Coming soon to a playing field near you: Duke women's varsity lacrosse?
If Jen Brune and Jen Hogan have their way, it will happen. Last Saturday, the two Trinity sophomores went in front of the Duke Athletic Council to present their proposal to upgrade the women's club lacrosse team to varsity status.
"If there's going to be a varsity sport added, it's going to be women's lacrosse," Brune said. "I think this is something Duke should have."
In September, Brune and Hogan joined with several other students and Mary Page Michel, their club's head coach, to gather information about the sport. In a 17-page report entitled "Why Duke Should Add Women's Lacrosse as a Varsity Sport," the group compiled its evidence.
One point brought up in the report is the current popularity of the sport among women at the University. The club team has been in existence for 13 years. This year, some 50 players showed up at the initial organizational meeting, and about 40 are currently on the team.
"The interest we have on the club level is astounding," said Michel. "We've had to turn players away because they won't get playing time."
Part of the popularity of the sport at Duke can be explained by the fact that a majority of the students that come to Duke come from the same area in which lacrosse is popular in this country -- the Northeast. Brune feels this geographic connection helps make the University a natural place for a women's varsity team, despite the fact that the entire country has yet to embrace the game.
"It's not a national sport yet," Brune said. "It is still a northeastern sport. But Duke right now is really a northeastern school. Most of the kids are coming from that region. We can't deny that fact and say we can't have a sport from that region."
The most powerful piece of evidence in the proposal for creating a program is likely the quick success that a women's lacrosse team could have at Duke. Although the hotbed of the sport is the Northeast, there are 12 varsity teams in the South region, as compared to only 10 in the North and Mid-Atlantic regions. What's more, the best two teams over the past three seasons are the two Atlantic Coast Conference schools with lacrosse programs: Virginia and Maryland.
These two teams have won the last three national championships. Much of their success is credited to the ability of these schools to attract top players who want to practice outdoors all year, something Duke could offer as well.
However, ranked third, fourth and fifth in last year's final poll were Princeton, Harvard and Dartmouth, three schools that Duke routinely vies with for the top academic talent in the nation. Clearly, there are plenty of high quality student-athletes playing women's lacrosse, and many of them are going to these other schools partly because of the academic reputations of these institutions.
What would happen, then, if you added a women's lacrosse team at a university which had mild North Carolina winters, was one of the finest academic institutions in the country and was also guaranteed of playing the best competition every year?
"I think this would be the top job in the whole country," Michel said. "The weather makes it such an ideal location. I think it would be great for the school, great for the students and great for lacrosse. Women's lacrosse really attracts that type of bright student, and with the ACC, we have a really unique niche in the women's lacrosse market because we would attract both the Ivy League person and the ACC person."
The Athletic Council has formed a sub-committee to decide on the proposal. It is scheduled to report its findings in April, and one possibility is that the committee will recommend that the team be added at a later time.
Brune hopes the University won't wait too long. The University of North Carolina and N.C. State are also currently applying for varsity status, and their entrance before Duke could lead to another situation like that of women's soccer, where UNC established a dominant program in the early 1980s that left Duke struggling to catch up once they did field a varsity squad in 1988.
"We don't want to see that happen to women's lacrosse," said Brune. " We want that competitive edge. That's the last thing Duke needs, is to lose at something else to Chapel Hill."
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