College Cup Comes to Town

Your Guide to the NCAA Soccer Tournament at UCSB's Harder Stadium This Weekend

<strong>THE GLORY:</strong> Although the UCSB men’s team lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament, the glorious Gaucho soccer spirit will live on this weekend at Harder Stadium, when four teams come from across the country to compete for the national championship in the College Cup.

December Desperation, soccer’s answer to March Madness, has come to Santa Barbara. Four teams that have survived a siege of heart-wrenching matches in the NCAA men’s soccer tournament will compete in the 2010 College Cup on UCSB’s Meredith Field at Harder Stadium.

On Friday, December 10, at 5:30 p.m., it’s top-ranked Louisville versus North Carolina. At 8 p.m., last year’s runner-up Akron will take on Michigan. The winners will take the field at 1 p.m. on Sunday and play for the championship.

If the matches are anything like last weekend’s quarterfinals, fans of the visiting teams will be chewing down their fingernails. But how did UCSB — which last hosted an NCAA championship event, men’s volleyball, in 1981 — become one of the few sites ever to pull the College Cup out of the East? It earned credibility on the field, by winning the Cup in 2006 at St. Louis, and in the stands. Santa Barbara set an NCAA attendance record in 2009 by averaging 4,335 fans per game, and this year the average jumped to 5,873 — boosted by an on-campus record of 15,896 that poured into Harder Stadium to see the Gauchos beat UCLA, 2-0, in September. The university recently put the final touches on almost $2 million in construction projects to improve the fan experience at the stadium.