MONTANA

[Kyle Berggren]

You are correct... It's Division 1A football that means automatic A team.... However, the conference can allow them to play down, but they would not be able to recieve B division championship bids and so on. Gonzaga & SFU have elected to play up!

[woulax23]

As far as D3, a teammate of mine at Southridge last year, Andrew Richards, went back east to play for Stevens Tech. Other than those 3 i havent heard of any other names out of Oregon HS programs that have gotten scholarships for LAX

Andrews older brother Alex was at Steven's first and saw playing time his freshman year, i believe he is one of the big reasons that Stevens recruited Andrew so hard, but i could be wrong about that. There is also Brett Heim who played for Lake O and he is at Siena, a D-1 program. There are names out there and i think that programs are going to all steadily get better. Look at the numbers; not many from Oregon are gonna make it back East, from what i heard there were over 80 guys at the U of O tryouts and i think that the word will get out that EVERYONE is trying to play there, this will lead to guys who are more willing to go to a different Oregon school because they might not make the Ducks squad but still want to continue to play college ball. I see this as an opportunity for smaller Oregon schools to recruit, but i think it means a very hard effort of going out and seeing these high schoolers play several games and showing interest. This will be tougher for the expensive private schools and it may mean that if you guys want experienced high school players then you might need to help them find and set up scholarships so they can afford to go to your schools. No matter what, however, these kids have to go to school somewhere so it is up to us to go out and recruit hard. I know that i would rather have my team build itself up and become as sick as Montana instead of knocking them out because they are better than us. I think that our league has grown beyond the point of simply taking athletes and building them into lacrosse players, and we need to actively recruit in order to keep up with not only league, but national, talent growth. Let's face it we can bump up Montana, but we can't bump out Claremont or San Diego or St. John's. Anyways this was not meant to be such a long post.... it just kind of developed, the moral is I don't think Montana should be bumped if they don't want to.

[Hi-Line Lax]

One of my biggest concerns about moving up is about school support. Our university only found out who we were last year, as my predecessors had done nothing to reach out to them, but it's coming along (a little slow for my tastes, but oh well). I do think this is a major factor in this decision...and right now I think it's more likely for a team like PLU to move back up to the A division, but I'm sure it will happen for us eventually...I'm not really rushing it right now though because my first two years out here we only won two games and that really wasn't that fun. I'm proud of how far we've come in a few short seasons, but there is still a lot of work for us if we want to be able to compete in the A division. I like the debate though.

[lil lady lax fan]

Just a quick clarification about Claremont. There are actually only four undergrad colleges they can draw from. I think the Varsity Women's team would be a might bit peeved if they drew any from Scripps which is the all-womens college.

Also, if you total up the number of students in the four colleges it only comes to 4150--about the same size at St. John. Their roster is pretty diverse though, including a number of players from the East Coast.

[Laxfan23]

Just a quick note. It was mentioned earlier that Idaho was in a similar boat with Montana as far as high school lacrosse goes. Couldn't be further from the truth. Idaho has 18 high school programs, 4 looking to join next year. In fact, they will be able to name 2 US Lacrosse All-Americans this season.

BSU is enjoying most of this. Albertson has gotten very little of the talent (probably because they haven't been able to keep a coach longer than a year).

[Blynk22]

Andrews older brother Alex was at Steven's first and saw playing time his freshman year, i believe he is one of the big reasons that Stevens recruited Andrew so hard, but i could be wrong about that.

Ya the ONLY reason he ended up at Steven's was because he wanted to play with Alex, he even graduated HS 1 yr early so that he could play 2 yrs with him. When Richards actually tries he is unstoppable with his size and shot. I take it you played HS ball in Oregon woulax, where at? [/quote]

[Dr. Jason Stockton]

One thing I can tell you about PLU with certainty is that there is very little chance PLU will return to the A division. The University was always very "concerned" that PLU was competing with big named Pac-10 schools, when they always wanted us to play with our "natural rivals," which are small, private Northwest colleges.

When PLU defeated Simon Fraser and Oregon in 2002 and reached #19 in the A division USLIA poll, that team had only ONE player that had ever played before college. One.

As for Montana going to the A division, I don't think it would be in their best interest. They never had success in the A division before moving down with PLU and Whitman - and up until last year they had never even beat PLU. . .and rarely were competitive with Western Washington and Whitman. With the exception of a stud attackman Jon Greene, they were a rag-tag bunch that was never well coached and had very little University support.

Their success last year has changed things. I feel their success was mostly due to the great coaching and organization that came from Kevin Flynn becoming a full-time coach and providing stability to practices and games. The east coast kids that come to Missoula for the skiing are now seeing a solid program with good coaching, and now those kids want to play ball at Montana. I think a move to the A division might slow their growth and progress.

In all fairness to the Grizzlies, they are only a couple years removed from 12 players showing up to road games and non-matching uniforms. Let's not underappreciate the incredible turnaround they've made and criticize them for playing within the MDIA guidelines which allow them to play in the B division.

[woulax23]

actually blynk i just picked up a stick my a couple years ago as a Freshman in the sprign when we became a club, then in the fall i drove up to Tacoma by myself to try and get us into the league. I know Alex from High School because we went to the same small private school, and you are very accurate both about Andrew going early to go play with him and about Alex's ability to be unstoppable but he has been plagued with ankle problems and other injuries all his career. in fact i found out last weekend that he took a check to the kidneys that caused a lot of internal damage and he bled four pints of blood internally which has cut off his season.

[Blynk22]

thats too bad...must be a richards family curse, andrew had a rough year last yr too with his ankle, never really had a chance to play 100%.