The past couple of weeks in the college lacrosse world have been dominated by conference tournament and NCAA tournaments in all three divisions of college lacrosse. It’s a great time in the season to watch the best teams and the best players try to fight it out for bragging rights on Memorial Day weekend in Philadelphia.
But there’s been one story that hasn’t been discussed a lot this week. On Tuesday, and later confirmed by a press release Wednesday morning, Hampton University, a historically black university in southeast Virginia, announced that they will be fielding a Division 1 team for the upcoming 2016 season, playing as an independent and playing a modified schedule while they try and find a permanent conference for the future, according to a Hampton Athletics press release. They will be the 70th team in Division 1, and the first historically black institution since Morgan State dropped their program in 1981, to have a Division 1 lacrosse team.
In a time when the best players, Lyle Thompson and Myles Jones, are minorities, this announcement is huge for the sport of lacrosse. A sport that was once associated with wealthy, white kids who went to private schools or even lived in wealthy areas with public school teams has started to fade away a little bit. Haverford School in PA, the top high school team in the nation, has an African-American senior by the name of Phil Poquie. Poquie played football as a running back and linebacker for the Fords and will go to Virginia as a midfielder for lacrosse. He’s also a survivor of the civil war in Liberia, and arrived to Staten Island, NY when he was two years old along with his older brother Dad, a current player for the Penn State football team. Talent is coming from all different places and different backgrounds, and Hampton will more than likely show off some of that unknown talent.
There was a letter that was sent out to Hampton’s student body late 2014 about adding soccer and lacrosse. AD Eugene Marshall Jr. previously worked at a lacrosse school at Army West Point from 2005-2010.
The coach for the Pirates will be Lloyd Carter, who co-founded the club lacrosse team in 2010, according to the university press release. Carter played at Morgan State until the discontinuation of the program in 1981. He coached at Baltimore’s Northwestern High School in 1999 for over a decade and won Baltimore City’s Lacrosse Coach of the Year award four times and helped guide Northwestern to two regional, two city, and six divisional championships. Carter is the perfect coach for Hampton, coaching in a large city and being successful at it as well. He knows the game and will be a great start for the Pirates to enter.
Hampton is about 85 miles northwest of Richmond, its nearest Division 1 opponent, and would also have VMI and the University of Virginia as in-state opponents. It would make sense that the Pirates would join the SoCon later on when the program is stabilized, which Richmond is in after its first two years as a program, which have been very successful. Opponents for their first two seasons could be UMass-Lowell and NJIT, the two new programs from this season, maybe Cleveland State, who will join Division 1 in 2016, VMI, Robert Morris, Manhattan, UMBC, Mercer, and other teams in the SoCon.
I hope that this program will bring immense success to the sport of lacrosse in the very near future. I think this announcement brings a lot of potential about the growth of the sport everywhere in the country, from the inner cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and elsewhere, to other parts of the country that are not recruited heavily.
I also recommend you check out LaxAllStars Connor Wilson’s breakdown of lacrosse at historically back colleges, which includes a link to Lacrosse Day at Hampton University from 2012:
