For the first time in the league's history, UPSL Women will operate promotion and relegation, beginning this upcoming season with the Midwest West Conference. UPSL has established an alternative home for competitive amateur soccer, stepping in for the more established WPSL and (in other regions) UWS, and this move is set to pioneer a movement that is so far lacking in the women's game.
The MWW has hosted teams from Minnesota and Wisconsin, although the final makeup of this year's conference is still under development. Last year, it was divided into North and South, with NOSC Blast from North Oaks, Minnesota, going all the way to a fourth-place finish in the National Finals. It was recently announced that the Spring 2026 UPSL Women’s National Finals will feature a record-setting $20,000 total prize pool.
UPSL Women Director and owner of Granite City FC, Amer Mian, emphasized the significance of the announcement and its broader implications for the women’s game nationwide
After three successful years of growth and stability with the UPSL Women, the Midwest West region is elevating competition by introducing a second division and implementing promotion and relegation. This will help raise standards across all our Women divisions and reflects our strong commitment to long-term growth and competitive excellence in women’s soccer. This is about more than just one region. Our goal is to build sustainable, competitive structures that allow clubs and players to grow year over year. The Midwest-West is taking the lead, and we fully intend to expand this two-division model across UPSL Women conferences throughout the country as the league continues to evolve.
What do the prospective participants in the 2026 Midwest West think? St Croix Soccer Executive Director Nathan Klonecki spoke to Northland Soccer Journal about it.
It seems like a path that pre-professional Soccer is going in the United States. It will probably make some of those games a bit more intense and especially if you are in the relegation area. We are used to it in the Youth setting so won't be much different for the St Croix coaches and players. Since many of the UPSL players have played in St Croix, they are used to it. Always good to have some competitive challenges.
Vlora FC Women Team Manager, Katie Brink, approaches it with a similar mindset.
I think it's a great development for our league. It's a testament to the growth of women's soccer in Minnesota that the UPSL now has a thriving second division, and promotion/relegation will keep competition strong on the women's side of the Midwest-West Conference.
The move opens a window into a world where sporting merit is the deciding factor in which division a team plays in from season to season (as enshrined in FIFA Statute Article 9(1)). It also brings us back around to the name for the reporting we do on the amateur game here. We are Northland Non-League because life below the fully professional divisions in any country is a different landscape. As Nathan Klonecki's comments hint, it opens the way for "pre-professional" play where young players (mostly high school or college students) can develop. It also occasionally opens a path for a player who has aged out of college and gone on to work in another sphere of human interest entirely, but who wants to keep playing. The airport baggage handler Jade Johnson, who topped the NPSL scoring charts one season for Dakota Fusion FC, is the best example I've come across. The thing non-league play provides par excellence is an experience in which it is virtually impossible to spend your way out of trouble, or, indeed, to spend your way to a championship. So while it is, for instance, technically true that every level of every league in Europe is decided by sporting merit, the ink-stained truth is that the professional divisions are often races to spend - either on transfer fees or salaries. Down in the non-league levels, it is the application of thousands of hours of unpaid labor in the pursuit of sporting merit each season - albeit mostly in search of a playoff trophy. It is that last caveat that promotion and relegation sweep away. In its limited application within a league system such as the UPSL's model, relegation is also finite, which prevents the multi-level drops occasionally witnessed in wholly open pyramids.
Stay tuned to Northland Soccer Journal for more on this development and all the other action across the soccer leagues of the North.
