The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- March 1, 1999

An automatic choice?

Men's lacrosse divided on whether new qualifiers will dilute championship field

BY MARTY BENSON
STAFF WRITER

Automatic qualification is here for Division III men's lacrosse. And while it's possible that few will notice its arrival right now, next year could be another story.

The only two conferences granted the first automatic bids in tournament history this year are the Old Dominion Athletic (ODAC) and Centennial Conferences. Together they accounted for five of the 12 tournament teams in 1998, including national champion Washington College (Maryland).

Thus the impact of automatic qualification for this year's championship might be slight because those two conference's champions -- and probably one or two more of their league peers -- would likely get bids whether via automatic qualification or not, since the criteria for all other teams remain the same.

"The Division III Men's Lacrosse Committee had heard that automatic qualification might be coming in a few years anyway, but felt that if they were going to have to do it, they'd at least start it on their own terms," said Philip A. Buttafuoco, former committee national office liaison and first-year commissioner of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC).

The Capital Athletic Conference (CAC) also applied for automatic qualification, but only one of its teams, two-time champion Salisbury State University, has ever made the tournament.

"The committee looked at the conferences from top to bottom and made the safe choice," Buttafuoco said.

Change on the way

So this year's selection process is different in name only. But next year the "in a few years" to which Buttafuoco referred comes to fruition. People already are noticing. Some teams are so excited they can barely wait.

But Washington (Maryland) is not in that group, nor are many of the other schools that have traditionally claimed the lion's share of berths. In 2000, however, if those schools do not win their respective conference, the tournament bracket may be filled before the committee can consider them.

The change comes from the adoption of Proposal No. 38 at this year's Convention, which requires automatic qualification to be granted to the champion of every conference that, among other requirements, has at least seven teams sponsoring the respective sport. In lacrosse, that adds the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) and Commonwealth Coast Conference (CCC) to the other conferences already mentioned.

Although many of the sport-specific details are still developing, it is likely that, had the new legislation been in place last year, Washington (Maryland) may not have been selected for the tournament because the Shoremen finished second in the Centennial Conference. Instead, that bid might have gone to a team from a conference from which the committee had never before selected a team.

Under the new selection process, teams will be considered in pools, with Pool A reserved for the automatic qualifiers. Pool B would include independents and teams from conferences that do not qualify for an automatic bid. Pool C is for nonchampion teams from the automatic-qualifying conferences. The number of teams to be chosen from Pool B is determined by awarding one bid per every seven eligible teams, which would fill the 12-team bracket before Pool C could be considered. A stipulation forwarded to sports committees by the Division III Championships Committee is that Pools B and C cannot be combined and that each must be considered on a national basis using the selection criteria identified in the legislation.

"The championships committee created the process at the direction of the Presidents Council and Management Council to refocus the championships back to regional and conference competition, to increase access and to eliminate the 'necessity' for teams to prove they are better than others (and therefore more worthy of a national tournament bid) by traveling to play teams in other regions," said Bridget Belgiovine, NCAA assistant chief of staff for Division III. "The intent is to get schools to play in their own area, which will assist in lessening missed class time, travel and expense pressures."

Bryan Matthews, director of athletics at Washington (Maryland) and chair of the Division III lacrosse committee, said he appreciates saving money, but he believes the championships are for excellence, not access.

"The regular season is for participation. Every school that fields a team has a chance to participate," he said. "The national championships are for the teams that are the most competitive."

Despite those feelings, Matthews said that had bracket expansion been part of the package and details of the legislation had been specified, he could have voted for the proposal.

Expansion could be next

Now expansion may be in the mix. The Championships Committee in January recommended that the Division III Management Council and Presidents Council consider increasing the ratio for championships access from one for every eight teams to one for every 7.5, which, if approved, would increase the berths from 12 to 14. The additional two berths would go to pool C. The rub is that while Division III conferences have until April 1 to declare, by sport, in what conference they will participate for purposes of automatic qualification for the next three years, the Council meetings do not take place until later that month.

Even without expansion, conferences have an option, although it may not be attractive. A conference or individual school could decline automatic qualification and compete as an independent. Either option would have the same net result, since one defector would drop most conferences below the required seven teams, making them all independents.

"If a conference is good enough to have two or three teams make (the tournament) and knows that if it takes automatic qualification, it will have only one team, I think turning down the automatic qualification is well worth discussing," Matthews said. "The worst-case scenario would be if a conference would be split apart by one school electing not to play within the conference, which would result in the conference losing its option to select automatic qualification. If we don't all agree, maybe we can agree to disagree and still do something together."

Chuck Winters, director of athletics at Gettysburg College, another perennial qualifier from the Centennial Conference, agreed that declining automatic qualification is a possibility.

"To me, the other schools in the conference would say if automatic qualification is not going to help us, why should we do it?" Winters said.

Incentive to improve?

In addition to the possibility of their schools being left out of the tournament, many at the traditional-power schools worry about the potential for one-sided games in the first round, often citing now-Division I Hobart College's 37-1 win over Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980, the first year of the tournament, as a sign of things to come.

"The presidents need to watch that very closely," Winters said. "If one team dominates a game like that, is that a good experience for those kids?

"There is an assumption that if you allow the champion of a weaker conference to get in that some of those teams will make more of a commitment to the sport and become better. If that happens, this is good, but I don't think it is going to happen as much as some might."

Matthews concurred.

"I don't think that when you lower the bar, which is what we are doing, it adds an incentive to improve," he said.

Tom Cafaro, vice-president for enrollment management at Nichols College of the CCC and a former member of the Division III lacrosse committee, said improvement will come, just as it did in Division I, where a bid was reserved for the best team from the traditionally weaker West region.

"You look at a team like Notre Dame," he said. "Now, they can get in on their own. Had we not instituted that bid for the West, that would never have happened.

"But in the short term, it left out some deserving teams, just like this will. In the long term it's going to make the sport stronger in different zones.

"It's going to take eight or 10 years (for the new teams to be competitive) unless something weird happens where someone picks up a great player."

Rob Quinn, fourth-year coach at New England College, which joined the CCC last year and posted an 11-4 overall record, said that he already is seeing the possibility of landing such a player, all because of the bait the automatic bid provides. Having been an assistant coach at ODAC member Roanoke College, a perennial tournament team, he knows there are two distinctive sides of the fence.

"We're already seeing improvement in that conference schools are hiring better coaches, and, hopefully, in a couple years, our representative will not get embarrassed," he said. "I'm sure a lot of other teams like those in the ODAC don't think this is a great idea, but we're ecstatic."

That feeling is shared by student-athletes like David Mansfield, a junior attackman for Quinn, who's already thinking about next season.

"Before, we could go undefeated and never get in," he said. "This gives a team like ours with a lot of heart a chance to shine. Ever since we found out about this it has brought our team up to another level."

If that is realized on the field at New England College and some of the schools of the same ilk, many believe the sport of lacrosse will come out the victor.