What Denver's NCAA Lacrosse Championship Means For The Sport

wes-berg-denver

 

Before we get started, obviously there’s going to be a ton of lacrosse bashing that goes on in the comments here. Honestly, it doesn’t make much sense since a ton of the readership on this site comes from the east coast from Boston to Baltimore which is nothing but lacrosse hot beds but when does the comment section ever make sense anyways.

The Denver Pioneers became the first school west of the Appalachians to ever win the NCAA Lacrosse National Championship after their 10-5 win over Maryland yesterday at the Linc. In 45 years, they’ve also just become only the 10th school to win the national championship joining Cornell, UVa, Maryland, Hopkins, UNC, Syracuse, Princeton, Duke and Loyola. And I think that’s been the biggest problem with the sport for a while. Every year it turns out to be the same thing. The same school filled with the same players from the East coast with a few Canadians/west coast kids sprinkled in win year after year. But yesterday there was finally a break in the monotony and that’s going to be huge for the sport of lacrosse.

Denver has been really good for a while now, especially in the 6 years since bringing in head coach Bill Tierney. They’ve been to 3 of the past 4 championship weekends but they just haven’t been able to end their season with a win in years past. Same thing goes for Notre Dame. They’ve been a great team for years and have been national runner-ups two times before. The sport has been growing rapidly and it’s popping up everywhere. There have been kids going DI from California and Colorado for a while but now you’re seeing Texas and Missouri and Oregon and all over the place. And now these kids out west finally have an actual championship to hold on to which can only help the expansion of the game.

The knock on lacrosse for a while has been that it’s “for kids who can’t play real sports but still want to be an athlete in college”. Well as the sport keeps growing and more and more big college programs start bringing in lacrosse, more high school athletes are going to realize that there’s a lot to gain from playing lacrosse. I’m not saying it’ll ever get as big as college football or basketball, but over the next few years I’m sure that we’ll see the gap close at least a little bit. And as a lacrosse fan, that’s all you can really ask for. The more the game expands, the larger the talent pool gets. And the game just took one step closer to that yesterday with Denver’s first ever national championship. Woulda been nice to see the Philly kid Matt Rambo come away with a victory in front of the hometown crowd, but in the long run this was definitely better for the sport.

Now feel free to talk about how gay lacrosse is.