Carleton CHOP coaches earn Division III men’s top honor

Ultiworld named Matt Forster, Russell Smith and Christopher Hickman its Division III men’s Coaches of the Year after Carleton CHOP turned a roster hit into a run to the national final. The case for the staff was built long before the trophy stage in Waukegan, Illinois: CHOP entered the year ranked No. 2 in Ultiworld’s preseason poll on Jan. 20, 2026, then lost season-ending contributors Nathan Wang and Dash Brenner before Nationals.

That is where the award was won. Rather than ask replacement players to imitate Wang and Brenner, the staff reshaped the offense around a deeper rotation and pushed younger pieces into real responsibility. Max Resnik, Julian Kägi and Henry Horstman Olson were among the players who absorbed those larger roles, and the roster kept expanding instead of shrinking. Ultiworld’s postseason honors made the development impossible to miss: Resnik was named Breakout Player of the Year after jumping from 2 goals and 2 assists in 2025 to 17 goals and 16 assists in 2026.

Carleton’s championship weekend backed up the numbers. The CHOP went 3-0 in pool play at the 2026 D-III College Championships at Greg Petry Sports Park, opening with a 15-11 win over Williams and a 14-8 win over Berry. The bracket followed the same pattern. CHOP handled Claremont in the quarterfinals and then moved past Oklahoma Christian in the semifinals, showing the kind of poise that usually survives only when a team’s structure is stronger than its top-end talent.

There was no straight-line march to the final. CHOP survived a first-round scare against Whitman, going to universe before stabilizing and cleaning up its next two pool games. That mattered because the staff never had the luxury of treating the injuries as a temporary setback. Wang and Brenner were gone, and the coaches had to build a version of CHOP that could win in multiple ways, not just with the names that had defined the preseason conversation.

The only team that stopped them was Middlebury, which won the final 15-7 after a 100-minute weather delay. That loss did not erase the run that got CHOP there, but it did frame the scale of the turnaround: a team that lost two of its best players still reached the last game of the season. St. Olaf’s Luke Bleers and Caleb Szydlo finished as first runners-up in the voting, but CHOP’s staff owned the clearest proof of coaching value. In a championship field that featured 32 streamed games over about 52 hours, Forster, Smith and Hickman made CHOP resilient enough to stay in the hunt until the end.