Florida Tech’s 2026 season opens on August 27 against Franklin Pierce.
That is not a coincidence, and it is not a soft landing. Franklin Pierce is ranked No. 3. Florida Tech is ranked No. 1, the first preseason No. 1 in the program’s history and the first for any Florida Tech team since men’s soccer in 1993. The last time these two played, on December 13 in Colorado Springs, the Panthers won 3-0 and took home a national championship.
Eight months later, the schedule sends them right back at each other.
How the final went
Franklin Pierce should have led inside the first minute. They didn’t, because Kaitlin Sinkler wouldn’t let them. The graduate goalkeeper turned away Makenzie Shean twice early, then denied McKenna Maguire in the sixth minute, and the game stayed level long enough for Florida Tech to find its footing.
The Panthers went ahead in the 13th. Alice Mottershead played Lauryn Wood into space, Wood struck from along the end line, and the ball deflected in off a crowd of Ravens defenders. It was Wood’s seventh career NCAA Tournament goal, making her the program’s all-time leader in that category.
It stayed 1-0 until the 73rd minute, when Rio Naganawa and Sofia Posner combined to find Peyton White for a header. It was the first goal of White’s college career, scored less than two minutes into her first appearance in a month. Naganawa got the insurance goal herself late, striking from the top of the box after Mottershead and Posner set her up.
Sinkler made seven saves in the final, her 11th clean sheet of the season, and 41 across six tournament games. She was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player, and it was not a close call.
Six games, one shutout streak
| Round | Opponent | Result |
| First round | Embry-Riddle | W 2-0 |
| Second round | West Florida | W 2-1 |
| Third round | Nova Southeastern | W 1-0 |
| Quarterfinal | Lenoir-Rhyne | W 2-1 |
| Semifinal | Cal Poly Pomona | W 1-0 |
| Final | Franklin Pierce | W 3-0 |
Florida Tech didn’t concede over the last 204 minutes and 37 seconds of the tournament, and posted four clean sheets in six matches. The semifinal is the one worth staring at: Cal Poly Pomona was the defending national champion and the No. 2 seed, and the Panthers beat them 1-0 to get to the final.
One footnote on that bracket. West Florida, beaten in the second round, is no longer a Division II program at all. The Argonauts moved up to Division I on July 1, joining the ASUN after 32 seasons in the Gulf South Conference, and they will not be eligible for NCAA postseason play until 2029.
The rest of that bracket comes back around. Three of the six teams Florida Tech beat are on the 2026 schedule: Franklin Pierce in the opener, Nova Southeastern in the Sunshine State Conference opener, and Embry-Riddle at the end of September. Nova Southeastern is ranked No. 7 in the preseason poll. West Florida is the only one that got away, and only because it left the division.
Worth noting that Florida Tech went 17-3-6 on the season. Nine matches that weren’t wins. This was not a team that steamrolled its way through the fall. It was a team that peaked exactly when the bracket started.
What it meant
It’s the first national championship in the 22-year history of the women’s soccer program, and the school’s first team title of any kind since men’s soccer beat Sonoma State in 1991. Katy Freels became the first female head coach at Florida Tech to win a national championship, in her second season and her 30th career win at the school, the fastest anyone has reached that number there.
“It’s just an unbelievable moment for the team, the program, the school,” Freels said.
It also continued a streak that says something about where Division II women’s soccer is right now: 2025 was the third consecutive year a first-time program won the title, after Point Loma in 2023 and Cal Poly Pomona in 2024. The old order of Grand Valley State’s seven titles and Franklin Pierce’s five is being interrupted regularly.
And it was a Florida sweep. Florida State won the Division I women’s soccer national championship the same month Florida Tech won Division II. Two titles, two divisions, one state.
Who’s back
Sinkler returns. So do Alice Mottershead, the junior from Manchester who assisted two of the three goals in the final, and both of the players who scored the goals that put the game away: Peyton White, a sophomore from Oviedo, and Rio Naganawa, a sophomore from Seki, Japan. Henkel, Anae Malbete, Carolina Falcao and Izzie Bromage are back too. Twelve freshmen join them.
The departures matter, though. Wood is gone, along with Mia Otero, Posner, Rebecca Storr, Halla Helgadottir and Nora Oldmark. Savannah Oxley is playing professionally in Australia. A Melbourne native and Viera High graduate, she played 81 games for the Panthers, more than anyone in program history. Seven opponents on the 2026 schedule are ranked in the top 25 or receiving votes.
The NIL piece: Space Coast, small market, real leverage
Here’s what makes Florida Tech interesting beyond the trophy.
The Sunshine State Conference bills itself as Division II’s Conference of National Champions, with 136 NCAA titles and the best academic success rate in the division. That’s a serious brand, and almost none of it is monetized the way a Power Four football program’s brand is.
Melbourne is a small market with an unusual one: aerospace, flight schools, surf shops, defense contractors. And this roster is recruited heavily in state: Emme Henkel from Satellite Beach, White from Oviedo, Nina Santiago and Marina Amorim from Orlando, Kamila Pena from Punta Gorda, and Cathryn Orr a Melbourne native and Viera High graduate. A national champion goalkeeper who’s a graduate student at an engineering school is a compelling endorsement partner too. Sinkler’s profile is live, and nobody has backed her yet. What these athletes have historically lacked is any organized way to connect with the businesses that would want to work with them.
That’s the gap. The Panthers’ roster is on RallyFuel, and fan backed NIL isn’t about outbidding anyone, because Division II isn’t playing that game. It’s about the fact that a DII national champion has real local brand value and thin infrastructure to convert it. We’ve made the wider case for backing non-revenue athletes elsewhere.
One real complication, though, and it applies to a lot of this roster. Florida Tech’s squad is heavily international: Manchester, Seki, Oslo, Paris, Heidelberg, Carnaxide. International athletes on student visas face restrictions on earning NIL income in the United States that domestic athletes simply don’t, and the guidance in that area has been unsettled for years. It isn’t a reason to write those athletes off, but it is a question to work through with a compliance office and an immigration attorney rather than assume away. We’ve covered the international student picture in more depth.
Standard caveats apply, and they matter: backing an athlete is an endorsement arrangement, not pay-for-play and not a recruiting inducement. It operates inside NCAA, state, and institutional rules, and no amount of fan support changes a result on the field.
August 27
Same two teams. Same stakes, differently arranged. Franklin Pierce has five national championships, eight trips to the title game, and a December it would like to redo. Florida Tech has one, and the No. 1 next to its name for the first time ever.
Related: How RallyFuel works · Florida Tech women’s soccer on RallyFuel · NIL across Florida’s junior colleges · Browse women’s soccer programs · Sunshine State Conference
