Liberty to Host Regent and USC Upstate to Open Season

LYNCHBURG, Va. – The Liberty Flames men's soccer team will host the Regent Royals and the USC Upstate Spartans to kick off their 2025 season on Thursday and Sunday.

Liberty will open the season by welcoming Regent to Osborne Stadium on Thursday. It will be the first-ever meeting between the two teams. Match time is scheduled for 5 p.m.

On Sunday, Liberty will entertain USC Upstate. The Flames and the Spartans will be meeting for the third straight year. Liberty has won each of the past two seasons, including a 5-2 victory at USC Upstate last season. Game time is slated for 5 p.m.

Liberty News & Notes

Liberty begins its seventh season under head coach Kelly Findley. Last season, he led the Flames to a 7-7-3 overall mark.
This season, Findley has two new assistant coaches. Glodi Konga and Cyrus Salehi have joined the Liberty staff. Konga, a former Flame, has played professionally and has collegiate head coaching experience, while Salehi has over 20 years of head coaching experience, primarily at the high school and club levels.
The Flames were picked to finish fourth in the 2025 Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) Preseason Poll. Sophomore midfielder Aidan Morrison was named an OVC Player to Watch.
The Flames will have a lot of new faces in 2025 as only 12 of the 22 players on their roster are returners. Leading the returners are OVC All-Conference first team defender Carlos Trott and OVC Freshmen team midfielder Morrison. In addition, Liberty returns midfielder Leo Conneh, who finished second on the Flames and eighth in the OVC with four assists last season, and defender Lucas Kelly, who has played in 28 of the Flames' 35 games over the past two seasons.
Of the 10 Flames' newcomers, eight are transfers and two are true freshmen.
Last year, Liberty went 4-1-2 at Osborne Stadium. The Flames are scheduled to play 10 matches at home in 2025. From Sept. 9 through Oct. 5, six of Liberty's seven scheduled games are slated for Osborne Stadium.
Trott returns for his third and final season as a Flame. The fixture on the Liberty defense, he earned OVC all-conference first team honors in 2024. The defender started 16 games and played the most minutes (1346) of any Flame last season.
Kelly joins Trott as a returner on the Liberty's backline. The junior defender started and played 15 games last season. He played all 90 minutes of a 1-0 win at Houston Christian on Oct. 16 in 2024.
Morrison played in all 17 games with 16 starts in his freshman season in 2024. He scored two goals and assisted on three others for six points. The midfielder was ranked as one of the Top 20 Freshmen in the country by TopDrawerSoccer.com and earned a spot on the OVC Newcomer team last season.
The Flames will have a new face in goal this season with the graduation of Owen Moore. Sophomore Tyler Beck and freshman Ethan Kell enter the season as Liberty's two goalkeepers. Beck did not see any action in his first collegiate season in 2024.

Schedule

Liberty to Host Regent and USC Upstate to Open Season

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Players Mentioned

Tyler Beck

Leo Conneh

Ethan Kell

Lucas Kelly

Owen Moore

Aidan Morrison

Carlos Trott