Courtesy of Sean Elliot
Camel of the Edition is a series that seeks to highlight extraordinary Connecticut College athletes who have stood out from the herd due to their recent performances or as a leader on campus or on their team.
Marco Perugini ‘27 is a standout midfielder on the Connecticut College men’s soccer team who made it to the NCAA DIII championship in 2024. The rising junior from Medway, Massachusetts, played a pivotal role for one of the strongest teams in Connecticut College soccer history in his first year with the roster after transferring from Union College.
Recently, The College Voice caught up with Perugini to talk about his tremendous first season in the white and blue, how his summer has gone playing with New England FC, and how the team is planning to follow up on last season’s championship run.
Could you please introduce yourself?
I am Marco Perugini (he/him). I am a rising Junior. I’m a part of the men’s varsity soccer team. My major is corporate quantitative economics and econometrics, and then I have a minor in finance.
Tell me about your sporting journey, and when did soccer become your focus?
Yeah, so I’ve been playing soccer pretty much my whole life, probably since I was about five years old but joined my first club at seven. It was really the only sport I was playing, and it was kind of my main focus ever since. I played in the development academy when I was in middle school, so I wasn’t allowed to play town soccer, so I was really just zoned in, soccer only in school, just trying to play in college, and then ultimately ended up at Conn, so it worked out well.
What was your recruitment process like, and why did you end up choosing Conn?
So my junior year, I had a lot of looks from different schools, but I ended up choosing Union, and I went there for just my first season, my freshman year. I played that whole first season and, while I was there, I was looking for a place where I could compete at a higher level. With Union we had a good year, but we weren’t really competing on a national level like a lot of the NESCAC teams do. I had a brother who was on the Conn team here [Christian Perugini ‘25]. He just recently graduated, so I reached out to him. Coach Burk, and Coach Storton already kind of knew me through him, so I was able to get that done real quick, get an offer, and then I transferred. I came here the winter of my freshman year, and I’ve been here since.
As a midfielder, can you talk about your responsibilities and what makes the position so attractive to you?
I play attacking midfield. We call it the number 10, so you have a ton of responsibility. I start the press with our striker, so that’s a huge responsibility we have. We like to press teams from the start of every single game, so that’s a really important job I have, as well as being a playmaker, being creative. That’s one of my jobs. Trying to assist people is another huge role I have. Playing midfield is something where you’re gonna be more active in the game, and you have a lot of responsibilities defensively and offensively because you’re in the middle of the field and you’ve got to be able to do everything that comes with soccer. I’ve been an attacking midfielder my whole life, and I wouldn’t really change at this point.
Last season, you were second on the team in points with 16. How were you able to accomplish this so early in your time with the Camels?
I think it comes down to the belief my coaches had in me, as well as my teammates. I mean, ever since I got here, I’ve had nothing but positive belief from both the coaches and the teammates. Giving me that confidence to step into a new team and understanding what my role is going to be on the team is something that’s super important for me. When you’re in an environment where you feel like you have a certain role that matters a lot to the team, it’s going to help you play a lot better, and you’re going to have a lot of confidence going into every single game. So [I’m] just trying to do my job every game. Like I said, being an attacking midfielder, you have to be creative and you have to set up goals, you have to score goals, and so just making sure I do my job is the main part.
You also recorded eight assists, making you one of only three Conn players to accomplish that feat in the past 10 years. What makes you so uniquely able to feed your point scorers?
That’s something just soccer-related that I’ve always focused on. Being a midfielder is setting up your teammates for success. Luckily enough, last year, I was able to have a lot of forwards who are really clinical, and if I set them up, they were able to score a lot of goals. At the end of the day, it’s just for the betterment of the team and if I can set up multiple guys for goals throughout the season, it not only builds my confidence and helps us win, but it builds the confidence of everybody who can score and they’re ultimately just going to play better. I think being able to set up your teammates and making your teammates better is a very underrated skill that maybe not a lot of people have, and that you ultimately need if you want to be a playmaker for a team.
The team had a very successful last season, regardless of the final outcome. What do you think the team can specifically focus on to get over the hump this year?
We obviously had a lot of success last year. It’s not always how you want it to end, but looking back at the season as a whole, you can look back at it and say we did a great job and we brought a lot of success to Conn, but our regular season didn’t really go as planned. We didn’t even host the first round of a NESCAC game. We finished in sixth place. I think something that we’re looking to change next year or trying to change our mindset on is, when stuff isn’t going our way right away, stay calm, stick to our game plan, stick to our game model and just make sure, we’re confident in who we are as a team, the players we have, it’s gonna eventually change. Don’t try and rush into something new, which I think we tried to do early on in the season. We lost our second game, and we were kind of in a little bit of a rut in the middle of the season. Making sure we stick to what we know and what we practice is something we’re really focusing on.
Do you feel any additional pressure to step up as a leader with the sweeping roster changes and youth movement coming to the team?
Yeah definitely. I wouldn’t necessarily say pressure, but I do feel an added responsibility going into the season. We’re gonna have a lot of freshmen this year. We graduated 12 guys because we had a lot of fifth-years last year. So it’s going to be a new team. We’re going to have a new dynamic for the team, but it’s just about integrating the freshmen as early as we can, making sure they feel welcomed right away. Your freshman year of any sport is going to be different. It’s going to be tough. You’re away from home, and college athletics is very different from what these kids are going to be used to. Making sure that they understand it’s okay to make mistakes is something not only I, but all the upperclassmen are really going to try and hone in on, because you’re not going to get it 100 percent right the first day you step on campus, and that’s okay. That’s normal. So, just making sure they know that.
This summer, you joined New England FC to play USL League Two soccer. How were you able to land this opportunity and what is a week like with the team?
I played for NEFC all throughout high school and we recently got a semi-professional team for this summer. My coach in high school wasn’t the coach for the team this year, but he was one of the directors at the club, so I reached out to him. They have tryouts, but since he’s already seen me play for four years, he didn’t need to see me try out. I was able to get a roster spot, which was one of the best experiences I’ve been able to have. I played with kids from top division one schools all over the country, top ACC schools, and at the end of the day, that’s who you have to play with if you want to get better. You have to surround yourself with people who might be better than you right now if you want to one day be on their level. We would have two games a week. Usually one away, one home. We play on Tuesday [and] Saturday. Say our game on Tuesday was away, we would leave Tuesday morning, drive up to, let’s just say, Albany, [which] is one of the teams we’d play against, play a game there and then we would have training every single day from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at our facility nearby. Sometimes we do lifting and then meetings, scout on the other team right after. If it was Friday, we’d probably scout for the Saturday game. Usually we just have Sunday off. So it’s very similar to a college season. It was like I was being in season for the first two months of summer.
Now that your summer season is over, how did it go and what was the most notable memory?
It went really well! I loved my coach. I loved all the teammates. We just missed out on [the] playoffs. We were in fifth place, I believe you had to be third place to make it, so we had a decent season. I would say, not necessarily one moment, but showing up every single day and being able to train with kids who are at some of the top schools in the country and seeing what their standards are is something that was really cool because you can take pieces from their game and implement it into your own game. That was something I was really looking forward to
before going into the season and I felt like I got a lot to take away from it.
How do you think playing with NEFC this summer is going to change your game this season and going forward?
The speed of play was the biggest thing I noticed; it’s just a lot faster. I would say that’s probably one of the biggest differences between [NCAA] Division One and Division Three is just the speed of play is probably just a little bit quicker. If you’re in that environment every single day, that’s going to be what you’re used to. So now going into the season, I feel like I might be a little bit of a step ahead when it comes to the speed of play so I’m excited for that.
What do you hope to accomplish this season for yourself and with the rest of the roster?
As a team, we’ve talked about this a lot in the off season. Obviously winning a national championship is our number one goal for next season. We got so close and we feel like we have some unwritten things that we have to finish. So that’s definitely a huge goal. I also think, like I was saying earlier, we didn’t have the greatest regular season. So finishing first place in the regular season, being able to host both rounds of the NESCAC playoffs, I think is something that we’re all really focused on. For myself, just individual goals. I would like, I don’t really have a number, but let’s just say 20 goal contributions on the year would be something I’m really looking towards.
What would be your walkout song for games?
My walkout song is No Church in the Wild.
Is there anyone you would like to shout out or any last comments you would like to make?
Not really. I mean, I’m just excited, man. I’m excited for the season, excited for the fall. I think we’re going to turn a lot of heads.
