Has this been a fun season, or what? A number of our Top 10 teams have had to earn hard wins over their intersectional rivals. This includes last week’s enormous triple-OT win on the past of No. 1 St. Anthony’s over Darien (Conn.). And think of this: there’s going to be some great games this Saturday in the Gains for Brains showcase as well as a game in just two days featuring FCIAC rivals Darien and New Canaan (Conn.). 1. South Huntington St. Anthony’s (N.Y.) 8-0 The Friars got an overtime goal from Brooke Long on an amazing skip pass from Kat Rathjen to pull out a 5-4 win. Alexandra Zenk, in ..read more

I didn’t want to let too much time go by before acknowledging the retirement of another great sports team coach. Tara VanDerveer retired last week after 38 years at Stanford and three national championships. She also retired as the winningest Division I basketball coach, men’s or women’s. But VanDeveer had a career achievement during which she held an entire sport on her shoulders. In 1995 and 1996, she coached the U.S. women’s basketball team on a 10-month, 100,000-mile journey to showcase and sell the game of women’s basketball to the general public. That journey ended in the Georgia Dome in ..read more

Yesterday, there were about 40 regular-season women’s lacrosse teams on the docket. Today, the postseason begins for four Atlantic Coast Conference teams. These are the two play-in games for Virginia Tech, Louisville, Clemson, and Pittsburgh as they seek to play next week in the quarterfinals in Charlotte. As we were talking about a couple of days ago, the backing out of the regular season into January, as well as the backing out of the NCAA Tournament to give participating teams their own broadcast windows on ESPN two Thursdays before the Final Four, has led to a number of strange and odd sch ..read more

It’s been a week of some amazing contests, as well as amazing performances by top players. This week, we saw last year’s national scoring champion, Caroline Ling, put up 14 goals in a game twice for Springboro (Ohio). What this has done is start her climb to the top ranks of goal-scorers and combined goals and assists all time. Even though Springboro is just 5-3 on the season, every opponent on the schedule has to account for that No. 9 in a Panther jersey. What you see below are statistics from available published sources, including MaxPreps, Berks Game Day, the KHSAA, The St. Louis Post-Disp ..read more

Hey, quick question: how many league fixtures are left in the two most prominent conferences in women’s lacrosse — the ACC and Big Ten? Well, as of the end of today’s play, one. Yep, one. That’s a Sunday game between Michigan and Northwestern. which ends the Big Ten season. If that stuns you, it really is no surprise. Women’s lacrosse starts in early February for many teams, and the current Division I tournament is much different from what it was 30 years ago, when there were two play-in games in the semifinal round and two teams made the Final Four automatically. Today, the Division I women’s ..read more

This afternoon, one of the more bizarre incidents at an introductory press conference that I have seen in about 40 years took place in Indianpolis. The scene was a news conference for newly signed Indiana Fever player Caitlin Clark. During the conference, remarks were made by Indianapolis Star writer Gregg Doyal which were, frankly, demeaning. In response to a question about how Clark makes a heart with her hands as a signal to her family, the reporter said, “Start doing it to me and we’ll get along just fine.” The last time I saw anything like that was in 1989, when the newly crowned Miss Ame ..read more

This evening, Caitlin Clark is expected to be the first overall pick in the WNBA Draft, going to the Indiana Fever. She will undoubtedly carry forward the excellence of the league that has been going for nearly three decades. But the question is, can she be the kind of star player who can transcend the sport like she already has? Undoubtedly. However, what I think she will be judged on is not whether she will be able to sell out arenas, but can she do what Wayne Gretzky did when he accepted a trade from Edmonton to Los Angeles in 1988? That one move brought big-time professional ice hockey to ..read more

I didn’t want to go too much further without recognizing the news last week that Acacia Walker-Weinstein, the coach for the Boston College women’s lacrosse team, will be the next head coach of the U.S. women’s national team. As such, she will be tasked with building and extending the U.S. national team pool in the hopes of winning the 2026 WorldLacrosse Women’s World Cup in Japan. For Walker-Weinstein, the prospect is too good to pass up. The U.S. team, especially in road World Cups, is one of the surest things on the planet. The States have won nine World Cups, and have won eight out of eight ..read more

fulcrum (n.) —  The support on which a lever moves when it is used to lift something This site has used a number of metaphors to describe important showcase games which have helped define not only the seasons of the participants involved, but for the greater landscape of the sport. We’ve witnessed a number of these, from the inaugural interstate matchups between Emmaus (Pa.) and Voorhees Eastern (N.J.) in field hockey to several iterations of lacrosse between Ellicott City Mount Hebron (Md.) and Moorestown (N.J.) to larger events such as field hockey’s National High School Invitational an ..read more

Hi, everyone, and welcome to our 2024 reboot of Friday Statwatch, our look through the world of girls’ scholastic lacrosse through a statistical lens. We like to think we tie together the game from past to present, and across geographical lines. As per usual, there is a heavy bias here leaning towards the warm-weather states. Florida, Georgia, California, and the Carolinas started two months ago. When the rest of the nation starts up, our sources will get better at giving us a good statistical picture. If you want a worthy task, please convince your teams, your schools, leagues, or state gover ..read more