University of North Carolina Athletics
UNC & The Growth Of Women's Lacrosse
April 13, 2016 | Women's Lacrosse
NOTE: This article originally appeared in the April 12 issue of CAROLINA, the official magazine of the Rams Club and UNC Athletics.
by Alex Zietlow
In 1996, the Carolina women's lacrosse program was founded as a varsity sport. And even at that point in time, the Tar Heels found themselves ahead of most of its competition.
According to NCAA reports and athletic participation surveys, women's lacrosse is the fastest-growing college sport in the country. From 2000 to 2014, participation has increased by 109 percent, outpacing all other sports. A total of 42 four-year colleges started varsity programs in 2015, and 29 have been announced for 2016. In fact, with Arizona State's announcement that they will launch their own women's lacrosse program for 2018, the Sun Devils join California, Colorado, Oregon, Stanford and USC to create a new Pac-12 women's conference, the third of the Power Five conferences to sponsor women's lacrosse (adding to the ACC and Big Ten).
Tar Heel head coach Jenny Levy is on the U.S. Lacrosse Board, an organization involved with the general grassroots, safety, and youth play of the sport. The 20-year head coach thinks that the growing sport is still being held back because of its small youth and high school participation relative to other sports. Subsequently, she believes athletes are still not taking full advantage of the athletic scholarships women's lacrosse offers.
“I think the college level is growing faster than the feeder programs,” Levy said. “There is a lot of scholarship opportunity at the collegiate level for women's lacrosse players. I think the feeder programs aren't developed enough yet.”
In 2014, at the youth level, female players were outnumbered by male players nearly two to one (279,779 to 145,065), but retained many more players in the transition to high school. At the high school level, girls' lacrosse had the largest growth rate from 2009 to 2014 at 31.2 percent; the next-highest growth rate in a girls sport at that time was ice hockey at 9.7 percent.
A specific concern of Coach Levy's is the high school feeder programs in North Carolina. After all, targeting in-state talent is a more effective means of recruiting, as the prospective player would be receiving the athletic scholarship at in-state tuition.
“We play twelve kids at a time and we have 12 scholarships,” Levy said. “As schools are adding fully-funded programs, you're getting less kids as the talent is going to more places. [For example,] Maryland is sitting in a hot bed where all of their kids are in-state, so Maryland exponentially has more quality players than most people because of their in-state feeder system.”
Sport awareness is one thing; not being able to take advantage of playing a sport you know about is another. In North Carolina public high schools, women's lacrosse is in the same season as women's soccer. Consequently, lacrosse often times does not get the best athletes. “I think that if more people would realize that there's more doors to be opened for their kids at the collegiate level if they played lacrosse, it would help,” Levy said.
And you can see the effect soccer and lacrosse being in the same season can have when you look at the Tar Heels' lineup this year; only three of the 34 players on the roster are from North Carolina. Most of the players come from the Northeastern part of the United States (New Jersey, New Hampshire, Maryland, etc.), where there is higher lacrosse awareness and no seasonal conflict with high school soccer.
According to Levy, more problems regarding women's lacrosse participation are found at the club soccer level. She says girls who have played competitive soccer their entire lives up until they are 11 or 12 either (1) burn out or (2) do not make the top teams; and by age 12, the girls either do not want to put in the effort or do not feel confident enough to pick up a new sport.
Maggie Auslander is a junior starting defender for the Tar Heels out of Cary's Green Hope High School. Her initial participation with lacrosse stemmed from being generally athletic and loving sports. Auslander was born in Pennsylvania and moved to Europe when she was eight. Among her athletic experiences were trials with an array of sports like field hockey, net ball, cricket, basketball, lacrosse, and others. As a fast and competitive young athlete, she was exposed early to the sport of lacrosse, as her dad played both in high school and college at the club level.
“My parents just put me in sports because they were like, 'You just have too much energy; go do something,'” Auslander said. “That's why I was in everything I could possibly be in.”
At her high school, she played basketball in the winter and lacrosse in the spring; and even then, her coaches would persuade her to talk to athletes on her basketball team to play for the school's lacrosse team, despite their lack of experience with the sport.
In fact, at Panther Creek High School (a school just three miles away from Green Hope), posters and signs would be hung throughout the building a few weeks before spring tryouts began, encouraging girls to try out for the lacrosse team, even if they did not have any prior experience or equipment.
Levy thinks that college lacrosse carries the burden of promoting women's lacrosse as a sport. “I think it's on college lacrosse to kind of do a 'Coach for America' program where you provide trained instruction to new and developing areas that need more help,” Levy said. “[If not, kids are] missing the opportunity to play middle school and high school sports.”
Despite its untapped potential for growth in North Carolina, the state is still making progress at the collegiate level. Earlier this month, East Carolina University announced that they will add women's lacrosse as an intercollegiate sport set to start in 2018. ECU becomes the eighth university in the state of North Carolina with a varsity women's lacrosse program. The next phase in the program's implementation includes searching for a head coach and recruiting student-athletes.
East Carolina currently fields a club team of 40 members, a majority of whom will graduate by the time the team's first season begins. Sarah Oechslin, a freshman on the club team, says that a few of her teammates are preparing for trying out for the team in two years.
“So far, I know [two] of my teammates are going for it,” Oechslin said. “I'm excited but nervous to try out, because it's a completely different level of competition.”
So while there are plenty of improvements to be made at the grassroots level to continue the growth of women's lacrosse, the sport is still growing at an unmatched rate at the youth, high school, and collegiate levels. The only caveat to the increase in collegiate opportunities is that growth promotes parity, making national recruiting and success on the field more difficult. And so just as the sport grows, teams will have to get more creative in recruitment and invest more in skill development to stay ahead of the competition.
