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By Idaho Head Coach Mike Band

The month of February was inaugurated by the unthinkable.  Last Sunday night, club rats (and reigning champs of MCLA D1) Michigan Wolverines “upset” NCAA D1 princes of Bellarmine University 14-8 in an unofficial scrimmage.  Now if you’re just reading this, you may be reacting as I did at first: screaming non-sense obscenities, and tearing off your clothes to bathe your nude body in sausage grease before storming down the hall to tell your boss that you’ve never liked his moustache.  Certainly, the end is near.  Right?  Right!?

But worry not, ye faithful!  For the stalwart defenders of the lax aristocracy quickly swarmed the Inside Lacrosse message boards to put the so-called “victory” in perspective:

By Onlooker

“bellarmine played sloppy but michigan had its starters in the whole time and were running a ten man ride on a field that was missing 15 yards across. bellarmine didnt know how to adjust. plus bellarmine played its whole bench. michigan played to win, BU played to get ready for the season.”

[Erroneous!]

By Cliff T

“Onlooker,
Where do you get this stuff? The field is 53 1/3 yards wide like every football field. That’s 6 2/3 narrow, or 3 1/3 on each side. It makes a difference, but not that much of a difference.

“Bellarmine also runs a 10 man ride. They always do. They ran it last night.

“Michigan subbed as well. To say they didn’t is typical excuse making, but they were running guys who won’t even be playing in regular season games this year by the early third quarter. The only place they didn’t sub is at attack because they only have three healthy attack right now. (They finished the scrimmage with middies playing there, so I guess they did sub even there eventually.) Zorovich, the team MVP last year, didn’t even play.

“Stop whining.”

By fmr. NYer:

“great… just what the club lacrosse rats need… a victory over a REAL D1 team…

“God, when I was in College we smoked these Michigan jokers 13-1”

By YMCMLax:

“BU also played U of M Saturday night and beat them. No one says anything about that though. Also, U of M becoming a varsity program would be great for everyone, except for the fact that maybe one or two players would actually still be on the team.

“All I can say is every dog has his day, even club dogs.”

[Erroneous again!]

By steve m:

“[…]Michigan did NOT play BU Saturday what are you talking about? They had practice on the same field as each other in Oosterbann Fieldhouse Saturday night.”

As these wretched club sympathizers (clubber lovers) parry the daggers of NCAA righteousness, emerge two truths which the reader may hold to be self-evident: (1) A top-tier MCLA team soundly defeated bottom-tier D1 NCAA team in an unofficial scrimmage; and (2) it turns out that not everyone is entirely impressed with the MCLA.  Our friend fmr. Nyer sums up the latter position quite nicely

fmr. NYer

“The problem with this ‘victory’ is that the bottom rung MCLA teams will sing the song that club lacrosse is just as good as NCAA lacrosse. Hardly the case.

Props to Michigan for playing well and beating a D1 team. I’m happy they run their program as if it were a varsity NCAA team. ‘Cause that’s all it is, a wanna be varsity NCAA team (though they proudly carry the name – Varsity Club team).

There’s no doubt that those kids work as hard as any NCAA team out there… but like I said, this will justify the lackluster effort 80% of all the other club teams put in. It’s those 80% that give club lacrosse an awful name and frankly give the sport a bad name.

I now live in an area where college club lacrosse rules the land and it’s embarrassing…

Kids pay thousands of dollars to call themselves ‘D1 or D2’ college players…. they don’t even have to show up to practices and a lot of those I know don’t take it seriously. This game was meant to be honorable and sacred… Club lacrosse hurts the integrity of the game…

Way to go Michigan… Way to go…”

Now, before I go too much further, I’d like to make sure everyone realizes that fmr. NYer and his ilk are myopic, elitist pricks.  I was entirely prepared to write this entry on that very premise.  However, as it often does, reality came along to lend perspective.

Concurrent to the Michigan/Bellarmine dialogue, another melodrama was playing itself out on the other side of the country.  Unfortunately, this storyline may be far more relevant to the majority of MCLA programs.  On Monday, February 1, PNCLL President Dr. Jason Stockton received a letter from Washington State University informing him that WSU was withdrawing from the PNCLL. They cited “a lack of leadership, member interest and finances as their reasons for withdrawal.”  Hmm, those reasons sound pretty familiar.  But how could that happen to a program under the very same organizational umbrella as the team that just thumped mighty Bellarmine?  Easily.

Believe it or not, a decade ago, WSU was a powerhouse in the PNCLL.  However, WSU is located in a small town called Pullman, WA.  Once upon a time, there was little or no youth lacrosse to speak of for many hours in any direction from Pullman, thus other universities in the region had a similar pool from which to draw recruits.  The playing field, so to speak, was level.  But something peculiar happened as lacrosse set upon its version of Manifest Destiny.  The wagon trains somehow bypassed the closest metropolitan area, Spokane,WA.  As lacrosse blew up in Portland and Salt Lake, (and later Seattle and Boise), Spokane lagged behind.  To this day, Spokane has only a single high school team.  Meanwhile, universities located more closely to the growing hotbeds in the northwest (Oregon, U-Dub, SFU) predictably began to attract more and more of the kids interested in playing at the college level.

Concurrently, because WSU is located in a college town, coaching options remained (and do remain) slim.  Few people make Pullman their permanent residence, and even fewer who do know anything about lacrosse.  At best, a town like Pullman might hope to draw a coach for the two years it takes to obtain a Master’s.  Suffice it to say, WSU soon found itself outnumbered, outcoached, and outclassed.  The program folded for the first time prior to the 2005 season after its club president and player-coach graduated and departed.

Shortly thereafter, the program was revived by a young go-getter by the name of Nick Lyon.  Before allowing WSU to rejoin, the PNCLL forced the Cougars to play a solid schedule as a non-PNCLL team, which they did.  Nevertheless, readmission to the PNCLL for the 2008 season did not solve the team’s geography problem.  Since then, WSU has been the regional poster child for the untold number of MCLA teams that operate while teetering precariously upon the precipice of disaster.

Most MCLA programs are run by players.  University of Pittsburgh Vice Pres and MCLA blog-rockstar, Peter Tumbas (better known as 412 Lax), recently touched on this.  Explained, Tumbas:

“If you are a member of one of the top 10 or so MCLA programs you probably have no idea how the other 110 teams operate.

Long story short, for those other 110 teams, the coach isn’t the leader of the program, just the leader of the team on game days and practices.

People like myself and the three other seniors on our executive board (read: young men) run the program on a day to day basis.

We were responsible for picking out of conference games, selecting uniforms, selecting gloves and helmets. Rather, we had the opportunity to make the decisions for our program.”

While this sort of organizational structure may not be ideal, for most teams it’s a necessity.  Despite the sport’s ridiculous growth, lacrosse remains a niche market.  Accordingly, few MCLA schools pay the coach (or coaching staff) the big bucks that all this work is actually worth.  So the students have to do it.  Why would anyone take on this task for free?  Because it’s the price to play college ball.

The smart ones, such as Tumbas, come to enjoy it.  It becomes their labor of love, and they get what they put in.  The team becomes a visual and organizational reflection of its leaders.  But the men at the helm of an MCLA program need to be both intelligent and dedicated (read: obsessed).  Imagine what happens if the few students who are willing and able disappear.  The program will fall apart.  Think it’s unlikely?  Think again.  All it takes is for bad luck to brew up the perfect storm.  That’s exactly what happened in Pullman when Nick Lyon graduated, and that’s what could happen at any given time to any number of other programs operating in small markets.

The WSU debacle played out like clockwork.  In the above-linked Collegelax discussion, Nick and few other WSU players and commentators cited the failures of the post-Lyon administration.  They were particularly harsh on Lyon’s direct successor as club president, Dave Vencis.  Predictably, the man under the bus arrived to see if he could crawl out from underneath.  In the process, he proved my point rather nicely:

“I was the president that “dropped the ball on a 3-on-1 fast break” according to this moron Jason Stockton who has never even seen me play nor has ever met nor doesn’t no shit about this situation

[Author’s Note:  What a well-written and cordial fellow!]

“I transferred to WSU from Endicott College, a DIII lacrosse program and also DII school Catawba college, to study sports management at a big school out west, as I hail from boston.

[Author’s Note:  DANGER!! DANGER!! IRONY AT CRITICAL MASS!!]

“As i got acclimated to my new campus, I became involved with the student government, numerous on campus committees and was elected vice president of my fraternity […]

***

“[…]For those who are unaware, Vice president’s are supposed to take over when the president is incapable of his job, which I admit became a reality for me this semester as I took on a 25 credit course load to graduate this spring.

***

“I still stand my ground that if everyone is so sentimental and sad about this, why didn’t someone step up and take over when they knew I wasn’t able to commit.”

So to sum up Mr. Vencis’ argument:  He was well within his rights to bite off way (way way way way) more than he could ever hope to effectively chew and someone should have identified that.  Because he was the president, czar, or doorman of every organization that would return his phone call, it was clear that he would drop the ball.  Therefore, it was equally clear that someone should have identified this and staged a coup before Mr. Vencis let the whole thing fly apart at the seams.

Oh.

Amusing as that all may be from a distance, it’s actually not that funny up close.  Being that my team is a mere 8 miles to the west, it’s a more prescient concern (there goes a inexpensive game against a divisional opponent).  Proximity aside, however, it’s a constant worry to 90% of MCLA programs that someone just like Mr. Vencis could end up in your administrative positions at any time if things go wrong.  And if there’s no one around who knows what is going on to stop it, that will be that.

Nevertheless, it must be said that the administrators are never wholly to blame when something like this happens.  Why weren’t kids showing up to practice?  Where was the coach?  Why didn’t anyone else care?  I’m going to look at things like this over the course of my next few entries.  But for now, know this: these questions are issues of behavior.  Behavior is a reflection of environment.  In the case of an MCLA team, the organizational structure plays a major role in shaping that environment.

This all brings us full circle to the foregoing assertions of fmr. Nyer and his chums on the Inside Lacrosse message board.  If you’ve already forgotten it, their position is that, with a few exceptions, the MCLA is comprised of a bunch of jokers who don’t show up to practice and put in a lackluster effort.  According to fmr. Nyer, even the exceptions like Michigan are ruining the sport by association.  I hate to say it, but he does make a couple of good points.  Things are different away from the traditional lax proving grounds of NY and Baltimore. Even the Kyle Harrisons of the world have attendance problems on the west coast when there are “better” things to do. And, if you look past the MCLA’s flagship programs, even past the teams on the outer fringes of the Top 25, and focus on the teams always on the brink, you’ll quickly identify some frighteningly undedicated humans.  For these reasons, fmr. Nyer would have you believe that those of us who didn’t attend Boy’s Latin and play for an NCAA team disgrace the game by even daring to look upon it.  This is where I part ways with fmr. Nyer’s line of reasoning.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve played with, coached, and watched the jerks that do disgrace this game we love.  It’s tough, and reliance on these idiots to fill out MCLA rosters has held back many a team.  But on every one of those teams there’s a Nick Lyon.  And the number of Lyons on most MCLA teams is swelling with every season.  These are the guys that do their homework early or late because they’ll be damned before they miss practice.  These are the guys who stand in the freezing rain on crutches so they don’t miss out on anything.  These are the guys putting in hours at the gym, on the wall, or in front of a cage to get better.  These are the guys spending all of their time on the phone or on the computer to make sure they have a team to play for.  Every day.

So what I wanna know, fmr. Nyer, is just who in the hell are you to say that they don’t deserve to play?  You’re nobody.

And further, your affiant sayeth not.

Mike Band is the second year Head Coach at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Juggling law school and coaching responsibilities in Idaho is no easy task.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Blogs, Mike Band. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.