Men's Lacrosse @ Hopkins, Noon Today (on the U!)
Michigan men's lacrosse travels to Baltimore today to take on conference foe Johns Hopkins in an Easter Sunday matchup. In another edition of 'who scheduled this and why?' the game will be at noon today. The good news is it will air live on ESPNU, so that's good (but nobody will watch it anyway - I won't be able to, I'll be on the road unfortunately).
Michigan (1-4) has struggled to get its season on track and is coming off a 14-6 loss to Ohio State. Hopkins isn't doing so hot either and sits at 2-4 and lost to Penn State last week. Last time these two teams met a few weeks ago, Michigan got out to a 4-1 lead but then Hopkins scored 11 of the next 12 goals. Michigan has to learn to weather those runs and take control of the game.
Anyway, I'm thankful it will be on and that they're playing at all! GO GET 'EM BOYS AND GO BLUE!!
Did they ever get around to retiring Archer's number?
Serious question from someone who doesn’t know lacrosse well. I know our program is young relative to east coast powerhouse programs but why are we so damn bad. Lacrosse isn’t a sport with a lot of professional future. I would think the degree, the name etc of Michigan would be compelling enough that we could at least recruit decently. The team seems to always be bad.
A wiki look shows that since 1971, only two teams West of the Mississippi (Denver and Loyola) have one the National Championship.
A big part of that, I think, is sports culture. I grew up in the Detroit area a long time ago. If you wanted to play Hockey, you did it on the frozen ponds and lakes. The only sporting goods store anywhere near my house was Dunhams. They had a live bait tank in the back of the store. They had what looked like a weird, overinflated football on a high shelf behind the counter. I later learned that was a rugby ball.
What they didn't have was lacrosse equipment. Back then, it was all about football, basketball, baseball, and track. I didn't meet anyone that played lacrosse until I attended Michigan, and those guys were all from out East. While kids today get a lot more exposure, it's still not part of the culture in the Midwest. And that's a big obstacle in developing a programm.
We can't even develop a football program that matched ups against the best.
Agree, but just one note, the Loyola U that won the title was Loyola University in Maryland, Not Loyola Chicago or Loyola Marymount in LA, so Denver is the only western team to have won, and that too in 2015.
He obviously didn’t mean Loyola Chicago because he said west of the Mississippi. Must have thought it was Marymount.
I always think of Lacrosse as a little bit like men’s rowing. Very few public high schools had lacrosse teams, and if they did, u played on it because you maybe weren’t good enough to make any of the other teams. No one grew up dedicating their sports time to lacrosse like they do soccer, bball, football, hockey, etc....at least not from my part of the country. Unless you had a family member that played or come from a region where it’s prominent, most kids don’t get much exposure. I would imagine the number of guys who come out of high school as elite are very few and that there is a huge talent gap between them and the rest. That being said, I wish I would’ve played it growing up!
I never played and actually only got into it because lacrosse played OSU after the Spring game one year. Had my 4 year old hockey playing son with me. He played baseball for two seasons and hated it because going from hockey to baseball was, for him, going from constant action to, well, baseball. He signed up for youth lacrosse and loves it. Just about ready to start his last year of 14U and then headed to high school.
I mean the traditionally good lacrosse schools are all either in places where lacrosse is big (Maryland, Syracuse) or are also pretty elite academic schools. Yale, Cornell, Princeton, duke, Virginia, Hopkins, unc are all at least peer institutions or better academically with longer histories of success in lacrosse. Michigan isnt going to win with local talent and it’s not like a Michigan degree is going to carry more weight than Yale or uva or unc in recruiting.
Many of the top lacrosse high schools across the country are the exact same schools that have been sending out-of-state students to Michigan in large quantities for years, and there is a very strong UM brand presence in Maryland, Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey etc.
We seem to be getting our fair share of top-100 recruits, and have facilities on par or better than any of the top lacrosse programs out there. I wonder if it's a coaching issue or something deeper, because other programs that were started after ours, in even less lacrosse-heavy locations, have already made the NCAA tournament while we have yet to come close.
While the Northeast and Mid Atlantic states are still the strongest areas for lacrosse, it has grown much bigger in SoCal, particularly LA, SD, and the OC. I was pretty impressed with the caliber of athletes on my daughter's team, which is producing D1 scholarship athletes from her LA area high school.
Yes - the game is growing at an incredible pace; it is the fastest growing sport at the high school level in the U.S. (IIRC). And lacrosse recruiting is very national now. The rosters of the top teams are no longer made up exclusively of NY kids and Baltimore prep schoolers. Duke has a midfielder from Dallas who was a star running back in HS and got a lot of D-1 offers for football (there seem to be a lot of Dallas players around D-1 now). UNC has a star player from Las Vegas(!).
Unfortunately, growth at the college level is stubbornly slow. College teams are getting so much better because they can pick from a large pool of talent from all over the country. And this growth continues to benefit the traditional powers. I would love to see some other big schools pick up the sport in areas where it's growing - SoCal, Texas, Minnesota, etc. but that's not gonna happen. No sport does a worse job of expanding its brand than lacrosse.
Two big reasons:
1. No real local talent base. Lax isn’t big in Michigan, especially compared to the East Coast. Most recruits are going to be from the east coast and are more likely to stay on the coast.
2. The traditional lax powers are typically Ivy League schools and other academic powers (UVa, Johns Hopkins, etc.) so the allure of a top notch education doesn’t hold much weight when you’re comparing with other top educational institutions.
JBA - good question. I mean - ? - it's a mystery. It's especially confusing when you think that other programs like Marquette, Richmond and High Point have had a lot of recent success despite entering Division 1 after Michigan did. Michigan has been around a while now and has some OK seasons, they've brought in some good recruits and they've developed good individual players. And with this win over Hopkins they've beaten every B1G team except Maryland and they've even knocked off a top-10 Ivy League team. But, they just haven't put it together as a team. The freshman on this year's team were the #3 class in the country and there is another good class coming in next year so hopefully that proverbial corner will be turned soon.
The top flight in lacrosse is also notoriously hard to break into, however. Duke is a power now but didn't make a Final 4 until 1997, which is incredible to think about. Notre Dame is now considered an elite program but they didn't make a Final 4 until 2001 and they still haven't won a national championship. Only Denver has been able to crash the winner's circle and they did that by throwing a ton of money at the game's greatest coach to get him to leave Princeton. So, in conclusion - ?.
3-2 Hopkins after 1. Too many turnovers for M.
6-5 M after 2.
10-7 M after 3.
13-10 M Final. Johns Hopkins isn’t a vintage JH team, but still M’s first win over the program. Good win!
Just a general “wow” event there today. I know Hopkins is down at the moment, but Michigan winning AT Homewood is something all these kids are going to remember. Hopefully it provides a bit of a spark heading toward the conference tournament as well.
It’s amazing that lacrosse is such a small sport that a former teammate of mine starts the thread and a high school teammate responds. Something tells me I’d know a few others who respond.
Great win for this team. Face offs and goalie play have improved dramatically this year, which were both key in today’s win. I hear a good recruiting class is coming in too. Things are looking up!