Mercer Women's Soccer Enters 2026 With a Problem It Actually Wants
Tony Economopoulos had about fifteen minutes before his bus left Macon on Tuesday morning, bound for Jackson, Mississippi and the start of his fifteenth season as Mercer's head coach. He spent them talking to Jon Nelson on SDH AM about a problem he did not have a year ago.
"This is a great problem," Economopoulos said. "Last year we couldn't get players. We brought more staff last year at OSU that we had bodies sometimes because we had so many open seats from injuries that kids couldn't travel."
The contrast is the whole story of where Mercer sits heading into 2026. Last season the Bears opened with a roster of 24 and were down to 14 by the time they faced Oklahoma State. Practices had to shrink around whatever bodies were healthy. Full contact training, the kind built around hard tackles and real transition moments, happened exactly once all year.
"We just couldn't afford any kind of freak accident and tackle," Economopoulos said. "Whereas this year, we've done it three or four times because we have a much larger roster, and it keeps the competitiveness up at a higher level."
The Bears still found a way to finish 10-7-3 overall and 3-3-3 in SoCon play, then beat the conference's No. 2 and No. 3 seeds to reach the SoCon Tournament championship game, where they fell to Samford, 1-4.
That run, and the group that survived a threadbare bench to produce it, is a big reason the conference still respects this program even after picking Mercer sixth in an 11-team preseason poll. Sophomore midfielder Payton Nutzman and senior defender Anna Bachman were both named to the Preseason All-SoCon team this week, the first such recognition for either.
Nutzman started 13 games as a freshman before a season ending injury on Oct. 5 cut her year short. She still finished with seven goals, five assists and 19 points, leading the team in assists and finishing second in both goals and points. Her best day came against Alabama State on Aug. 31, when she scored three goals and added an assist for seven points, both season highs.
Bachman started all 20 games last year and played the sixth most minutes on the roster, 1,566, while anchoring a back line that produced seven shutouts. Her four assists tied for second on the team, three of them on game winning goals, and she set a career high with 22 shots, including 11 on goal, a mark that led all Mercer defenders.
The Bears will not have long to feel out the new depth. Mercer opened preseason with an exhibition trip to Charleston on Aug. 5, and Economopoulos liked what he saw from a group that had spent two weeks in periodization before that first live look.
"I was very delighted at the speed of play," he said. "We had a lot of new kids who stepped up, new transfers and freshmen who impressed us." That performance turned a simple travel decision into a hard one. "We can't fly 29 players and staff, so we're gonna take 20 players total," Economopoulos said. "Leaving that game, I thought, we have a hard decision to make now."
The real season opens Wednesday at Jackson State, followed by West Georgia in Carrollton on Aug. 16 and a first ever meeting with Maine in Orono on Aug. 20. Mercer finally comes home on Aug. 23 against South Carolina State, the first of three straight at Betts Stadium that includes Georgia Southern on Aug. 27 and a visit from in state rival Georgia, ranked 19th nationally currently, on Aug. 30.
Some of this year's depth arrived from well outside Macon. Freshman forward Emily Rutkowski came from Melbourne, Australia, part of a pipeline Economopoulos credits to a handler with contacts there. Sophomore Francesca Pugliese and freshman Soleil Elliott both arrived from Ontario, close enough to the New York border that some of Mercer's Canadian recruits simply drive two hours into Buffalo or Rochester to play in front of the staff.
The program's most notable international story traces back three years to Serbia, where Economopoulos went to scout Greece's U19 national team. "We were watching one kid in particular, and we saw a different kid," he said. That different kid became midfielder Marianna Rapani, who arrived from Iraklio by way of OFI Crete FC.
"Mariana got called up to the full national team back in the summertime," Economopoulos said, "and, hopefully, she gets called up again in October for the qualifiers."
Economopoulos said he limits how many players he brings in from any one country, wary of small cliques forming inside the locker room. What he sells hard instead is Macon itself, and its position an hour from Atlanta and two hours from the Georgia coast.
"We're an hour from Atlanta," he said. "So you want anything massive, you're an hour away from a big concert and airports, any shop, any store you want to go to, the world is right there."
The roster still runs through Georgia, too. Forward Kelsie Henton played her high school ball at Sandy Creek in Fayetteville. Midfielder Peyton Densmore came out of West Forsyth in Cumming. Midfielder Addie Moynihan arrived from Brookwood in Grayson. Midfielder Lily Bivins, a freshman out of Macon's Academy for Classical Education, gets to play her college soccer without leaving home. And two products of Bartram Trail in Jacksonville, seniors Anna Bachman and Olivia Bori, give the roster a Florida backbone of its own.
Everything Mercer does this fall still runs through Samford, the defending SoCon champion that Economopoulos does not expect anyone to knock off just yet. "Until somebody knocks them off consistently, that's who we're all chasing," he said.
His bar for his own team is specific. "If they do that and we're healthy, I think we can finish top two or three and get that bye in the first round of playoffs," Economopoulos said, pointing to health and goalkeeping as the two variables that cost the Bears matches a year ago.
"That's our whole goal this year," he said, "if we can sustain where we're at right now."
Mercer opens the season Wednesday at Jackson State.
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