For 145 years, Tuskegee University never fielded a soccer team.
This month, that changed — and it turns out Atlanta had a lot to do with it.
The historic HBCU kicked off its first-ever men’s and women’s soccer programs, and when you look at the roster, it reads like a love letter to metro Atlanta.
Of the 24 players with Georgia ties, more than a dozen are straight out of the city: names like Tripp Bailey, Ashton Chambers, Toree Davis, Semaj Harvey, Cameron Hendrix, and Christopher Turner are now suiting up for the Golden Tigers.
The men’s team played its first match ever on August 17, and it wasn’t just a quiet scrimmage. Alumni showed up. Parents showed up. Even the basketball team came out to cheer. For a program that didn’t exist a year ago, that’s a pretty big welcome party.
Both head coaches are Georgia natives themselves — Matthew Tarpley leading the men, Emanuel Stephens leading the women — and they leaned hard on hometown ties while building their rosters from absolute scratch.
Here’s the fun kicker: the whole season is being filmed.
A docuseries called Unveiling History is following the team through its first year, and it’s got serious Atlanta fingerprints too — created by local writer-producer Brian Egeston (BET’s “The Quad,” former head writer at Tyler Perry Studios) and produced with Atlanta’s own Horne Brothers Films.
So next time someone says nothing new ever happens in college soccer — tell them Atlanta just helped write history for an HBCU three hours down I-85.
