The NCAA News - News and Features

June 29, 1998

3 attracts a crowd in men's lacrosse

But Shoremen like being alone at top in Division III

BY GARY T. BROWN
STAFF WRITER

Things have been happening in threes lately for Washington (Maryland) athletics director Bryan Matthews.

His school is a member of Division III. His school's men's lacrosse team has played in three straight Division III championship games. He's also had three different positions at Washington since he enrolled there in 1972 -- player, coach and now director of athletics.

Unfortunately for Matthews, there have been some other numbers hovering about, too. Seven times the Shoremen have been beaten in the final. Four U.S. presidential terms have come and gone since Washington first had a crack at the crown in 1982. Twenty-six years have elapsed since the Shoremen first established their lacrosse lore, finishing -- that's right -- second in the initial United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association (USILA) tournament in 1972.

But those numbers don't matter to Matthews anymore. They all add up to number "1" now after this year's Shoremen squad dumped two-time defending champion Nazareth, 16-10, to finally reach the pinnacle in Division III lacrosse.

Even better was the fact that it happened during championships weekend, which has become a model collegiate championships festival for team sports.

This year's spectacle was at Rutgers -- the previous five have been at Maryland -- and more than 40,000 fans poured through the turnstiles over a three-day period to watch Princeton, Adelphi and Washington bring home division trophies.

For Matthews, it was a long time coming. He had been all too familiar with the bridesmaid tag. Even as far back as 1972 when he was a freshman goalkeeper at the Chestertown, Maryland, school of then some 700 undergraduates, Matthews learned what it was to be second.

Matthews' team lost that first title bout to what would become Washington's primary nemesis -- Hobart. Then in 1973, Washington reached the edge again before falling to Cortland State. The Shoremen lost a third chance to Hobart in 1977 before Matthews assumed the head coaching reins in 1979.

His first two teams posted sub-.500 records, but by 1982, Matthews had built a championship-caliber squad. The opponent for the final: Hobart, which already had captured the first two Division III titles. Again, Matthews was sent home runner-up.

"We had a pipe shot on an extra man in sudden-death overtime on a wide-open cage," Matthews lamented, "after which Hobart came right down and scored. I still wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat over that one."

Birth of an event

A lot has changed in collegiate lacrosse since then, though for a long time it wasn't Washington's string of seconds. Matthews said that despite playing in front of a packed house at Hobart 16 years ago, the aura couldn't touch what has developed into lacrosse's championships weekend.

"That game in 1982 still had a regular-season game atmosphere," he said. "Obviously it wasn't a regular game, but there was not the same championship-event atmosphere."

Matthews sits on the NCAA Men's Lacrosse Committee, which established its championships weekend in 1992.

The festivities included the Division I finals and Division III championship game until this year, when the Division II title game was added. The Division I semifinals and final are now conducted Saturday and Monday with the Divisions II and III championship games staged Sunday.

Fans have voiced their approval. Attendance for the Division I championship game has eclipsed 20,000 in five of the seven years, and overall championship attendance in Division I has been above or near 70,000 for the last six years.

That spells success in Matthews' dictionary. Though his perspective may be title-colored, he said he can't imagine anyone walking away from the event unimpressed.

"I can speak to that with two hats," he said. "As a committee member, the championships weekend has been very successful and has achieved the intended goals. As an athletics director at an institution that has been fortunate to have played in it the last three years, it's just a tremendous experience for our whole community. And I'd be very surprised if a Division I athletics direc-tor wouldn't say the same thing."

Future steps

John C. Parry is a Division I athletics director at Butler University who echoes Matthews' accolades for the event. As chair of the committee, however, Parry still sees room for improvement.

"There remain some concerns," he said. "We used an alternate field (Rutgers' Yurcak Field) for the Division II championship game and we have to decide if that's right for them. They would have preferred to be in the stadium but that raises concerns about the field taking too many games. But having the Division II players and coaches included at the banquet and in all the postgame coverage were very positive things."

Parry also said that the committee must wrestle with timing when it selects the two teams for the Division II championship. This year's competitors were named May 2 and didn't play until May 23. Parry said one option may be moving the selection back a week to enable Division II to extend its regular season and not have such a long delay.

The committee has overcome similar obstacles before. Implementation of the event in 1992 required convincing Division III that a neutral site would be a good thing.

"The Division III philosophy said that postseason championships should be held on campus," Parry said. "So there had to be a belief that this was going to be a more positive experience even though there wasn't a Division III campus involved. I'm not sure that was a universal feeling at the time.

"Secondly, it was apparent that the higher-seeded team was going to be giving up that home-field advantage. So there were some coaches out there who were reluctant to accept that if you had a great year and a great facility, you still wouldn't be hosting the championship game."

Those feelings may be a thing of the past if the atmosphere generated at the championships weekend is any indication. Division III championship-game crowds have grown four-fold since the days of on-campus finals.

"People at Hobart did a wonderful job," Matthews said of the 1982 finale. "But it wasn't like being part of this championships weekend in terms of quantity of people, size of the stadium or scope of the event. What players, parents and alumni are able to experience now is just amazing. 1982 was like a big lacrosse game -- now it's a championship event."