studio, we had to write reviews of My Obsession, a program by the Boston Ballet. My professor, Dr. Yang, liked what I had to say and urged me to pursue more writing of the same style. 

So I did. I applied to The Daily Free Press, putting the Features and Sports sections on my application, figuring that I already went to so many concerts and games that I might as well write about them.

I was accepted and became a sports writer during the spring sports season. 

Women’s lacrosse recaps made up my first five pieces, but I knew that soccer was going to be my main thing.

I took the following summer learning about, reading about and watching as much soccer as I could — mostly due to personal interest, but also to be better prepared to regularly write about a sport I never played. 

My first soccer article was the preview for the 2023 season.

I was so fortunate to begin covering the team when I did, because what a season 2023 was.

I followed the team’s path to an unbeaten home run, including a 4-1 win over Navy and a 3-1 victory over Loyola, and I wrote about its clinching of the regular season title for the first time since 2014.

Then I got to cover the Patriot League Final.

It was over an hour of waiting for the scoreless deadlock to break — shots traded back and forth between the teams. But in the 65th minute, BU broke through, and the palpable energy in the stands reached another level.

“That’s why you play the game,” then-senior goalkeeper Francesco Montali said postgame.

It’s the games, moments and feelings like these that help explain why I always sat outside the press box and also why I kept writing, putting out 38 more articles after that first preview in 2023.

Consistent coverage of the team meant regular conversations with Head Coach Kevin Nylen — win, lose or draw and positive, negative or neutral. 

After the team tied Saint Mary’s College of California 1-1 early in the 2024 season on its way to an NCAA-leading 10 draws, Nylen said it “could be one of the worst performances since we’ve been here as a staff.” At that point, maybe it was, but weeks later, there was a worse performance.

The ensuing 5-1 loss at Brown University seemed to leave Nylen more baffled than angry.

“That’s a tough way to start a game,” Nylen said. But he added he was “really proud” of the team in the second half of the game.

And just this season, after losing 2-0 to Lehigh University, Nylen said “we deserved to lose,” which I used as the title for that recap.

These quotes may paint him as blunt or hard-shelled — but I think, more than that, they show honesty and openness. This is even clearer in the way Nylen talked about his teams. 

After the final game of this season, before addressing the game itself, he focused on the seniors: “I[‘ve] got a lot of love and a lot of gratitude for the guys who wore the jersey for the last time tonight,” he said. “They raised our program.”

After the win in the 2025 Patriot League First Round, Nylen called senior defender Giuseppe Bagnato “a huge glue guy” who contributed in ways that “[don’t] come up on the stat sheet” after the senior, who had a slower start to his collegiate career, made key defensive plays and set up the game-tying goal to help the Terriers to the Semifinal.  

He quipped about senior forward Alex Bonnington’s first goal after considerable time missed due to injury, saying, “It’s about time” before turning to more serious reflection.

For the profile on former forward Aidan Bone, Nylen said, “Aidan is a quieter person, at least he’s quieter than I am.”

“He’s not going to be the alpha male in the room, but he became a bigger voice,” Nylen said.

Each new interview and new subject provided an entirely different angle on the team.

Bagnato and junior forward Andrea Di Blasio, who, I found out, were teammates before coming to BU, brought a lightheartedness to a setting that can be intense and results-focused. 

In our conversation, they reflected on the youthful joy that often fades with time and how they were able to rekindle their relationship with the sport. They mentioned their sibling-like dynamic and shared how celebrating together on the field reminded them of “how [they] were back then.”

And then, when I spoke to Di Blasio after this season’s Alumni Day win, the first few seconds of the interview recording picked up teammates in the background shouting “fenomeno” at the player who had just achieved his second-career brace.

Then there were moments that almost didn’t feel like interviews. When I was writing a piece about Bonnington’s path from the United Kingdom to Duke University to BU, his former teammate, Will Trueman, joined our Zoom call both late and in the middle of snacking. It was a very lax vibe for sure. 

And when I asked about what Bonnington was like before the growth spurt the forward had told me about, Trueman laughed and said “average” and that Bonnington “shot up.”

These moments shaped my understanding of the team more than any numbers could, but there are some fascinating numbers that help summarize my coverage.

I did three profiles, five features — among them, three season previews — and 31 game recaps: 14 wins, 10 losses and seven draws for a .565 record that I had no actual influence on.

Excluding this piece, I wrote the word “the” more than 2000 times, “a” 814 times, “to” 721 times and “and” exactly 700.

“Terriers” was used 70 more times than “BU,” with 246 and 176 uses, respectively. I’d like to think this is because I preferred referring to the team as a plural unit, but maybe it’s a random coincidence.

The most-mentioned players were Di Blasio, Bonnington and senior goalkeeper Sheraz Saadat, the first two due to profiles and in-game contributions — each has 20 career points — and their multiple appearances in postgame interviews because of that. Saadat had a sizable impact in his two seasons, although I never interviewed him.

I mentioned former forward Eitan Rosen and former midfielder Daniel Kim the same number of times as the numbers on the back of their shirts — 21 and 8, respectively. They were the only players that was true for. 

With more than 28,000 words written and nearly seven hours of interview recordings, I can say I spent a lot of the last three years at Nickerson Field and on Google Docs. I cherished every minute of it, too.

There is so much to be said about the team, and it comes with a really exciting future. I hope someone else finds as much joy in covering the men’s soccer beat for The Daily Free Press as I did. 

It is worth every late night, hard interview, tough loss, all the freezing rain and gusty wind and the ESPN+ streams that don’t work, because there are the triumphant wins, heartwarming narratives and sun that breaks through just in time for kickoff, with the joy of the community surrounding the team.

So, thank you — to my old friends and neighbors, to my current friends back in Colorado, to my roommates here at BU, to Dr. Yang and to all The Daily Free Press staff who supported and edited my tens of thousands of words, who laid out the print edition into ungodly hours of the morning and who contributed images that my articles wouldn’t be the same without. Thank you to Scott Ellis, the sports information director who helped coordinate the many, many interviews I conducted and especially to Kevin Nylen, his coaching staff and to the Boston University men’s soccer team of the past three seasons for being not only one of my favorite subjects to write about — but also for being open and honest, allowing me to share their stories on and off the field.