Before your Founder covered the IAAM Class A final yesterday, we were at the ancestral home for American lacrosse, Homewood Field in Baltimore.
We could only view one of the two games in the NCAA Division I women’s lacrosse bracket, the first-round game between host Johns Hopkins and the State University of New York at Albany.
I went originally to watch for myself one of the five Tewaaraton Trophy finalists, senior Reagan O’Brien of Hopkins, a person who is an artist when it comes to dispossessing opponents. I noticed at least two situations where she was able to make a takeaway from the Danes’ attack, as well as a ground-ball pickup.
But there was one statistic that was unmistakeable, and it was the numbers looming over the north side of Homewood Field: the game score.
After conceding the opening goal in the first minute of play, the Jays scored the next 18 goals. I’ve seen what I call a “poke the hive” game before, where a lower-ranked team scores an early goal and then the more favored team runs up a number of consecutive goals on the way to an easy win.
As a result, the Hopkins pep band was on full song all afternoon; I remarked to one of the railbirds in the well surrounding the field that I was going to be hearing the goal song, “To Win,” in my sleep.
Now, I didn’t have the usual game program rolled up in my hands; that is now accessible through the Internet. But if I had been paying attention, I might have noted that six players, including the Danes’ leading goal-scorer, were not available for selection yesterday. A seventh player, a starter, did not play.
An article overnight in The Albany Times-Union reported that two usual starters were not in the side yesterday for violation of team rules, and four other had chosen not to travel with the team to the event.
I’ve been around women’s lacrosse in the college space for more than a quarter of a century. And usually, “violation of team rules” involves a specific kind of misconduct which has permeated organized sport for decades.
I’m not going to speculate here what said misconduct was, because I don’t think the players, the Albany program, or lacrosse deserves this kind of scrutiny.
What I know, however, is that a season ended in a manner which will be talked about for months, and for reasons not on the scoreboard.