Lancers

Worcester built itself on manufacturing and on the string of colleges that sit above its downtown, and Worcester State University's football side has been part of that campus life since 1962, when it started as a club sport before the university pushed it up to varsity level in 1985. The Lancers now play in the Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference, a league that carried the New England Football Conference name for most of the years the program's trophy case actually filled up.

That filling happened in a short stretch: conference titles in 1995, 1996, sandwiched around division championships in 1987, 1988, 2000 and 2011. The 2001 ECAC Bowl win over Curry stands out for a different reason — it is the Lancers' only victory in seven trips to that bowl.

Coughlin Memorial Field holds 2,000, modest even by Division III standards, and on the days Fitchburg State comes to town for the Sterling Cup it fills with the kind of crowd a 2,000-seat ground can actually hold in full. The Falcons remain the rivalry that matters most to Worcester State supporters, ahead of the games against Western Connecticut.

Royal Blue and Yellow have stayed the colours throughout, and the program has sent players like Jacob Maher and Graham Asum to All-America recognition, names now attached to the Athletics Hall of Fame alongside alumni such as Marcus S. Price and Kemani Jones. It is still a campus program before anything else, tied to a university and a city that measure their autumns by whichever college team is playing that Saturday, with the Lancers taking their turn at Coughlin Memorial Field.