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.”