STATESBORO, Ga. – Florida Gulf Coast men's soccer will open the 2026 regular season at Georgia Southern on Thursday.

Head coach Oliver Twelvetrees will begin his second season in Fort Myers with a new team after 16 players exhausted their eligibility at the conclusion of the 2025 season. Lucas Barsoe headlines the eight returners after recording 1,090 minutes in the midfield, while Job Choute comes back for his fourth year at FGCU as the longest tenured Eagle on the squad. 

Choute and Brooks Beeman bring back one goal each. Brian Lopez tallied a pair of assists and Jai Sahni added one assist to comprise all of FGCU's returning points. 

The Eagles lost the fifth-most percentage of minutes in NCAA Division I men's soccer from 2025 to 2026, as the departing players accounted for 81.3% of FGCU's minutes in 2025. Only Gardner-Webb, Campbell, Hofstra and Penn State lost a higher percentage of their team's minutes heading into the 2026 campaign.

Twelvetrees welcomes 21 newcomers to the team to fill the 81.3% of minutes lost, including eight true freshmen. A trio of Power Four transfers – forward Michael Ndiweni (Ohio State) and goalkeepers Marcelo Lacayo (UCF) and Harvey Sellers (Louisville) – lead the 13 transfer additions. Aron Martinez joins his former teammate, Lopez, from a national championship junior college team at Iowa Western. 

Twelvetrees' side includes 14 international student-athletes from nine countries – Costa Rica, Denmark, Germany, Canada, France, England, Spain, Brazil and Barbados. 13 players hail from Florida; Martinez (Dodge City, Kan.) and Sahni (San Ramon, Calif.) are the lone players on the roster that are from the United States, but not from Florida. 

FGCU is set up to retain more of its roster moving forward, as only three Eagles will play their final year of college soccer in 2026 – fifth years Choute, Sahni and Eduard Garcia.

Despite the roster turnover, the Eagles were picked to finish third in the 2026 preseason ASUN Coaches Poll, the ASUN announced Tuesday.

Georgia Southern enters its 2026 campaign after a 13-4-1 mark in 2025. The Eagles of the Peach State went 2-0 against the ASUN, notching wins over Stetson and Jacksonville, and defeated No. 4 Marshall at home. Georgia Southern lost 21 goals from its four players that found the back of the net more than once in 2025, but Toby Nevile, Mitch Picksley, Harry Dale and Tomas Morales return after scoring one goal apiece.

FGCU leads the all-time series with Georgia Southern 2-1-1, and is 1-1 in Statesboro. Georgia Southern won the most recent matchup 2-0 in 2024.

For more information on FGCU men's soccer, follow @FGCU_MSoccer on Instagram, X (Twitter) and Facebook, and visit fgcuathletics.com.