The Trophy will be awarded on Thursday, at the Smithsonian, National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. The Tewaaraton Trophy is awarded annually to the most outstanding male and female college lacrosse players in the country.
Since 2001, the year of the trophy’s inception, just two players from a non-blue blood school have ever won the award. In its 13 years of existence, just seven schools have been represented: UVA (3), Syracuse (3, Mikey Powell won twice), Cornell (2), Duke (2), Hofstra (1), Colgate (1), and Johns Hopkins (1). The Tewaaraton has gone to an attackman nine times and a midfielder four times; no defensive player has ever won the trophy, and don’t expect that to change this year.
There are five finalists for the men’s award: Joe Fletcher (Loyola, D), Tom Schreiber (Princeton, M), Lyle Thompson (Albany, A), Miles Thompson (Albany, A) and Jordan Wolf (Duke, A). Ultimately, the decision will come down to either Lyle Thompson or Jordan Wolf, but at the end of the day, Lyle Thompson will walk away with the award. Besides the fact that Lyle is the all-time points leader in Division I lacrosse, Lyle was part of an attack line which has attracted a new audience to the game. Younger fans seem to be captivated by the Thompson trio’s flashy ability to score while older generations have come to know the trio through an explosion of media attention highlighted by a front page article in the New York Times. Jordan Wolf is an incredible player; he might have the quickest feet of any attackman, and his dodging ability, especially from behind the net, is unrivaled. Nevertheless, Wolf just doesn’t have the same star power which the Thompsons have emerged with.
Most Outstanding Player of the Tournament
After the 11-9 Duke win, the media named senior Jordan Wolf the Most Outstanding Player of the Tournament. The post-Championship Game honor is really just the Championship Game MVP, not the tourney MVP, I don’t think that is a very tough opinion to defend.
Wolf had four assists on the day, but only had two goals, one of which was basically an empty netter with 23 seconds remaining. He pulled the trigger 10 times Monday, but only hit the cage on five attempts. Just to give you the whole picture, Wolf also finished with zero groundballs and two turnovers.
In 2010 I happened to be on the media level for the Duke-Notre Dame National Championship. Duke won that matchup as well, but nevertheless, a unanimous decision by the media gave the most outstanding player award to Irish goalie Scott Rodgers. As far as I can tell, 2010 was the only year in which a player on the winning team did not receive the award. I understand that the 2010 championship was a much tighter game, and even went to overtime, but with his team down 5-1 coming out of halftime, Sergio Perkovic put the Irish on his shoulders. I thought that Perkovic made, by far, a larger impact on his team in that game than Jordan Wolf; Wolf was just the easier choice.
NFL Stadiums
For the last few years, one particular conversation topic has consistently emerged following Championship Weekend: do NFL stadiums continue to work for Championship Weekend? I think the NCAA believes simply having the championship in an NFL stadium is a draw of its own. It might have been in the beginning but that’s not still the case. I also keep hearing that the attendance was low this year because certain schools were not involved. Well we heard that after Foxborough in 2012, but the very next year Syracuse played in the Championship and the weekend still attracted the fewest fans since 2002. After six straight years of declining attendance, Baltimore was supposed to be the perfect venue to rebound, but that just didn’t happen.
The reality is that $79 for the cheapest weekend ticket and $55 for a parking pass is not affordable anymore, especially for out-of-towners. In past years, the parking lots at this weekend sported license plates from states across the Atlantic coast. I believe the Baltimore crowds are still showing up, but it is the caravan of families and lacrosse organizations, which are not local, that just aren’t traveling like they used to. To take three kids on a trip to Championship Weekend, expect to shell out just under $400 dollars before you even make it into the stadium, not to mention the costs of lodging, food, gas and other miscellaneous expenses that come with traveling with kids. I think these are the type of numbers we will continue to see until the lacrosse fan base in any given city gets big enough to fill an NFL stadium in its own right. If it can’t happen in Baltimore, it won’t happen anywhere else.
