Over the past couple of years, ladies’s lacrosse figures from three-time Tewaaraton Award-winner Taylor Cummings to Intercollegiate Ladies’s Lacrosse Coaches Affiliation government director Liz Robertshaw have referred to as out the NCAA for scheduling Division I video games on the identical time on the identical day, one thing that isn’t the norm on the lads’s facet.
Certainly, for the final a number of years, the NCAA males’s octofinal spherical featured 4 video games on Saturday and 4 video games on Sunday on ESPN networks, with quarterfinal video games getting related unique broadcast home windows the weekend after.
Not so for the ladies. Certainly, for a lot of the final three or 4 years, the quarterfinal video games within the NCAA Match have been held at midday or 1 p.m. on the identical day. That may change this yr, however with a little bit of a twist.
Based on a doc obtained by TopOfTheCircle.com, the quarterfinal spherical of the NCAA Division I ladies’s lacrosse match will go from the weekend earlier than the Last 4 to the Thursday earlier than the Last 4. 4 on-campus video games will probably be held at 12 midday, 2:30 p.m., 5 p.m. and seven:30 p.m. on Might 19.
In different phrases, whereas there’s a five-day break between the octofinal around the earlier Sunday, there will probably be eight days between the quarterfinal spherical and the Last 4 at Homewood Discipline. The identical will happen in 2023 resulting in the Last 4 on the College of North Carolina.
Now, I get making an attempt to offer the game the utmost publicity attainable. However there are lots of questions:
- Will the quarterfinal spherical be put behind the pay-per-view wall that’s ESPN Plus?
- Will the 4 video games be moved round on completely different ESPN properties, making it arduous to observe?
- Will native followers and scholastic groups go to varsity video games at midday and a couple of:30 on a Thursday afternoon?
- Finally, is that this Thursday quadrupleheader going to have an effect on the same old tempo and rhythm that coaches get used to throughout the NCAA Match?
The final deserves some scrutiny. Coaches which have gotten used to successful the on-campus mini-tournament for the primary two rounds of the match at the moment are going to must win three video games (aside from the highest three seeds) in a span of seven days, one thing that may be a little out of the abnormal within the U.S. faculty ranks.
Let’s see how this works.
