It was a big weekend for Notre Dame lacrosse. Though the women’s team fell by one to Boston College, blowing a three-goal fourth quarter lead, BC is at least a top-ten team, and the men could take over the number one ranking later today after downing previously top-ranked Duke by five goals, the Kavanaugh brothers accounting for nearly half of Irish scoring.
Good teams are good for Notre Dame. This is a simple rule: We, Notre Dame people, want Notre Dame to be as good as possible at every single sport. But at the same time…do we like lacrosse?
Lacrosse has a stigma to it, and it doesn’t come from nowhere. Lax bros do exist, and while many are comical and lovable, that isn’t the case for all of them. The conventional wisdom around campus in 2014 was that if your bike got stolen off the racks at Main Circle, it was probably at the lacrosse house. Nine years is a long time, but lacrosse is lacrosse. It’s generally played by wealthier dudes from the East Coast, and that’s a subset that—at Notre Dame and elsewhere—overindexes in a certain direction of personality. There’s also an angle here where perception is identity. If Notre Dame is known as a lacrosse school, it doesn’t really matter what lacrosse players are like at Notre Dame. It matters what “lacrosse school” means to those who hear it. Notre Dame could have the most self-aware, self-deprecating lax bros in the world, and it wouldn’t matter if the two-word phrase “lacrosse school” made casual acquaintances think of us like we were Princeton.
Another inconvenient matter, one I don’t think lacrosse people recognize, is that being among the best in the country at lacrosse isn’t as impressive as it is in other sports. There are only 73 Division I men’s lacrosse teams. More schools sponsor D-I field hockey than sponsor men’s lacrosse.
Personally, I don’t really like watching lacrosse. It’s slow, what’s impressive is lost on me, and the scoring falls in that inconvenient window where single goals aren’t all that special but it isn’t a race like basketball is.
Still, at the moment, Notre Dame is better at lacrosse than it is at any other sport save fencing (which is really not impressive, given you have to be one of the three worst D-I fencing programs in the country to not fit into a hypothetical top 25). So while we might not want to be a lacrosse school overall, with all the implications that carries with it, we’ll gladly be good at lacrosse. Go get ‘em, bros. Just please leave the bikes on the rack.
Shrewsberry and the Portal
Forget being competitive. If Micah Shrewsberry is going to fill a roster this season, he’s going to need to use the transfer portal. This is said to be difficult in South Bend.
Transferring into Notre Dame is not impossible. Two non-athlete transfers lived across the hall from me my freshman year. Amir Carlisle was a transfer. Alohi Gilman was a transfer. There have been plenty of others through the years, but to be fair, many of the noteworthy have been grad transfers. Grad transferring is, comparably, easy. You only have to be admitted to a master’s program. To transfer as an undergraduate, the credits come into play, and it’s no secret that not every university has its athletes taking as difficult of classes as they take at Notre Dame (this is partially a numbers game—the bigger the enrollment, the more classes there are, so it’s easier to have easier classes available).
A question, then, is whether Micah Shrewsberry is going to be able to admit every transfer he wants. The answer matters, and not only for this year. To succeed in college basketball right now, you might have to be strong in the transfer portal.
Forget whether this is a good or a bad thing. It’s the way the sport works. Basketball players are transferring at a high rate, and while it might be hard to transfer into Notre Dame, it’s all too easy to transfer out. Notre Dame is going to lose players to the portal. Notre Dame is going to need to get other players back if it’s going to be a strong program.
An uneasy truth here is that a lot of this depends on what the admissions office is willing to do. There’s a reason Marcus Freeman was so publicly courting admissions officials last year around this time. Much of Micah Shrewsberry’s fate in South Bend, and the fate of the program under him, is going to revolve around the team in McKenna Hall. This isn’t the worst group to see holding the keys—the admissions staff’s approval rating seems high, though to be fair, everyone at Notre Dame was let in by them, so we probably don’t collectively have a representative view of their work. But, it’s not all up to Shrewsberry.
One last thought here? Keep an eye on transfers from other power schools, and especially from Big Ten and Big Ten-adjacent schools. The Big Ten is more of a stickler academically than even the Big 12, and generally, Division I programs adhere to stronger academic standards than Division II or Division III schools (or NAIA, NJCAA, etc.). As Merrimack’s own head coach has pointed out, this is part of why that D-I transition period which ended their season exists. There’s an adjustment period to life under Division I regulations.
I say all this to say: Guys like Kebba Njie, who’s transferring out of Penn State, might be a safer bet to withstand the process than someone from a Division II school. Joe Girard (Syracuse) and Marcus Domask (Southern Illinois) should have degrees, so they should be clear if we can land them. Austin Nunez (Arizona State) does not, but I wonder if guys like him and Njie also have an advantage as transferring after their freshman season, because there are fewer credits to reconcile.
Quick Hitters
Men’s basketball commit Markus Burton made the Indiana All-Stars roster. I haven’t seen any other major recruiting news on that front, nor have I seen anything on the transfer side except for links to the four listed above, with Girard and Nunez the two more strongly linked. We continue to cross our fingers for Logan Imes and Carey Booth.
On the women’s side, this is not an exhaustive news summary, but Lauren Betts is into the portal out in Palo Alto. The former number one recruit is a bit of a natural link to the Irish, given the overall similarities and associations between Stanford and Notre Dame, but I haven’t seen any formal links.
This Week
After Saturday’s victory, the men’s lacrosse team is now off for thirteen days. The women’s team has a busy week on the road, visiting Butler today, Pitt on Friday, and Robert Morris on Sunday. They’re currently fifth in the ACC, and Pitt’s winless in conference play, so Friday’s will be important for climbing the conference ladder while the others will be big for RPI.
The baseball team took two of three at Pitt, staying in fourth place in the ACC Atlantic Division. They’ll host Michigan State tomorrow then go to Clemson for a three-game set this weekend. Clemson’s sixth in the Atlantic.
The softball team took two of three at Louisville, climbing to sixth in the ACC. They visit Michigan State tomorrow, host a solid Indiana team on Wednesday, then host the three-game series against ranked Virginia Tech this weekend. Big opportunity to make a late push towards the bubble.
Not a lot of note that I saw from the track & field program up in Kalamazoo. They’re down at Louisville this weekend for an invite.
The women’s tennis team lost at Florida State and Miami. They’ll host Syracuse and Boston College on Friday and Sunday to close out the regular season.
The men’s tennis team won at Clemson but lost at Georgia Tech. They’ll finish their regular season on the road in Louisville on Thursday.
Lauren Beaudreau took third place in last week’s Chattanooga Classic while the women’s golf team finished fifth. They’ve got the ACC Championships this weekend in Greensboro. Those start Thursday. The men’s team returns to action this weekend in Arizona, playing at the Thunderbird Invitational. This will close out their regular season.
The rowing team will be in Boston this weekend, racing Harvard, Yale, and Northeastern.
