PAmedic wrote:on the other hand- nothing like being on the ground floor of establishing a new DI program.
(Presby's marketing strategy)
Glass 1/2 full v. Glass 1/2 empty
I'd much rather go D2 or D3 and actually be able to win games than go to a first-year D1 program that is most likely going to get handled game in and game out. With the nature of lacrosse, LU is going to find that lacrosse recruits are a lot more likely to go down to the lower levels because they will be able to go to some of the top tiered programs and be able to be on national championship contending teams year in, year out. Many lax kids have parents that are more than capable of being able to afford paying for their education, so the need to get their education paid for via athletic scholarship is not even close to as important as it is for sports like basketball, for example.
The way they are setting up the program is setting it up for immediate and long term failure. You cant expect a lacrosse team to be even competitive with the wrost of the worst in D1 if you don't give a coach a minimum of one full year to recruit. By giving them only the summer, you might as well expect to have a 0-1 win season, unless they schedule a bunch of sorry to middle of the pack D2s and D3s. It's going to be extremely hard to develop long term success if your very first year you don't even show signs of competitiveness. YOu don't even have to be winning games to show you can be competitive and win in the future, but if you are getting handled every game that's not really going to appeal to anyone. You have to be able to show recruits that, even though the team is losing, that there is a culture in place that breeds competitiveness and can eventually lead to a culture of expecting to win every game. That's not going to happen by giving a coach such a drasticalyl short time frame to recruit an entire lax team, not unless you get a coach who can sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in a white dress on a 90+ degree summer day.