lax4ct.com: In Pursuit of Division 1 Men’s Lacrosse at our Flagship Institution

Three Connecticut Highschools in Top 20 Nationally

Laxpower.com

LaxPower, the world’s leading authority on lacrosse team performance ratings, is pleased to announce the National Coaches/Computer Ratings for high school boys’ lacrosse for the recently completed 2009 spring season.

Gilman School of Baltimore, which finished 15-1 and won the Maryland MIAA A Championship, is the national champion for 2009, defending the title they claimed in 2008. Gilman finished in first place in both the computer ratings and coaches’ poll, garnering 29 of 44 first-place votes.

Rounding out the top five programs in the country for 2009 are four perennial powers:

#2: West Islip High School, New York (22-1) — New York state Class A champion
#3: Manhasset High School, New York (20-1) — New York state Class C champion
#4: LaSalle College High School, Pennsylvania (21-4) — Pennsylvania PIAA state champion
#5: St. Mary’s High School, Maryland (15-2) — MIAA A semifinalist

The final rankings were compiled using Lax Power’s CCR rating formula, which combines the national computer rankings with a national poll. The computer ratings used for the rankings are based on over 23,500 game scores for more than 3,100 high school teams. The poll is a product of rankings by 44 high school coaches from around the country. Each of these parameters represents 50% of the final tallied results.

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New Study of Gender Symmetric Teams Reveals Significant Disparity in Athletic Opportunities

CollegeSportsCouncil.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. - June 23, 2009 - The preliminary findings of a study of NCAA participation and scholarship data conducted by the College Sports Council (CSC) shows that in gender symmetrical sports, which have teams for both male and female athletes, women are accorded far more opportunities to compete and earn scholarships at NCAA Division 1 schools, the highest level of intercollegiate athletics.

“After nearly four decades after the passage of Title IX, it’s time to erase all institutional gender discrimination, and that includes bias against boys,” said CSC Chairman Eric Pearson. “Current NCAA policies cultivate the disparity between male and female scholarship opportunities. In sports where there are symmetric teams the scholarship limits should be the same. The CSC calls on the NCAA to equalize scholarship limits in all sports which have teams for both male and female athletes.”

Later this Summer, the CSC will release a comprehensive study on athletic opportunity in NCAA Division I in “gender symmetric” sports where both men and women compete. Preliminary findings of this study include:

• At the NCAA Division I level, there are far more womens teams (2,653) than men’s teams (2,097), denying thousands of male athletes the opportunity to compete.
• Overall in “gender symmetric” sports, there are far more scholarships available for women (32,656) than for men (20,206).
• By far, the most difficult athletic scholarship to obtain at the Division I level is in men’s volleyball, where there are 489 high school athletes for every full NCAA scholarship.

The charts accompanying these preliminary findings can be found at: http://www.collegesportscouncil.org/media/release_charts.pdf.

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Lacrosse Booming in Stamford

ConnPost.com

By Mike Levitt
Move over baseball, there’s a new sport in town.

This season proved the most successful in the short history of boys’ lacrosse in Stamford, as both Westhill and Stamford High reached the state tournament and Westhill made the city’s first-ever birth in the FCIAC tournament.

“I think we accomplished our goals this season,” Westhill coach George Talboys said of his Vikings, who went 11-4 and reached the Division L tournament for the second straight year. “Other than winning some in the postseason, our goals were to get an FCIAC birth, double digit wins, and beat several teams we’d never beaten before, all of which we did.”

In a baseball-crazed city, lacrosse has come a long way in a short period of time, especially considering it was just eight years ago the city’s first high school lacrosse team was formed — a club team consisting of students from both Westhill and Stamford High, most of whom had never played the game.

The next year, both schools started their own teams, competing at the JV level. It was then that Talboys and Stamford coach Jeremy White took the reins of each school’s program.

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Mercer University Adds Lacrosse, Becomes First D1 Team in Georgia

MercerBears.com

Mercer University will add men’s NCAA D-I lacrosse to its intercollegiate athletic program during the 2010-2011 academic year and will add a Division I women’s team in 2011-2012, athletics director Bobby Pope announced today. Mercer is the first NCAA Division I institution in the state to announce the addition of lacrosse to its athletic program.

The sport, which originated among Native American tribes in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic before the United States was colonized, has long been popular in those regions and is now the fastest-growing high school sport in Georgia and one of the fastest growing in the country. According to the latest participation survey by U.S. Lacrosse, the sport’s governing body, lacrosse is the fastest-growing high school sport for girls over the last 10 years and the second-fastest growing sport among boys. At the collegiate level, men’s lacrosse has been the fastest-growing sport over the past decade, while women’s has been the second-fastest-growing sport.

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Milwaukee School of Engineering Adds D3 Men’s Lacrosse

Laxpower.com

Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) will add men’s varsity lacrosse as the school’s 22nd sport beginning in the spring of 2010 according to Director of Athletics Dan Harris.

“Lacrosse has rapidly gained popularity in the Midwest as more opportunities have grown through local youth clubs and high schools,” said Harris. “During the past three seasons, we have seen growth in our club program and are ready to grant the team varsity status.”

Robin Buckley, will fill the position as head coach, a position he has held the past three years with the school’s club program. Buckley brings over 19 years of coaching experience to the MSOE Raider program. Buckley, a native of Illinois, started playing the sport of lacrosse in 1982 at Lawrenceville Prep in New Jersey. He continued playing lacrosse in college at Lake Forest College, where he was a four-year starter.

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Princeton Legend Tierney Leaves For U. Denver

NYTimes.com

By JOSHUA ROBINSON
Whenever the time came to hire a coach, college lacrosse programs across the country had been reaching out to Princeton’s Bill Tierney for years. They were not necessarily trying to pry him away. They just wanted advice from someone who had spent nearly four decades in the game — maybe a few names, or a couple of places to look.When the University of Denver began searching for a coach last month, it was no different. Except, Tierney said, the more he heard about the job, the more he was intrigued.

On Monday, Tierney was announced as the Denver Pioneers’ new coach after 22 years, 6 national championships and 14 Ivy League titles with Princeton. This season, the Tigers finished 13-3 and lost to Cornell, the eventual runner-up, in the N.C.A.A. tournament quarterfinals. Tierney’s record at Princeton was 238-86.

“I’m not sure which came first, the right time or the right place,” said Tierney, who has grown children on the West Coast and whose son Trevor will join him as an assistant. “I’m about challenges. Until I came to Princeton, every other job I had was rebuilding, and we did that here.”

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Interview (video)

Class M Title: Darien Defeats Wilton

ConnPost.com

NORWALK — When it fell in overtime to Ridgefield in the Fairfield

County Interscholastic Athletic Conference championship game, the Darien boys lacrosse team could have very well felt sorry for itself.

Instead, the Blue Wave refocused on its motto for the 2009 season: The Drive For Five. And the motto became reality Saturday, as Darien defeated Wilton 17-11 in the Connecticut Interscholastic

Athletic Conference Class M championship, giving the school its fifth-straight state title.

“The thing we emphasize is your season is complete when you end it in a pile. If you lose your last game, regardless of where it is, it’s going to be a disappointment,” Darien head coach Jeff Brameier said.

“They could have won the FCIAC and not won states and their season would have felt a bit slighted. So winning the state championship is much more important that our league championship by far.”

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Class S Title: St. Joseph’s Defeats Weston

ConnPost.com

NORWALK — The last three seasons St. Joseph has come up just one win short of the Division S state boys lacrosse final.

So when the Cadets finally reached the state championship game this year, they made sure to make it count.

Senior Joe Bacarella tallied four goals and four assists as third-seeded St. Joseph claimed the first state crown in program history with a hard-fought 12-11 victory over No. 9 Weston Saturday morning at Brien McMahon High.

“We waited a long time to get here,” Bacarella said. “When the (state) playoffs started we all talked about those three semifinal losses. It was motivation. We all knew this was our time to make it happen.”

Bacarella’s fellow seniors Pat Moore, Matt Marini and Connor Brawley also had big days in their first state championship game. Moore recorded two goals and two assists, Marini had two goals and an assist and Brawley netted two goals.

Morgan Faller led the Trojans with four goals and Sean Ledwick tallied three goals and an assist.

Saturday marked the last chance at a championship for Bacarella and his classmates, who had played together the last eight years with one goal in mind.

“The state title was always our goal,” Bacarella said. “We wanted to be part of the team that brought the school its first title. We wanted to take the program to another level and give it the creditability it deserves.”

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Class L Title: Fairfield Prep Defeats Simsbury

Courant.com

By DESMOND CONNER

NORWALK — - They had been through enough on Thursday.

The 12th-seeded Fairfield Prep Jesuits were of the mind-set that they were not about to go through another nail-biting experience en route to a fourth consecutive CIAC Division L lacrosse crown.

And No. 7 Simsbury had no say in the matter Saturday afternoon on Jack Casagrande Field at McMahon High School.

Jesuits senior attackman Chase Bailey had five goals and his junior position-mate John McGoldrick added four in Prep’s 15-3 win before a silent Simsbury crowd and boisterous Fairfield Prep fans.

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Connecticut Boys’ Lacrosse 2009 All-State Teams

Laxpower.com

The Connecticut High School Lacrosse Coaches Association (CHSLCA), in conjunction with the Connecticut High School Coaches Association (CHSCA), is pleased to announce the 2009 Class L, Class M, and Class S Boys’ Lacrosse Teams. The teams were voted by the 78 Connecticut boys’ head lacrosse coaches. Players were nominated by coaches and were part of All League teams around the state.

The All-State players, as well as the Coaches and Assistant Coaches of the Year, the 2009 Connecticut Lacrosse Player of the Year, the 2009 Scholar-Athlete of the Year, the 2009 US Lacrosse Man of the Year, the 2009 Connecticut Boys’ Lacrosse Team of the Year, and the 15 Connecticut High School US Lacrosse All-Americans and seven US Lacrosse Academic All-Americans will be honored at the 2009 All-State Lacrosse Banquet on Tuesday, June 16 at 7:00 p.m. at the Aqua Turf Club in Southington.

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