Taylor Green, Bowling Green Ready for 2026 Season
by Mike Cihon, BGSU Strategic Communications
7/30/2026
Taylor Green enters her fourth year at Bowling Green State University, and has been a mainstay of the Falcon women’s soccer program since her arrival in Northwest Ohio. The team’s lone captain as a junior last season, Green helped the Orange and Brown advance all the way to the championship match of the Mid-American Conference Tournament. Green and the Falcons are looking to build on that success in the 2026 campaign.
Green, a native of Plainfield, Ill., has displayed impressive leadership capabilities ever since she set foot on campus for her freshman year. The defender has been in the starting lineup for nearly every game in her first three seasons, other than when injured or recovering from injury, and has solidified herself as one of the top players in the Mid-American Conference.
“I first became aware of BGSU in my junior year of high school,” Green said. “I had a call with the old coaching staff. Once I had that call, I read up on BG a little more. They were known for winning championships, and who wouldn’t want to go to a school that is winning all the time? That really drew me here.”
"They were known for winning championships, and who wouldn’t want to go to a school that is winning all the time? That really drew me here.”
As a freshman in 2023, Green missed the first two games due to injury, then played in each of the next 16 contests, starting the final 13. Once October began, Green played 807 of the 810 total minutes in BG’s final nine contests.
Following that season, however, Coach Jimmy Walker was named the head coach at Creighton University, and Chris Fox came to Northwest Ohio as head coach of the Falcons. Green, entering her sophomore season, quickly saw that the new coaching staff’s style of play was perfectly suited for her game.
“When we had the coaching change, I couldn’t have been more grateful that Coach Chris came here,” said Green. “His playing style is everything that the team loves, everything I love … who doesn’t like keeping the ball and not having to run so many miles and chase the game? We really control the game and we make teams come to us. We don’t change for them; it’s our style or nothing, and that’s what I really like.”
Green played all but 15 of the 1,620 total minutes during her sophomore season, and going into her third year with the Falcons, she and her teammates felt that they had a firm grip on the Fox’s system. That feeling was evident when the team began preseason practices for the 2025 season.
“Our phrase for last year was ‘it felt different,’ and I felt like we showed that in every way,” she said. “We didn’t finish exactly where we wanted to (in the MAC standings), but it really felt like things came together. We were playing more as a team, and everyone understood other people’s tendencies. It always takes a little time to figure it out, but once you do … we hit the ground running last year, and we have our sights set high this year.”
Last fall, Green was on the pitch for every second of the first nine-plus matches, leading the Falcons to a 6-1-2 start. In the Western Michigan game, however, Green suffered an injury late in the first half and was forced to miss the second half of that contest. The injury turned out to be a broken collarbone, forcing her to miss the next five games as well.
For Green, that time spent on the sidelines at practices and games enabled her to see things in a different way.
“It completely changed my perspective of my role, but also what I need to do on the field and what I can do better for my team. When you’re on the field, sometimes you miss certain things, but watching from the sideline, I picked up on things; areas I didn’t know I was struggling in, or things I could have done better. It really took being on the sideline watching to give me a completely new perspective.”
Despite an injury that would sideline many people for the remainder of the season, Green returned to action after missing just under a month. She came off the bench to play against Ball State, then was back in the starting lineup for the final two regular-season matches as well as the Falcons’ MAC Tournament run.
“It meant so much for me to get back out there for my team. I didn’t want to stay on the sideline if I knew there was even one percent of me that could get back on the field and play. I was excited to give it everything when I did get back on the field. I was going to be who my team needed, and just having my teammates supporting me and believing in me, it made me feel like I could get right back to where I was at.”
The Falcons entered the MAC Tournament as the sixth and final seed, but BGSU advanced past third-seeded Buffalo and second-seeded Miami in a pair of overtime contests at Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus, before falling to WMU by a narrow 1-0 score in the final.
“I don’t think anyone on our team was happy finishing sixth," said Green. "But, once you make it to the tournament, seeds don’t matter. It’s a whole new season, and I feel like that’s the way we played throughout the tournament. Yes, we earned the sixth seed during the regular season, but we wanted to show what we were capable of. We fell just short, but we are working on it.”
Green is one of 19 players on the current team who were on the roster for that tournament run last November. That group is joined by 11 newcomers, including four NCAA Division-I transfers. Three of the 11 new players joined the Falcons for the spring semester, gaining experience in and familiarity with Fox’s system.
“I think this year, a lot of the (returning) players know the style of play, know all of the little details. It’s so much easier when you have a big collective group that’s on the same page and can help welcome in those new players. It’s not just Chris kind of pinning our philosophy on them, it’s all of us helping. Having such a big group of returners is really helping our incoming players adjust, and they are all adjusting very well. Two weeks in and we look like we never even left for the summer. We picked up right where we left off in the spring.”
Falcon fans have their first chance to catch Green and the 2026 squad in action on Wednesday, August 5. Purdue comes to Cochrane Stadium that afternoon for an exhibition that begins at 4:00 p.m. Then, the regular-season schedule commences 11 days later, as the Falcons host Robert Morris on Sunday, August 16. That contest starts at 1:00 p.m., and admission is free to all BGSU home soccer matches.
