Common Sentences

Florida State? SMU? Really???

Last Sunday afternoon’s men’s lacrosse Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) championship game pitted Virginia against North Carolina. And early on, as I watched these two powerful teams, I thought: senior year, 1978, at North Carolina State, we beat them both. We went up to Charlottesville and scored 24 goals on Virginia, and we cruised to a 12-6 victory over North Carolina in our last home game. A few days after beating the Tar Heels, we learned the hard way that we weren’t going to the eight-team NCAA tournament.*

Virginia won Sunday’s game and the title, 16-6, and if you require drama to enjoy an athletic event, this one was not for you. There’s little drama in a lacrosse game in which one team runs eleven consecutive goals, unless it’s a team coming back from a deficit, in which case you are watching one of the most enlivening (or nerve racking) sights in sports.

That was not the case in Charlotte. Carolina scored on their first two shots. Then came the deluge.

A subpar 6-8 in 2025, the Cavaliers stood at 3-4 in mid-March. But they found their form, and it wasn’t a total surprise when they defeated Notre Dame, ranked #1 in the nation, to get to the final. One senses that their coach, Lars Tiffany, who has won two national championships and coached the Haudenosaunee national team, and who looks like he might have been a Boy Scout as a kid, helped his players manage an adverse start to the season.

By Sunday afternoon, they were a team playing joyous lacrosse. Decked out in their odd, sleeveless, tangerine and navy jerseys, they tore openings in the Carolina defense. Attackmen made shots that suggested Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Goalie Jake Marek, an Air Force Academy graduate studying nursing at UVa, shut down Tar Heel shooters and pitched arcing passes to breaking Cavalier defenders. Virginia midfielders and attackmen won ground ball battles and more than once found themselves going two-on-one against a lonely Carolina defender, setting up easy goals. Virginia appears a team to be reckoned with.

https://www.insidelacrosse.com/article/virginia-takes-acc-title-with-emphatic-domination-of-north-carolina/4e2bf2f1-79a9-4b6b-aded-eff139b47696

All five ACC teams—Virginia, Carolina, ND, Syracuse, and Duke—made it into the 16-team NCAA tournament. But the conference does not receive an automatic bid, since it’s only a five-team league.

Wait, you say—if you’re still reading—what about NC State?

What about NC State?

Administrators dropped men’s lacrosse in the early ‘80s. And although the current athletic director is the brother of Notre Dame’s renowned lacrosse coach and the son of a former UVa head coach and professes to love the sport—I think he’s being honest—he has said that State will not resurrect lacrosse.

The former Johns Hopkins goalie and lacrosse maven Quint Kessenich wrote recently of ACC lacrosse:

The league would benefit greatly from the addition of a sixth member school. Boston College, Pitt, Wake Forest, Cal, Florida State, Miami or Stanford would be gigantic adds for the league and sport. ACC newcomer SMU would be a great fit and there are folks in Dallas trying to make that happen.

A heart-breaking paragraph for Wolfpack lacrosse survivors. Not even mentioned!

Boston College dropped men’s lacrosse years ago. So out of solidarity, if I had to vote from Kessenich’s list, I’d vote for them. (They have a great women’s team.) Wake? Terrific fight song, but they probably wouldn’t play it during lacrosse games. Pitt? Meh. Cal, a great public institution. They’d bring what Michigan brings without the chilly weather conditions. Stanford? Only if you think that what lacrosse really needs are more teams dominated by prep school kids. Miami? I can’t put Jimmy Johnston and his lawless bunch out of my head. Florida State? Not unless they drop that racist Tomahawk Chop—that shouldn’t work anywhere, especially in lacrosse. Southern Methodist? Really? Wasn’t that the school that actually had to drop football—drop football!—due to corruption?

Geezers like me and my NC State teammates may have to face reality. We fifty or sixty boomers want lacrosse back at our alma mater. But is that what State needs? In 2025, administration froze faculty hiring and trimmed programs in the face of federal cuts and state uncertainty. The UNC system recently let go 700 administrators and approved a tuition hike. Meanwhile, big time college athletics spirals further out of control: the transfer portal, NIL, conference realignment that has varsity swimmers and gymnasts flying coast to coast. College sports suffers from institutional insanity.

So I’m ambivalent. Given 2026 realities, much as I’d love to see State back in the game, I have my doubts. And even if our old school brought it back, it would be today’s D1 lacrosse; synthetic, slick. The Pack wouldn’t ride three red vans, driven by coaches, to road games. They wouldn’t play home games on a sloped, converted intramural softball field. They wouldn’t sleep four to a room in an EconoLodge on the road. That was our experience, and on balance it was a modest, precious one.

For those of us Wolfpackers who experienced that joyful season of 1978, maybe the proper posture is one of sincere thankfulness for what we had. And to leave it at that, until good times return. Which I hope they will.

Notes:

(*) I contributed almost nothing to those wins. I got on the field for about 30 seconds against Virginia when a little sideline confusion caused our coaches to call for an attackman. I slipped out there, ran around for 30 seconds or so, and then got replaced by a more capable teammate. I was happy to have gotten time in a game like that.

Against Carolina, our coaches, in a most generous gesture, decided to start all of our seniors. Of them, I was the most questionable. It was a game we had to win to have a chance at a tournament bid against our bitter rivals. I’ve coached; I don’t think I’d have had the chutzpah to put Richie (Beaver) Schwartz on the field in a game like that. What if we’d ended up losing by a goal, and I’d—not uncharacteristically—blown an easy shot early? But they did it, and left me out there for quite a few minutes, and put me back in—when we had a safe lead—to end the game with the other seniors. I will always be grateful to our head coach, Charlie Patch, and our assistants, BJ O’Hara and the late Bob Haase, for their generosity that day.

Stephanie Saul, “As Trump Goes After Universities, Students Are On the Chopping Block,” www.nytimes.com. 6 March 2025.

“NC State hiring freeze: Faculty, staff positions on hold amid federal spending uncertainty.” https://www.wral.com/news/education/nc-state-hiring-freeze-february-2025/. 14 February 2025.

“Navigating Changes in Federal Funding,” https://research.ncsu.edu/administration/2025-federal-transition/. 16 December 2025.

“UNC System budget strategy combines hundreds of job cuts with tuition increases.” https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article314476335.html. 28 January 2026.

Doyle Smith, ed., The Official National Collegiaate Athletic Association Lacrosse Guide, 1979. National Collegiate Athletic Association