Fourth in the country. Wednesday. Ashland Middle School.

Medfield opens as national No. 4 on a middle-school field. Natick is dark until the 15th. Tuesday is when the rest of Massachusetts starts.

Mass Pitch Staff · 2026-09-05

Fourth in the country. Wednesday. Ashland Middle School.

Medfield is ranked fourth in the United States as a high school girls soccer team. Natick, which won Division 1 last November, is twenty-second. Nobody else from Massachusetts is in the national twenty-five.

So the first official game of the year for the best-ranked team in the state is Wednesday, on the road, at Ashland Middle School.

That is not a slight. That is the sport. The ranking does not get a stadium. It gets a middle-school field in the Tri-Valley and a roster that just lost ten seniors, and it has to go prove the ranking is not a pamphlet.

Sunday is the first day a game is even legal. Nobody scheduled one. Monday is Labor Day, and the season will in fact start, just not the way anyone would draw it up for a poster. Sizer and Pathfinder. Mystic Valley and Lynn Voc. Bourne and Old Rochester. Fairhaven and Joseph Case. Wahconah and Mount Greylock. Five real games. Zero famous ones. If you want the defending Division 1 champion, wait until the 15th. Natick does not play this week.

Tuesday is the first day the week has a pulse.

Eleven months ago they stuffed five championships into a weekend at Doyle Field in Leominster and at Curry College in Milton. Natick beat Franklin 4-2, a third Division 1 title in five years, Nicole Proia and Abby McCauley scoring two apiece. Duxbury beat Longmeadow 3-1, first title since 2008, goals from Lilah MacQuarrie, Lily Ladieu, Olivia Coperine. Medfield beat Nipmuc 1-0 on a 13th-minute strike from Devon Weafer, who was a sophomore, in a rematch of a final Nipmuc had won the year before. Sutton beat Littleton 1-0 for a fifth straight banner, Ava Magnuson scoring with either 32 seconds left or 36, depending on which recap you trust. The ball went in. Hull beat Monson 3-1 and won the first state title the program had ever had, Meghan Duran with the one that counted.

Then a lot of people left.

Nicole and Lydia Proia went to Seton Hall. McCauley went to Fordham. Lauren Sutliffe is already playing as a freshman at Northeastern. Magnuson went to William & Mary with 42 goals last fall and 153 for her career. Ten Medfield seniors walked off a field that had finally become a championship field again. What remains of those five rooms has to go play in September, which is a different sport from November.

Start with Scituate on Tuesday, because Duxbury does. The captains who stayed are Coperine, MacQuarrie, Grey Metzler, Regan Donovan, Anna Manganello. Two of them scored in the final. Repeating is a rumor until the first whistle at Scituate High. The same day, Franklin, which took Natick to 4-2 in that D1 final, opens a Hockomock week against King Philip. Newton South draws Bishop Feehan, and with Feehan comes Addie Hansbury, the Catholic Central defensive player of the year. Newburyport draws Lynnfield. Hull, which had never won a thing, opens at Rockland, which is a perfectly Massachusetts way to begin a title defense.

And Concord-Carlisle opens at home against Algonquin, which means Emmy O'Donnell's last high school season starts against Algonquin.

O'Donnell is the Gatorade state player of the year, bound for Duke, an alternate on a U.S. under-20 list. Peter Fischelis, who coaches her, has said the thing out loud: "Emmy is the best player in Massachusetts." Matt Wentworth, who has to play her on Thursday at Lincoln-Sudbury, has called her "a nightmare to coach against." She plays Tuesday. She plays Thursday on the road in the Dual County. The rest can wait.

Wednesday is the ranking.

Sidney Heavey had 24 goals and 14 assists last year, an All-American season, Central Florida next. Kristine Lilly is her mother, 354 caps, and that is already the most famous sentence attached to this team. It is also the least useful one for Ashland. Ten classmates are gone. Heavey is not. Weafer is not. Melinda Lohan is 58-6-4 in three seasons as the coach and said at tryouts, "We've got genuinely two varsity teams sitting on this field right now." Audrey Grandinetti, a senior co-captain headed to Quinnipiac, said, "We have so much more to prove this year." Wednesday at Ashland Middle School is where those sentences have to become a first half.

Thursday, O'Donnell goes to Lincoln-Sudbury. Duxbury comes home to Whitman-Hanson. Friday, Longmeadow, the other team from that Division 2 final, opens against Westfield. And out in Mendon, Chris Hadfield coaches Nipmuc's girls for the first official time. He already won a state title at the school. That one was the boys, 2017. Steve Khoury retired after back-to-back girls finals. Hopedale is first. Sarah Dacey has Plymouth North. Matt Rodrigues has Attleboro. Arthur Staffiere has Malden Catholic. Dave Mitchell has Gloucester. None of those rooms get solved on Labor Day.

The hole in the week is Natick. Still the Division 1 champion. Still run by Kari-Ann Daley and Denise Trubiano. No game until Framingham on the 15th. Emilia Sousa started as a freshman on the title team and spent the first days of September at a U-16 national camp in Fayetteville, Georgia. Daley has said she "looks exponentially better than last year." She can look like anything she wants. They still don't play until the 15th. Opening week will not hold a seat.

Masconomet, which won Division 2 the year before Duxbury did, still has Maggie and Lily Blosser, both off to Maryland, one of them back from the ACL tear that took Lily's 2025. Norwell still has Hannah Morse, who scored 30 last fall and is bound for Davidson. Central Catholic still has Sarah Tressler, bound for Brown. If you are circling one date in October already, make it the 10th, 11 a.m., Central Catholic at Medfield. September is for getting there.

October can wait. Medfield still has to go to Ashland on Wednesday, fourth in the country, ten seniors lighter, on a middle-school field. Tuesday is when the rest of the state starts.