berniecarbo1 said:
Not much of a lax fan as it was not a real popular sport outside of Long Island when I was a kid, but maybe you guys can explain why the only legit school in lax west of the Mississippi is Denver. Out here in LA I see more and more kids playing it and it is becoming pretty popular in the high schools. Do they not play it at the collegiate level in the West? Honest questions as I think it is a great sport and from a popularity standpoint, I think it is passing baseball with the next generation. But I never see/hear about a MWC or Pac 12 team playing it.
You're right that historically it's been an East Coast sport at the college and HS level, especially Long Island, upstate NY, NJ, eastern PA, MD, DE and northern VA. When I graduated HS in MA in '82, there were about two dozen high schools statewide that sponsored the sport, most notably Longmeadow, Lexington, Lincoln-Sudbury and Concord-Carlisle. These were (and still are) high-income suburbs. Today there are 212, so it's no longer an exclusive sport.
It's been played in the Deep South, Southwest, Midwest, Mountain and Pacific regions collegiately for about 20 years to varying degrees, but not necessarily as an NCAA sport. Instead, it's treated by most of those schools as a club sport, but the degree of organization is still at a pretty high level, including national tournaments and championships. In many cases, Title IX gender-equity/funding issues prevent schools from sponsoring it at the NCAA level. In others, it's been the costs of recruiting, especially since it wasn't a popular high school sport in those regions.
But that's been changing, and
pretty quickly.
Sales of lacrosse gear nationwide rose over 25% in the past year alone. That covers not just pro, college & high school, but youth leagues. The concerns over head injuries in football are going to prompt more and more parents to guide their kids toward less risky sports, lacrosse among them. Ditto for ice hockey, where equipment and ice time are far more expensive, and most of the nation will never agree to fund the number of rinks required to grow that sport competitively. The migration of families from the northeast and the rust belt to more southerly and westerly locales also bodes well, because these are the people who are going to advocate for its growth at the youth and HS levels in those areas. Lacrosse is going to explode over the next decade.
JHU Sox fan said:
I do know some of the schools out west are in a league called the MCLA which is not part of the NCAA.
There are 10 primary division I
college club leagues today within the MCLA, which include many of the same schools identified with big-time football & basketball. You'll find many SEC, Big 12, and Pac 12 powers, plus all the ACC and Big Ten schools that don't currently sponsor it as an NCAA sport (Clemson, VA Tech, Florida St, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, etc.)
Whether these same schools pursue NCAA classification for lax will depend on many issues, but it's already happening. Next year will be the Big Ten's first season as a sponsored men's league, though the original 5 member schools have sponsored it in other NCAA conferences for quite some time. It'll also be the first year of the Pac 12 women's lacrosse conference. A bunch of schools are adding it as a women's sport to achieve Title IX balance with men's sports (My niece, who's from MA, just finished her first season as a scholarship player with Colorado). Then there are the major conference TV networks, plus the newer independent sports-oriented networks like CBSSN, NBCSN, Fox Sports 1 & 2, etc., that are also hungry for content to fill vast blocks of open time.
But the writing's on the wall. Whether it's immediately for Title IX compliance, in a few years for TV money, or in 10-15 years in response to the rapid increase in youth & HS play, it's only a matter of time before we see schools like Wisconsin, Texas, Georgia, and UCLA join with other like-minded conference members and make the move to NCAA D-I.
