UNC men’s soccer head coach Carlos Somoano joined 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck Thursday, Aug. 6 for a wide-ranging conversation. Somoano, who is entering his 16th season as head coach at Carolina and who earlier this year agreed to a three-year contract extension, shared his excitement for the Tar Heels’ 2026 season and also discussed some NCAA rule changes. That includes a proposal endorsed by Somoano which would spread the college soccer season out across both the fall and spring semesters.
You can read a transcript of the conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity, below. Click here to listen to the full conversation.
AARON KECK: What are you doing right now? Season opener right around the corner. What’s life like for you?
CARLOS SOMOANO: Well, preseason college soccer is an avalanche. We started training Tuesday. So we’re only in our third day. We’ll train this afternoon. Yeah, it just moves fast. So we’re just trying to make sure that we get everybody up to date, oriented, go through our soccer orientation, and then we start playing games. So it is, especially for the new players, trial by fire. We just jump in headfirst. It is the most exciting time of the year, though. It’s good to be back with the boys.
KECK: What are you most excited about this year?
SOMOANO: I just love our players. I love our team. Great personality. A lot of strong, positive personalities that are influential players, too. So that’s exciting.
KECK: Tell us about the transfers coming in.
SOMOANO: That’s a great question. I don’t think of our players as which ones are transfers, which ones are not. They’re just guys that we have. Who came in the spring? That would be Ryan [Zellefrow, from Vermont], Lockey [Nick Lockermann, from Vermont], some of the more recent guys, Nico Loebus [from Vermont]. Yeah, great players. Fun, good personality.
KECK: It’s good insight too, because all of us go into Dorrance Field watching the games, there are gonna be players that we’re seeing for the first time. You’ve been with these guys for months now, on top of the recruiting to bring them in, right? None of these are new.
SOMOANO: That’s right. We had some of them come in January. The way this whole thing works, you’re basically turning over a third of your roster every semester. You start in August, you’ve got a team, and then in January, you’ve got a whole new group of guys. And then now in August again, we have another group of guys because we had a significant amount of players come in that are here for the first time. So we have some transfers that are brand new here in August, and some that have been with us for a little bit longer. I know those a little bit better.
KECK: You’re coming off a trip to the second round of the NCAA Tournament last year. Came real close to beating Maryland. That was a great game, but hoping to build on that this year. And just got the preseason poll in; you’re 26th in the country according to that number. Right outside the top 25. Is that a motivation for you at all, or do you think about preseason polls at all?
SOMOANO: Definitely not for me. I think most of the preseason polls just start where you finished last year, so a little bit irrelevant. They don’t necessarily give you the biggest picture, and I think you see that in a lot of sports. I think if you start spending your time on that and then you’re not spending your time on the things that are gonna help you climb the ladder. We’ll be motivated either way, wherever they put us.
UNC is coming off a trip to the second round of the NCAA Tournament last season, where it lost to Maryland in penalty kicks. (Image via UNC Athletic Communications/Nate Skvoretz)
KECK: Do you feel differently at this time of the year from one season to another, or is it the same feeling every year? Can you tell when it’s gonna be a great year?
SOMOANO: No, definitely not. It just happens so fast, and we haven’t seen the boys since mid-April, right? So they come in and you’ve gotta cross your fingers that they come in fit. And we have some great characters, so it seems like they did that job. So that’s our first marker. We’re excited about that, and we feel that they worked hard over the summer. You hope they come in healthy. We’re relatively healthy. We dropped a couple guys over the summer in summer ball, but that’s okay. We have a deep roster and we’ll take the next man up. And then, just trying to put it together. So these exhibitions will do a good job of giving us a picture of what we’ll look like.
And until we play an actual match, it’ll be hard to say how good we can be. And quite honestly, when I’m looking at that, I don’t even know midway through the season. We’ve hit some markers where all of a sudden you start to realize, hey, we’ve got something special here. You don’t really realize it until the team has evolved a little bit.
KECK: You mentioned the exhibitions. What’s your approach to the exhibitions? Is it just getting as many guys, as many formations and combinations as possible?
SOMOANO: You’ve gotta balance that out because you can’t try too many things. Because we’ll be playing a match Aug. 20. So we’ve gotta start working on who we’re gonna be as soon as possible. At the same time, we’ve gotta give enough guys a look to see what they’re capable of doing or if they’re capable of helping us. And then we’ve gotta stay healthy. So honestly, we go through these matches and they’re a little bit of a, ‘Hey, let’s make sure we come out of this with everybody ready to roll on Aug. 20.’
KECK: I don’t know how to put this: is there a concern about spoilers if you’re out there on an exhibition? Like, we don’t want to show too much of ourselves because we don’t want the other teams down the road to know what we’re capable of?
SOMOANO: Not for me. I think we’re gonna go and we’ll evolve over the course of the season, so whatever you see in the first game is not gonna be exactly the same midseason. But at the same time, I think we’ve always gone in with the approach that, ‘Hey, we have no problem showing our cards.’ We’re just gonna be the best version of ourselves and we’re gonna make opponents adjust to us, as opposed to trying to hide who we are and change for an opponent.
KECK: It’s a big year for soccer because we’re just coming off the World Cup. Are you feeling an extra amount of excitement just in general about soccer this year going into the season because of that?
SOMOANO: Well, I hope the community is. I’m always excited. The World Cup was awesome. I thought it was so much fun. I just love watching Team USA play. It was a gut punch when we hit the wall against Belgium, but I don’t think that should take away from what they accomplished and the excitement that the World Cup brought. It was fun to watch Sebastian [Berhalter, a member of Team USA and a former UNC player] out there, that was awesome. I couldn’t be more proud of him and happier for him. Hopefully that’s brought a little bit of more attention to men’s soccer and gets people excited to come out and watch some games.
United States’ Sebastian Berhalter (14) celebrates winning the World Cup round of 32 soccer match between the United States and Bosnia in Santa Clara, Calif., near San Francisco, Wednesday, July 1, 2026. (Photo via AP Photo/Eakin Howard.)
KECK: It’s also a tumultuous time for college athletics, starting with the new NCAA eligibility rules. Thoughts about that? Do you think that helps, hurts, changes you at all?
SOMOANO: You know, the age-based eligibility rule, I don’t think you can take any one of these things in isolation right now. Like you said, tumultuous is a good word. There’s a lot of variables and one of these rules affects another 10. So you’ve gotta put them all together. I think what we as coaches have learned to do is, our knees are bent. We’re ready to pivot, change directions on the fly. We’ve gotten used to it. And I think you’ve just gotta go with it and try to make the most of it. Hopefully there’ll be some settling at some point, but right now, you think the target’s right in front of you, and it moves constantly. There’s no point stressing out about any of that stuff. You just try to make the most of it. And I one thousand percent spend all my energy on our student-athletes. Everything else, we’ll manage.
KECK: Are they getting what they need to get out of college athletics and college in general, do you think? What more could UNC or the landscape of college sports be providing to make sure that these kids are set up to succeed when they get out?
SOMOANO: This is a great question. I love to discuss this. I could do this for hours. I still think NCAA sports and athletic departments do provide a lot for our student-athletes. And yeah, there are significant issues that we need to address. And I think part of the problem is the boots on the ground, the people that are actually working in it, are not the ones making the decisions. It feels like there’s somebody way up at 30,000 feet that’s trying to legislate for people that are living it, and they don’t really understand what you’re living. So you get a little bit caught up in that. But again, there’s still so much to offer out of college athletics. Let’s focus on our student-athletes, let’s focus on the positives because there’s a lot to offer. And while we’re doing that, yes, let’s most definitely try to fix and amend where we can so that we can offer even more. I think that may be the better way to put it. When you start looking at it, you’re like, ‘Man, there’s so much to offer, but how much more could this be? How much greater could this be for our student-athletes if we didn’t tie our shoelaces together?’ Some of this is self-inflicted damage. But our student-athletes have got it made. I mean, being at Carolina, come on. I’m the men’s soccer coach at Carolina. It’s not even a job. It’s just a blessing, and I’m happy to do it. I’m happy to be the guy that has the responsibility for that.
KECK: There’s a new proposal that would make college soccer a year-round sport instead of just a one semester thing. What are your thoughts about that?
SOMOANO: It’s kind of been my passion project for over 10 years. And it’s not year-round, it’s just a redistribution of what we’re currently doing over both semesters. Moving the championship to late April, May, and then redistributing our current games and our current trainings over two semesters so it’s not all jam packed.
Gosh, I could go into a thousand variables as to why that makes sense. But I think the easiest thing to do is look at any soccer player in Europe, South America. That’s how everybody does it. We’re a little bit of an outlier in college athletics. 1959 is when [NCAA] men’s soccer started, and it was a seasonal sport. And no longer do we have such things as seasonal sports. These are lifestyle sports. Everybody’s doing it year-round in terms of training. When you’re trying to cram 20 contests into 10 to 12 weeks, it’s not ideal. So if we’re able to get that across the line, I think it’s gonna be one of the most significant impacts for a male soccer player in maybe the history of college athletics.
KECK: This is a dumb question, but since I grew up in Michigan: how do you play games in East Lansing and Ann Arbor in January, February? Would that be an issue that needs to be resolved?
SOMOANO: Not a dumb question, but it’s a misunderstanding. You wouldn’t be playing games in January, February. Matches wouldn’t start probably until March. And I would say, how do you play a lacrosse game in that time? Or play a baseball game? This is already happening. How do youth soccer players play a game in January, February? Toronto FC has a team and they start in mid-February.
KECK: What is your message to fans before the season begins?
SOMOANO: We have a fun group. I think we’ve got some extra juice this year that I’m hoping to see come to life. And I fully have confidence that it will, and it’s gonna be a fun team to watch this year. I think we’ve got a little bit more pop to our game, so come watch us!
Aaron Keck and UNC men’s soccer head coach Carlos Somoano. (Image via Chapel Hill Media Group)
Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications/Jeffrey A. Camarati
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