In BSD's world, he would have been an accountant.

The year is 1892. The place is Birmingham, Alabama. The University of Alabama ponders whether to sanction it’s first ever football game, against a team comprised of a hodge-podge of local Birmingham high school players, and a second against a group of east-coast transplants who were much more familiar with rugby. Traditional powers such as Yale, Princeton, Cornell, and Lafayette have a iron-clad grip on the elite football talent – nearly all of it resides in the Northeast. Do they even bother? Football is a sport of the Northeast elite, not the still agrarian south. Well, if you’re Mike at Black Shoe Diaries, you just mix yourself a mint julep and say “fuck it” – that’s too steep a hill to climb.

In the doldrums of the off-season, the Nittany Bloggers have done some cursory research and oddly leveled their sites on…the Michigan Club Lacrosse team (!?) and their quest for Varsity status, coming, ultimately to the conclusion of “it ain’t gonna happen”. Mike tosses out a few points leading with:

The big question is whether the state of Michigan can support the varsity team that so many people up north desire.  The answer is pretty simple: without some type of major east coast pipeline, they don’t stand a chance.

Well, Mike, a cursory glance at Michigan’s existing roster shows that of the forty-five rostered players, Michigan already has twenty players from the east coast. If you’re going to claim that Michigan won’t be successful because of an inability to get east-coast players, wouldn’t it make sense to see if they, you know, have already gotten east coast players? What’s with this obsession with east coasters, anyway?

Lacrosse is an interesting sport in that just about all of the power is centered in Maryland, New Jersey and New York…there is a reason the national powers in college lacrosse are out east: that’s where the high school talent is.

Fact: Obviously, this is true. Lacrosse college powers like Syracuse, Duke, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Johns Hopkins, and the Ivies all reside out east, and it’s true that lacrosse is traditionally only a popular high school in the Northeast. The issue, of course, is that Mike is confusing “talent” with “kids who play lacrosse” – and there is a notable difference. Good high school lacrosse players don’t come from the eastern seaboard because there’s a genetic component getting passed down in their WASPy bloodlines that has somehow stayed out of the Midwest gene-pool. The best lacrosse players are there because the preponderance of high-school and youth teams are there.

Now this is where the distinction between “talent” and “kids who play lacrosse” becomes meaningful: that is changing. Eight years ago, there were fewer than thirty high school lacrosse teams in the state of Michigan, and virtually no meaningful youth program. Today, there are more than a hundred. In that time, the MSHAA has officially recognized the sport and holds a state tournament for it – the upper-classmen on this year’s Michigan team would have been among the first Michigan high school students to actually play in MSHAA-sanctioned lacrosse. Participation nation-wide has more than doubled in the past 7 years. (Virtually all this information is culled from this USA Lacrosse survey.) Mike dismisses the Brother Rice lacrosse program, but they’re sending multiple players to major college lacrosse programs next year – on scholarship. Lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in the US – this isn’t to say that it will become football or baseball, but does show that a sea-change is happening in the sport, and the same old assumptions about who is good and who is not don’t really apply anymore.

I, myself, played on Michigan’s club team between eight and twelve years ago, and the number of east-coast bred players on the team has actually diminished since then – because the state of Michigan is actually producing competitive players.

In a static, unchanging world, Mike is right – Michigan’s lacrosse program would be DOA in Division 1 athletics. But, in a static, unchanging world, the Alabama Crimson Tide would be cannon-fodder for Lafayette’s all-powerful football program today, instead of the winners of twelve national championships. The media would be drooling over “Ivy League speed”, and the SEC would be a mere footnote. Things change – and the growth of Michigan’s lacrosse program is evidence of that.