Over the weekend, all three NCAA divisions whittled down their fields for this coming week’s cut to the last four.
And you can’t help wondering if we should rename the Division III tournament for the conference which has been the single most dominant force in non-scholarship women’s lacrosse in recent times: the New England Small College Athletic Conference.
Before 1993, NESCAC teams were not allowed to play in NCAA national championship tournaments. But since 1994, a NESCAC member has been in the Final Four every season.
Every single one.
And it could get to a point this coming weekend when we could guarantee three NESCAC teams in the national semifinals if the six teams currently in the bracket were to win their octofinal games on Saturday.
How’s that possible? Well, three of the four quarters of the Division III bracket have two NESCAC members in them. In the Tufts quadrant, the Jumbos and Williams are in separate games on Saturday. In the Wesleyan quadrant, the Cardinals and Trinity are in separate octofinal games.
Four-time defending champion Middlebury is in a quadrant where they are looking at perhaps meeting Amherst in the quarterfinal round.
The only quadrant without a NESCAC team is the one being played at Salisbury State, and that quadrant has the hosts, along with York College, Denison, and Christopher Newport.
Now, we’ve seen this kind of NESCAC dominance before.
In another case of “history repeating itself,” this happened in the NCAA Division III field hockey championship last fall. Eight teams from NESCAC made the field, and seven won their first-round matches. But one entire quadrant of the field hockey bracket had four NESCAC sides; another had three.
The winner, as you remember, was Tufts. And the Jumbos were in that quadrant of the bracket with Amherst, Bates, and Williams.
Iron, it seems, sharpens iron.
Let’s see if the same happens this weekend.