If Joe Finn is right – and he usually is – lacrosse will become a radically different sport one of these days.
Joe Finn is the keeper of the archives at US Lacrosse. He’s also a rare bird – a graduate of the University of Maryland in the late 1960s who never played lacrosse but has been a passionate follower of the sport through all the years. Joe doesn’t sound very happy with what he sees coming.
“It’s only a matter of time,” he said resignedly, “when the old-guard schools will no longer be among the best.”
The old-guard schools, of course, would include such as Joe’s own school, Maryland, plus Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Virginia, Army, Navy, Princeton and 2016 NCAA champion North Carolina. As Joe sees it, the evidence of dramatic change is right before our eyes: a stream of new schools coming into Division I already and who knows who’s coming behind them?
What Marquette has done already is a harbinger of the future. The relatively new program, from a non-traditional area, made it to the NCAA tournament in only its fourth year and earned a home game in the tournament against North Carolina, the eventual champion.
Joe Finn and I, being of a certain age, have grown up on the old guard. We like the way the game has always been. To us, a Hopkins-Maryland lacrosse game on a Saturday afternoon is huge. Army-Navy is also big. So is Syracuse-Cornell. So are certain Ivy League games, especially with bearing on an NCAA championship.
Says Joe now: “When a fairly large number of big-time athletic schools such as Texas, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Southern Cal and Illinois pick up the game on the varsity level, there is no way even Johns Hopkins can compete. Most of those schools already have good club teams. But a Texas-Southern Cal championship game in lacrosse doesn’t have the same ring.”
When does Joe think this might be a reality?
“Maybe not in our lifetime,” he says. “And maybe, one can imagine, it’s possible in a decade or two, or three.”
Corey McLaughlin recently wrote an excellent story in US Lacrosse Magazine about potential growth of lacrosse in the Pac-12. I know this much about schools such as Stanford and Southern Cal: They are great universities and athletic powerhouses and they take things very seriously.
Both schools already have women’s lacrosse teams that are among the best in the country. Southern Cal was No. 5 at the end of the 2016 season, Stanford No. 12. If Southern Cal and Stanford and perhaps some other Pac-12 schools go into Division I men's lacrosse, they will go all out and they will soon be at or near the top. They won’t settle for less.
In McLaughlin’s story, Denver coach Bill Tierney said of the future, “We can always dream.”
Lacrosse is a great game getter better all the time. Growth is a good thing, isn’t it?
Maybe some people aren’t ready to dream. Maybe they want a Hopkins-Maryland lacrosse game always to be huge. Maybe some of us are not ready for a Texas-Southern Cal championship game. And maybe it will never happen anyway.
But if you really love lacrosse, and you really want it to be recognized nationally, wouldn’t you want it to grow to its full potential? I wonder.