JMU Lax Comes Up Short

The JMU women’s lacrosse team entered the weekend as one of the hottest teams in the country, riding a ten game winning streak. Unfortunately, both the winning steak and the season came to end on Saturday. The Dukes lost a hard fought battle to Syracuse 7-3 in a NCAA Quarterfinal match-up in Harrisonburg.

Falling one win short of the Final Four (for any of you that didn’t know what Quarterfinals meant) is brutal, but it doesn’t diminish the team’s accomplishments. They won the CAA regular season and tournament championships, were ranked as high as #5 in the nation,  beat cross-state rival UVA, and finished 17-3. The program appears to be in a solid enough state that the woman will have plenty of chances in the future to make runs at a championship.

I actually tuned for the Madizone broadcast for a portion of the game on Saturday. Two things stood out about the game and the coverage. One, it is really, really difficult to find an announcer who convey the excitement of lacrosse strictly via audio. I applaud the entire Madizone team for an enthusiastic broadcast and commend the announcers for doing a great job covering a sport they weren’t familiar with (seriously). It’s just tough to follow the game when you hear things like “She shoots, and it’s in the net…not the net you score in, but the other one that the goalie holds.”

The second thing that stood out was that Gary Gait coaches the Syracuse women! Yeah, that name means little to most of you, but playing lacrosse in the 90’s my friends and I talked about Gait the way the kids in The Sandlot talked about Babe Ruth. Apparently, I’ve been living under a rock because he paid his dues as an assistant for the Maryland women for 9 years before getting the ‘Cuse gig. This would be like Michael Jordan returning to Chapel Hill to coach the Lady Tarheels. It’s a great job. It’s just not what you’d expect.