2008 Lax World MCLA Pre-Season Division 2 Poll (1/9/08)

[TheBearcatHimself]

Maybe that shouldn't happen. Maybe it would just stay the way it is, so things don't get so complicated. That choice is up to the people of each team in this league.

I don't think it is a valid argument to say "We shouldn't travel because it is complicated" or to say that teams in D2 will never be able to afford long travel. This same sort of thing had to have happened in the early part of the last century with football and basketball. I am sure schools in the 1920's did not easily see a cost-benefit ratio in traveling to play quality opponents just for the sake of the sport; but guess what? As the game and talent spread, so did the money and so did the ability to find means to make longer road trips. A mid major basketball team that won't travel to find quality opponents? Well welcome to oblivion.

Now obviously I have made perhaps an incongruous comparison, at least for the time being, but I firmly believe that as the sport and league continues to grow, more teams, and school recreational departments/athletic departments, will start to receive an influx of money from lacrosse to fund travel on a greater scale. Now this may be a utopian vision, but if we continue to work towards that goal then hopefully one day MCLA D2 will function similar to NCAA DII/III and many (if not all) teams will travel and be able to travel out of conference for games.

[woulax23]

I feel like it comes down to each individual team's commitment, and even more importantly having a group of ultra-committed leaders on the team. I can speak for our team in saying that no one on our team even thought about playing an OOC schedule after going 3-5 in our 2nd season of existence. It took myself being pro active in making contacts with teams, creating a budget to show our guys that it was possible, and pursuing it until I had the entire trip planned in order for it to happen. It was toughest when it came close to time for us to get the details in order and i had to go to the team and tell my guys that we needed to come up with a couple thousand more dollars in fundraising to make the trip happen. A lot of the team wanted to bail on the trip, but I told them about how we had given our word to these teams and that scrapping the trip was simply not an option.

I can also give my take on Willamette, which shows a similar trend in having strong team leadership. Until Will showed up and started to really put some time and effort into that program they were not really going in any direction, even conference wise, much less as far as OOC was concerned. However he seems to have willed, no pun intended , this team in the direction of becoming a legitimate, competitive program that wants to win games. I feel like there are a lot of teams in the country who might be on the door step of starting to make OOC trips, however they are lacking one or two guys who are willing to step up and say "listen guys, I am going to make this happen for us and all I need is for you to back me up on it."

I do feel like the fact that more and more DII teams are traveling farther distances will inevitably become a motivating factor and that we are just starting to see the snowball at the top of the hill, which hopefully will continue to get bigger over the next few years. The thing is that no one can expect this to happen over night. It might take a younger member of a team who is interested in OOC competition to step up and say, "Ok, if we can't make this happen next season then let's make it a two year team financial goal that in my senior season in 2010 we are making two, two game OOC trips" I think that it just seems so overwhelming for teams with small schools and even smaller budgets to think about a trip like this, but in reality it is a reachable goal. If anyone is interested in getting their teams OOC competition in the next couple of years, feel free to contact me and I would love to help anyone out that needs it. Whether that means help getting teams to come to you, or setting up multiple games so that you can come here/go to a different conference. I just think that being proactive and not taking no as a possibility is one of the only things that will get the DII up to speed.

[Gvlax]

We all need to encourage more DII OOC play and travel. Not just for the health and prosperity of the division, but for consistently improved poll results.

It has been very difficult to schedule games like this. The big problem is the fact that D2 teams just can't afford it. Whats worse is no one is willing to step up and say, "Hey, lets raise dues so we can go from Arkansas to California." This will happen when people stop looking at MCLA D2 as club ball and look at it as a legitimate competitive division. Maybe that shouldn't happen. Maybe it would just stay the way it is, so things don't get so complicated. That choice is up to the people of each team in this league.

The other problem is travel. Most teams in this league don't want to go too far. We (harding) are going 12 hours to play dayton and UCM, but thats rare for east coast teams. The west is better on this subject. I know last year SJU traveled to california to play some top OOC games. D2 teams have to get out of their heads that 8 hours is not that bad; thats average.

On a side note, DePaul is very low ranked, which is common for new teams, i.e. westminster ranked 13 last year in the preseason. Watch out for these guys.

Coming from a "small" d2 school i know where he is coming from when he talks about raising dues to travel. On my team we pay dues (600 returning players, 700 for new players) even collecting that can be difficult sometimes as i learned last year as treasurer. We are ranked this year so we knew we had to schedule the hardest OOC teams we could get. We were lucky to get Augustana, St. Thomas, Moorhead and Eau Claire one weekend in march and potentially harding and depaul also in march. But trust me convincing the guys to pay and extra 100 bucks each to rent a charter bus has been anything but pleasant. If our dues shot up to cover all OOC games with busses that we had to travel to, i would guess about 5-10 guys couldnt afford to play this year. We were the only team to show up to Conference last year in our own cars mind you. Slowly I can tell over time that the players coming into the program are losing the old mentality of "club" and looking at it being "Virtual Varsity". When the day comes that everyone sees lacrosse at GVSU as a virtual varsity team, then and maybe then only will our team be able to raise dues enough to cover a trip to California to play different OOC games.