Tidbits from around the country, teed up just for you every Thursday.

Three conference tournaments start this week, with 16 more (sixteen...more) kicking off between now and Friday the 13th. For more, check out our always-evolving Conference Tournament Hub.

Photo Courtesy of Akron

We'll start with The Akron Watch this time around, after the Zips barely escaped a surging Michigan State team with a 2-1 win on Wednesday night. Despite Teal Bunbury's 15th goal of the season less than four minutes into the game, Akron couldn't score again until the 75th minute, when Blair Gavin sunk a penalty kick. But the Spartans, who have been scorching lately, put up one of the best fights the Zips have seen this year, tallying the first first-half goal Akron's allowed all season in this one. Said Akron coach Caleb Porter: "'We haven't been through much adversity and I think you can tell a lot about a championship-level team in the moments of adversity." Another dominating fun fact about Akron this year: the Zips have outscored their Big Ten opponents, 14-2 on the season.

A week after being profiled by NCAA.com, Monmouth set an all-time program record for wins with a 2-0 win over former NEC leaders Quinnipiac on Sunday. With a 15-1-1 record on the season, the Hawks broke the record of 14 wins set by the 2006 team. The win came after another victory on Friday, over CCSU, which followed Monmouths' first loss of the season two Sundays ago -- a loss that some expected to jolt the Hawks. But, a record-setting season for Monmouth looks very much back on the right track.

Michigan earned its 100th all-time win as a varsity program with a 2-1, double-overtime win over No. 12 Northwestern on Sunday. The Wolverines now close up their regular season with a game in Columbus against an Ohio State team that just took down Indiana, playing live on the Big Ten Network.

After tallying North Carolina's first hat trick in four years, the Tar Heels' Alex Dixon was named to the College Soccer News and Top Drawer Soccer Teams of the Week. It's impressive enough to notch a hat trick, especially for a power like North Carolina; it's a whole other thing to do it like Dixon did, with all three goals coming in a seven-minute stretch. Going into the Tar Heels' final two regular season games this week, it'll be interesting to see if the sophomore can keep it going. 

Connecticut, a team that fell out of the top-25 after opening at 2-2-2, clinched the Big East Blue Division title with a 3-0 win over Marquette on Monday. The win gave the Huskies their 18th Big East title in 27 years in the league, along with a first-round bye in the conference tournament -- they'll open with a quarterfinal match against Providence in Storrs on Nov. 7.

UMBC's all-everything duo of Andrew Bulls and Levi Houapeu, the No. 1 and No. 2 scorers in the nation in terms of points-per-game, were named the America East Striker and Midfielder of the Year, respectively. The Retrievers, who have trailed off ever since reaching the top-25 midway through the year, scratched out a No. 5 seed in the America East Tournament, where they'll play at Binghamton in a quarterfinal match on Saturday.

With a 1-0 win over Navy on Tuesday night, Maryland snapped a two-game scoreless drought. After being shut out in a loss to Wake Forest and a tie with Virginia, the Terps got back to their winning ways with a 10th-minute goal from Kaoru Forbess. Maryland closes up its regular season on Friday with a 7:30 p.m. match against The College of Charleston at Ludwig Field.

Tidbits from around the country, teed up just for you every Thursday.

For virtually every conference with a postseason tournament, only two weekends remain in the regular season. For the always-packed BIG EAST, this weekend's the final one before tourney play begins on Wednesday. Keep an eye on action this weekend, especially in the Red Division, where nobody's secured a postseason berth yet, with five teams within seven points of each other.

Akron's Teal Bunbury scored two more goals on Wednesday night, as the top-ranked Zips rolled over Penn State, 3-0. The sophomore has now scored a goal in nine of his last 11 games and has put up four multi-goal games this year. Akron is very, very good. And in the second installment of the Akron Watch, the Zips' defense has allowed just three goals in 1,440:00 of play for a team goals-against-average of 0.19, which out-paces Evansville's NCAA single-season record of 0.24, set in 1990. Also, because we missed it earlier in the week, Darlington Nagbe was named MAC Player of the Week after notching a seven-point day against Michigan last week.

In another Story We Wish We Wrote, Santa Barbara News-Press senior writer Mark Patton takes a look at two stories of perseverance on the fourth-ranked Gauchos, where Waid Ibrahim is playing with a pacemaker that revived his soccer career and David Walker just got the rods removed from his broken wrist. Neither of the forwards, Patton writes, has missed a game this year.

Photo Courtesy of Ohio State

In another Photo Gallery Of Current Varsity Soccer Players In Their Childhood Halloween Costumes And Telling Traumatizing Childhood Stories, Ohio State ran a feature this week called 'Trick-or-Treating with Ohio State Men's Soccer.' The first story? From senior defender Doug Verhoff: "My dad use to always take the chain off his chain saw and then run the chain saw across his chest.  Everyone would always freak out. He's a wild one so I'm sure this does not surprise many people."

UMBC once again features the No. 1 and 2 scorers in the country, after Levi Houapeu was named America East Player of the Week following his second hat trick of the year. The goals came as the Retrievers clinched a spot in the America East Tournament with a win over Albany on Saturday. Houapeu sits just below teammate Andrew Bulls and his 2.67 goals per game with a ledger of 2.60 a contest. UMBC, who's gone through a few rough patches this year after starting the season undefeated at 9-0-0 (the Retrievers are only 3-4-0 since then, with all but one of those games conference clashes) can finish no lower than fifth in the conference.

Michigan State, which had taken a mid-season tumble, downed Notre Dame on Wednesday for the Spartans' fourth straight win. The Spartans' notched their 10th win of the year, given them 10 wins for the ninth time this decade, while Cyrus Sadee scored the game-winner for the second straight MSU game.

Louisville tied the school record for wins on Wednesday, downing Cincinnati to improve to 12-2-2. The Big East Red Division leaders wrap up the regular season at Villanova on Saturday, Oct. 31 at 1:00 p.m.

Ray Reid isn't usually this patient.

In the past, a season-opening stretch like the one his Connecticut team waltzed through this year would have driven him crazy. The special kind of madness reserved for a guy who's been subjecting himself to it for two decades.

But there was something about this Huskies team this year. Something worth waiting for, even through the losses - a 3-0 trouncing to BU on Sept. 5, when UConn was ranked No. 12 and a 2-1 loss to Rutgers on Sept. 20 - and the consecutive scoreless ties (against Dartmouth and Iona on Sept. 11 and 13).  

"To be honest, I was very patient with them," he said. "Normally I'm not. But I knew we had a lot of potential. I like the older kids in the program, and I like our new guys."

The Huskies ended that six-game run at 2-2-2, falling out of the top-25 a year after advancing to the third round of the NCAA Tournament.

They haven't lost since. They haven't even let up a single goal since, rattling off a 6-0-1 record that includes five BIG EAST wins and a 4-0 non-conference tally against then-No. 6 Harvard last Wednesday. Their 6-1-1 mark in-conference gives them the lead in the BIG East's Blue Division and represents the best ledger on either side of the conference.

And going into this week's matchups with Yale and Seton Hall, the 17th-ranked Huskies look to be among the nation's biggest movers when the NSCAA Poll comes out on Tuesday. Following yet another upset-riddled weekend,

"I just think we're always a slow-developing team because of the way we try to play," Reid said. "It takes a little time to get our legs under us."

Five players in Reid's top 13 are freshmen. One of them, Carlos Alvarez, leads the team in assists, with seven, and was named the TopDrawerSoccer.com Player of the Week on Monday for his seven-point (2 goals, 3 assists) week in UConn's two wins last week. Another, Stephane DIOP, is tied for second in assists, with four.

"Alvarez, you know he's got unbelievable composure and subtlety for a kid that's 18 years old," Reid said. "He's got great vision and great feet."

The young guys - ranks that include the Huskies' top scorer Tony Cascio, a sophomore whose five goals and four assists give him a team-leading 14 points - have helped, certainly, Reid said. But it's the older guys that have turned this team from initial disappointment to a national force, now that the year's hitting the back stretch.

First, there's Kwame Watson-Siriboe, the senior back who anchors a defense that's allowed just six goals in 13 games. Providing extra support on the back line has been junior Robert Brickley, who slid back from midfield to center-back, playing in front of redshirt junior goalie Tom Ford, who's posted a 0.44 GAA and a.864 save percentage this year.

The defense has been a "full-team effort," Reid said, and he's hesitant to single people out. But one of the biggest forces behind the overall team turnaround this year, he said, has been the return of Mike Pezza.

A senior, Pezza was held out of action early in the year with an ankle injury. But, with the return of the man who led the team in assists in 2008 and the country in 2007, the Huskies have gone from a team that averaged just 0.83 goals a game in their first six contests to one that's put up two per game in their last seven.

"He has been outstanding for us," Reid said.

Pezza tallied the first assist in that Harvard game, a 4-0 blowout in a game that pitted the top two teams in the NSCAA Northeast Region against each other. And maybe just as importantly, in holding the Crimson scoreless for just the second time this year and scoring as many goals in a game (4) as Harvard had given up the entire season, the win signaled to the country that the Huskies are back.

"[The win] just showed us that on any given night we can play with any of the better teams in the country when our guys want to," Reid said. "We just gotta continue to stay very, very focused."

Washington's two wins over the weekend -- an upset over No. 5 Cal in Berkeley on Friday and a tie with No. 22 Stanford on Sunday -- showed the country how powerful conference games can be in revitalizing a season, or the exact opposite. Click on for more on the Huskies' run and to see which teams have thrived and which have suffered once the schedule hit league play.