Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports
Lacrosse is traditionally known as an East Coast sport, one played in prep schools in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and in colleges mostly up and down the East Coast. But in recent years, it’s become a sport that’s quickly spreading, starting with Northwestern women’s team taking the first championship away from the traditional powerhouses a decade ago. And now, for the first time in NCAA history, a school west of the Appalachians took home the men’s title with Denver’s decisive victory over the Terps (whose women took home the title last weekend.)
For fans and proponents of the sport, the message sent by Denver winning the title only six years after Bill Tierney left Princeton to go west was a simple one: More schools should have the rapidly growing sport. Tierney pointed out before the championship game that his team wasn’t one full of highly recruited stars — Trevor Baptiste, the team’s key face-off man, was about to go to Franklin and Marshall before re-opening his recruiting and committing to Denver.
When Northwestern brought the championship to a new area of the country, years before the Big Ten even had a lacrosse championship of its own, the story began in a similar way as Denver’s, with few top recruits and a coach that left a comfortable spot in a traditional lacrosse power. Northwestern’s first stars were two players that, according to legend, coach Kelly Amonte Hiller saw jogging on the street and asked if they wanted to try out a new sport. That team’s success was one of many reasons that lacrosse spread so quickly and in a short amount of time it went from being a sport where players had to explain basic rules to one popular far outside of the traditional schools in the women’s game.
Now, it appears, the men’s game is solidly on the same track — something Tierney has brought up consistently in interviews throughout his time in Denver.
“We’re hoping it means that people will look at this and say if Denver can do this so can we,” he said after the game.
Paul Rabil, one of the sport’s best-known players in Major League Lacrosse and a former standout at Johns Hopkins, pointed out that the win wasn’t a shock — Denver has been knocking on the door for a long time. It comes as a time when two non-traditional lacrosse powers, Ohio State and Michigan also had good seasons and youth participation in lacrosse is rising.
“I think now the perception of lacrosse being an elite East Coast sport has to change,” he said. While it may not grow as quickly as the women’s sport has grown, Rabil said that the win is “validation”
“You can point to paper that Denver won a championship,” he said. “And the game now is out West.”
