PHILADELPHIA — A few years ago, the nation’s first lady popularized the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child."

The same could be said about what’s necessary to channel a once-obscure NCAA championship into the mainstream. That’s especially true when the event is, in reality, three events — NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championships Weekend — the only NCAA event at which the three division champions are determined at one site on one weekend.

So it’s a good thing this "village," known as the "lacrosse community" long before the event dreamed of drawing 40,000-plus fans on a single day, is just that. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody is ready to pitch in because, well, that’s what you do at this event.

Three reasons this year’s event worked to perfection: (1) the NCAA Lacrosse Committees, (2) the sports information professionals involved, and (3) the individuals from host institution University of Pennsylvania, who worked tirelessly to transform Lincoln Financial Field ("the Linc") into lacrosse heaven for three blistering, record-setting days over the summer’s first holiday weekend.

If the town council of lacrosse is the three division lacrosse committees, which function with village verve as one body many times during "the Weekend," the mayor of this trinity is the Division I chair, who is, of course, a former lacrosse coach.

That’s Jon Hind, second-year chair, recently named interim athletics director at Butler University, where he started the program in 1993 and coached until 1999.

"Hondo," as he’s known in the lacrosse community, continued a Butler family tradition by becoming chair. The man for whom he’s filling in at his employer, recently retired John Parry, chaired the committee twice during his long tenure as an athletics administrator. Parry also is generally credited as being the first to push for moving the Division I semifinals and final to one weekend. Both men have worked with each gender’s basketball Final Four when those events have been in Indianapolis, Butler’s home address. Since Hondo joined the committee four years ago and even more since he became chair, he has sought the counsel of Parry, himself a former lacrosse coach (at Brown University). After all, family leaders pass knowledge to their heirs.

"John has been a great resource with explaining the commitment, the nuances, the philosophies, the culture — you think you know it going in, but there have been a lot of times when I’ve asked him, not specifically who to put in what roles, but in more general terms of how to approach things," Hind said.

Hondo also learned from previous chair Chappy Menninger, director of athletics at Mount St. Mary’s University, who presided over the sport’s first two championships in a professional football stadium (Baltimore) in 2003 and 2004.

"He had a wonderful way of assigning things so that you never felt as though you had something thrown on you to do," he said.

Hind said that his role as chair is as task assigner rather than as boss.

"I try not to chart the course but to steer the ship," he said.

A steady hand is necessary to run the beehive behind the scenes. During the games, committee members often look like color-coordinated fans, sitting in the best sideline seats in the house in NCAA garb. Unless something goes awry.

Hind said what helps makes such occurrences rare is the savvy he gained from working with those Indy Final Fours, leaving no stone unturned.

"Certainly things come up the day of the event that you have to react to," he said. "But what impressed me about people at the Final Fours was how thorough they were in their planning and how collaborative they were in getting the job done."

A similar effort is now necessary in lacrosse, which draws Final Four-sized crowds, albeit in an outdoor arena.

"We’re funneling through about 100,000 people over three days," Hind said. "We now have the complexities of live TV (in all eight games) and we have the enormity of the venue. We need police escorts to get the teams through traffic to the stadium.

"We don’t have the supply/demand issues basketball has with tickets yet, but we’re getting closer." (This year’s Division I semifinals attendance of 49,562 was a record, as was the championship-game attendance of 47,062.)

Just coordinating practice is a challenge for two reasons. The first — accommodating eight teams — is obvious. The second concerns preserving the field. The wear and tear of playing five games on a field that is part natural, part synthetic, over three days is a concern even if there’s no rain, like this year. So practice at the Linc was limited to 30-minute "walk-throughs." The rest, some of which happened during another division’s game — were overseen by committee members at nearby college fields.

One person playing that role was Scott Marr, coach at the University at Albany (New York) and a second-year committee man. Although he coached in the championship game twice as an assistant at Maryland in 1997 and 1998, the first of which the Terps hosted, he admitted he didn’t know what awaited him as a behind-the-scenes facilitator.

"Until you’re on a committee like this, I don’t think you realize how much work it takes to put this on, from the banquet to getting the police escorts set up to coordinating all the practices, the hotels — just the logistics of the whole thing," said the former Johns Hopkins player.

For the machine to hum, the family members step up, most visibly as team representatives, committee code for "weekend logistical guide and go-between."

"We depend on team reps to be the committee’s eyes and ears for the teams, and, quite frankly, their mouth," Hind said. "They need to tell us when things are right and when they’re wrong so we can make them right."

The relative smallness of the lacrosse world makes assigning team reps easy. Hind said someone usually volunteers for each team, someone who’s been connected with that team’s family. Coaches will serve for rival coaches, as do administrators. Still, odd situations pop up. Generally, schools with the most prominent programs have a staff member on the committee. Since the team is prominent, it’s common for the school of a committee member to advance to the championships weekend. Then, especially if the committee member is an administrator, he can face double duty as both team member and team rep, a trick that’s as hard as it sounds. Maryland Assistant Athletics Director Shawn Flynn found that to be true in the semifinals, where his Terps fell to Massachusetts.

"The biggest thing as a committee member is to stay impartial," Flynn said. "That’s tough because you’re not. For 10 minutes I’m an administrator for Maryland and the next 10 minutes I’m with the committee, so it was challenging.

"But I eliminated the middle person. I could tell (Maryland) exactly the way it was."

Fourth-year committee member and Princeton coach Bill Tierney hoped his team would still be playing Memorial Day weekend, but instead he served as rep for Syracuse University and coach John Desko, whose team the Tigers played in the first three championship games this millennium. Last year, Tierney’s squad didn’t make the tournament, so being "repper" instead of "reppee" wasn’t unexpected. This year, Princeton lost to Maryland in the quarterfinals. In Tierney’s first two years on the committee, his Tigers played, so his duties were absorbed by fellow members while he coached. This year, he had to swallow some disappointment to serve his role. Winner of five championships in his pre-committee days, Tierney said he thinks most coaches would rather have a coach than an administrator serve as a rep. Even rivals are family in this small but growing world.

"One of the things that people may not know about lacrosse is how tight the coaches really are," Tierney said. "The mutual respect in our coaching fraternity is great. Even though we battle fiercely on the field and go after each other with recruits, we understand each other.

"So I think it’s almost easier for another coach to be team rep because we know each other and know how coaches think."

Haverford College coach Mike Murphy, a first-year member of the Division III committee and a former Division I assistant with Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia, served as team rep for eventual Division III winner State University College at Cortland. He said his weekend duty was never uncomfortable because of a familiarity that in his case was more than a feeling — Haverford alum Eric Seideman, who played for Murphy, was on Cortland State’s coaching staff.

"Our coaching group as a whole is pretty tight-knit. Despite all the growth, lacrosse is still a niche sport, so we all get along," Murphy said. "There aren’t a lot of awkward situations (even as team rep) because I think we all know each other and like each other pretty well."

Division III Chair Peter Bothner, director of athletics at 2004 runner-up Nazareth College, said the players’ family feeling is similar to that of coaches, perhaps even closer, even if they are from different divisions.

"They’ve played with and against each other in summer tournaments," Bothner said. "They know each other better than a Division I basketball player might know a Division III basketball player. They root for each other.

"When we were in it two years ago, my team wanted to see Syracuse play. They’d gone to high school with them. They felt like they were a part of them in a way."

Just because the coaches and student-athletes have strong bonds doesn’t mean that the latter understands the role of the former when they’re team reps, which they view as having President Bush escort Osama Bin Laden at a U.N. dinner.

"The kids don’t get it," Tierney said. "I know a couple of them asked me when we were playing, what’s that coach doing here? I know other coaches’ kids say the same thing, but we as coaches get it."

Maybe that’s just head coaches.

Marr, team rep for eventual runner-up Massachusetts this year, said thoughts similar to those to which Tierney alluded struck him when he was a Terps assistant.

"I’m thinking, ‘These guys are just here because they’re coaches, they’re just hanging around,’ " he said. "It’s funny, with UMass, we’ve been very successful against them, so I’m sure they’re wondering what the heck the Albany coach is doing standing on their sidelines and in their huddles and all that stuff."

Marr, too, was put in an odd position because of lacrosse’s small world, serving as team rep for his old team’s opponent, where one of his former colleagues and best friends, Dave Slofkosky, still serves as an assistant.

"I had called him before the tournament and told him if there was any coach I wanted to see win, it was him," Marr said.

But UMass was family, too.

"When I got into coaching and went to my first coaches convention, the first coach I met that I hadn’t known before was (UMass coach) Greg Cannella, and we’ve been good friends since then, so this was fun for me," Marr said. "I know these guys because we play UMass every year. It was fun to be around them. It’s a great bunch of kids."

Murphy, who coached during the championships weekend in his Virginia days, said he still found himself going back to the handbook to find answers for Cortland State’s staff, which was led by interim coach Rich Barnes.

"I didn’t always know the answers as the new guy, but I said I’d get back to them," he said. "A lot of it I did know. We’re given a stack of paper three inches thick that you can read and find all the information.

"It’s obvious a lot of work has gone into this and there’s been a lot of tweaking of the model through the years."

It appears that teams coached by current or former committee members have more success in the tournament than they did before those coaches were on the committee. Experiencing the championships weekend atmosphere before competing in it helps because since moving to large civic stadiums, the postseason aura differs greatly from that of the regular season, especially for Divisions II and III.

Perennial Division III contender Salisbury University coach Jim Berkman spent four years on the committee. He said the experience helped him prepare the Sea Gulls, runner-up this year, for the championships weekend.

"Being around everything, you get to know the drill," Berkman said. "You know what’s going to transpire. I think you can have a better plan to try to get the most out of your kids. It just makes things a little easier."

Le Moyne College coach Dan Sheehan, whose Dolphins won this year’s Division II title, spent four years on that committee, the last one as chair. He said the experience helped him achieve a balanced approach with his team.

"You understand how long it’s going to take to get from one place to the other, how exactly a police escort works … how eight teams can practice on one field in the span of a couple of hours," he said.

"You get to understand that so that you can prepare your team. You want the team to have the goose bumps when they walk into the stadium. You don’t want to give them too much information so that it takes some of the luster off, but at the same time you don’t want them to be star-struck."

Marr said he learned patience will make for a better experience for the student-athletes.

"You take things in stride because not everything is going to go perfectly," he said. "There are going to be some hitches … if you don’t like the locker room or the police escort doesn’t show up on time or something like that, the biggest thing for your team is that you have to remain poised.

"Let the kids enjoy their experience. Don’t do anything to take away from them."

Because they’re key members of the village, too. The one it takes to grow a championship from obscurity to stardom.