It's increasingly clear that soccer is losing out to lacrosse. Dropping men's soccer helps Mount St Mary's comply with Title IX, but dropping lacrosse's bigger roster would've helped more.
I've heard rumblings that Oregon is considering starting up men's lacrosse. Don't know if that is true or not, though.
To be fair, look at the schools who have decided to dump soccer for lacrosse - Towson, Richmond and Mount St. Mary's. None are located east of the Appalachians. When you see it start to hit the midwest, then you can be concerned. Remember that Nebraska-Omaha started up soccer in 2011, and Pacific and Utah Valley will in 2014.
That is true. But instead of growing, soccer is treading water. My prediction has been that forcing so many non-professional prospects (and really non-D1) to choose soccer or DA Academy will make lax even more popular. Others feel the equipment costs will hold it back at the youth level. We'll see.
Marquette is starting up lacrosse but soccer seems relatively stable there. Out west, Denver and Air Force have D1 lacrosse teams out west - San Diego State has a women's team that I think became NCAA sanctioned this past year.
Lacrosse has been booming for a decade and more in the San Diego area. It has matured to the point where the better players, both male and female, are winning scholarships to east coast lacrosse powers. And they are eat-your-dead fanatical. My son played 8th-grade lacrosse in a 5th through 8th middle-school program. The orientation speech from the head coach went like "We will have three teams. If you want to play on the A team, you must not miss any practices. The following are not valid excuses for missing practices - baseball, football, basketball, soccer, wrestling, gymnastics..."
Ever been to a DA kick off / practice / team meeting? just displace LAX for Soccer in your speech.. and its the same. I do not beleive soccer is fading, However, I do think that the landscape is changing. Rather than making it more inclusive, USSoccer is making it more exclusive...especially at the mid- teen years. Not that I didnt recognize it and make sure my kids were on the "right side" of the gate... I see how the format can turn people off... There seems to be an attitude that .. "If we can jsut win a world cup.. socer will have arrived".. Not true in my opinion.. what we need, is a wider audience, that embraces the game at all levels......displacing the woefully boring Baseball, and becoming engrained in our Culture.. THEN, we will win a world cup... Insofar as college soccer... Probably NOT the best training venue for potential professionals.. but touches the American spectator where it counts.. via competition and school loyalty...
Oh.. I forgot.. the Mount is in the Highly recognized NEC.. a hotbed for potential soccer stars in the Mid-atlantic region.....or shall I say.. the threshold conference for D1 soccer....
At the NCAA level, lacrosse has advantages soccer doesn't. It doesn't go against football for attention and it's Final Four is held in the late spring, when weather is nice, college kids (for the most part) don't have classes and its held over a holiday weekend (Memorial Day), and it's not near Christmas with the impending financial and travel obligations that the holidays hold. As a result, the lax FF is profitable! They tend to play it at an NFL stadium and draw crowds MUCH bigger than the college soccer FF. Then there's the fact that regular season lax (and their whole tournament, not just the FF) is on TV a lot more because it fills a void in the spring on Saturday afternoons. Even if the games don't get much in the way of ratings, if you go have lunch at any sports bar in America in the spring, odds are on one of the TVs there'll be a lax game on in the background. I'd suggest soccer switch to the spring, but at a lot of schools the lax and soccer teams share facilities so they aren't available in the spring.
Good points..... But I still think we will see increased competition for Athletes in soccer between MLS academies, (looking to sign homegrowns, and do their own training), and NCAA D1 schools.... The question is.. Will D1 college become a better training ground for potential pros, or will the true potentials skip college and go straight to the academies like everyone else in the world...
The difference in this country is that each year the (fill in the blank and pick one) Princeton/Harvard/Yale/Duke/Northwestern/Stanford/etc. soccer team will produce 25 times the millionaires of all the MLS acadamies combined.