Ahoy! Pirates Make NCAA Tournament, Hosting First Tourney Match Since 2005

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. – Seton Hall men's soccer has received an at-large bid to the 2025 NCAA Div. I Men's Soccer Championship. The Pirates will host the Siena Saints in a first-round match on Thursday, Nov. 20 at 5 p.m. at Owen T. Carroll Field.

All NCAA Tournament games are ticketed; tickets for the general public are on sale now at am.ticketmaster.com/setonhall/buy/msocncaa. Limited free tickets for Seton Hall students will be available first-come, first serve at the front desk of the rec center Thursday at 12 p.m.

This will be Seton Hall's 14th appearance all-time in the NCAA Tournament. The last time the Pirates were in the field was during the 2022 season, when they fell to New Hampshire 2-1 on the road. The Hall's at-large bid marks the third time the Pirates have qualified for the NCAA Tournament under Andreas Lindberg's tenure. Additionally, this will be the first time Seton Hall has hosted an NCAA Tournament game since 2005, when the Pirates defeated Hartwick 2-1.

Seton Hall finished the regular season 7-3-7 overall and 3-1-4 in conference play, but missed the BIG EAST Tournament on Decision Day after suffering a late loss to UConn. The Pirates navigated the toughest strength of schedule in the country to the 17th-ranked RPI. Over the course of the season, the Pirates faced off against five eventual conference champions - Georgetown, Princeton, FDU, Saint Louis and Lafayette - in addition to four other teams that participated in their conference championship games.

The Hall enters the NCAA Tournament led by a trio of all-conference performers. Defender Agustin Resch (Arata, Argentina) not only earned All-BIG EAST First Team honors, but he was also named BIG EAST Defensive Player of the Year. Resch became the second Pirate in program history to receive the latter honor, with the only other being Seton Hall Athletics Hall of Famer Hector Zamora in 1990. Midfielder Til Kauschke (Hamburg, Germany) and forward Mikkel Lejbowicz (Farum, Denmark) both earned All-BIG EAST Second Team honors. Kauschke marshalled the Pirates' midfield, scoring a career-high four goals and logging four assists. Lejbowicz closed the season on fire, scoring five goals in five games to raise his season-long mark to seven goals scored, tied for the most by any player under Andreas Lindberg's tenure.

The Pirates enter the NCAA Tournament with a highly experienced roster from top to bottom. Among the Pirates' starters, eight of them are multi-season starters and seven of them are seniors or graduate students. When the Pirates last competed in the NCAA Tournament in 2022, ten players on the current roster were part of that team. Two of those players, defenders Liam Guske (St. John's, Florida) and Konstantin Donalies (Bremen, Germany), played the full 90 minutes, while Donalies knocked home The Hall's lone goal in a 2-1 loss.

This will be the fourth all-time meeting between Seton Hall and Siena. The two sides last met 75 years ago in 1950, in a match that ended in a 6-0 Seton Hall win. The Saints won their first Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Championship and will be making their first NCAA Tournament appearance.

The winner of Thursday's match advances to the Second Round to face No. 11 national seed Bryant on Sunday, Nov. 23.

The Pirates are one of five teams from the BIG EAST to qualify for the tournament, joining Georgetown, Akron, UConn and St. John's. That total is tied with the Big Ten and for the second-most teams from a single conference in this year's tournament, trailing only the ACC's nine bids.