Wednesday morning, on the stadium floor of American Legion Memorial Stadium in Charlotte, N.C., an umpire in a striped shirt will put a yellow lacrosse ball in the upper third of two specialized draw sticks held by players from the Tobacco Road Derby.
With a stepback and a whistle, Duke and North Carolina will begin what will be a rollercoaster of a postseason in NCAA Division I women’s lacrosse.
Sure, there are a handful of regular-season fixtures being played the next seven days, finishing with Penn-Brown and San Diego State-Xavier on Sunday. But let’s face it: most of the attention will be duly focused on the two most prominent women’s lacrosse conferences, the ACC and Big Ten.
These two conferences have top teams and top players. When you look at this morning’s RPI rankings on the NCAA’s website, 12 out of the top 21 teams are from either the ACC or Big Ten.
But what I see, with the nation’s two women’s lacrosse superconferences finishing their conference tournaments this Sunday, is an opportunity for a number of the potential multibid conferences to know what they have to do when their conference championships are determined next week.
I am specifically looking at the Big 12, the Ivy League, and the Patriot League. I think these conferences will likely squeeze out some of the mid-table ACC or Big Ten teams out of the bracket when it is announced May 3.
The first pages of the novel will be written Wednesday; don’t miss it.