Boston College Athletics
May 21, 2024 | Lacrosse, #ForBoston Files
BC is ready to dance at the Final Four with a balanced and deep roster.
Monday morning brought an array of good feelings to the Boston College community. Sunshine and increasing warmth enveloped campus in the venerated colors associated with the vibrant late-spring and early-summer May days, and Gasson Hall looked prouder than usual as it loomed and watched the statues and staircases around the Chestnut Hill campus. Bells echoed off stone-encased buildings as the familiar cap-and-gown commencement ceremonies began, to which the spoils of higher education's most revered tradition dangled tassels and hoods under the banners of respective schools for students finally departing the last stage of their pre-professional lives.
The conclusion of the school year closed campus for the summer, but BC wasn't quite ready to end a year-long party that started with its move-in days ahead of Labor Day weekend. Buildings were awash in tradition, but the surface structures hid the basic fact that the Eagles storrowed the end of the year with the lacrosse program's now-annual tradition of advancing to the national semifinals.Â
For BC, the story rang the same as it did over each of the last seven years, but like the graduation exercises themselves, this year's class of Eagles grabbed the spotlight with their own individual story.
"I definitely feel different," said head coach Acacia Walker-Weinstein. "The teams are different every year, the stories are different, the personalities are different. I think we just have to figure out [the team] from top to bottom and what we need to do better and differently from last year. Past success doesn't guarantee future success, and past failure doesn't guarantee future failure. So I think we just have to stay focused on the next week and figure out how to get better."
Last Thursday's win over Michigan felt typical after the upstart Wolverines battled and challenged BC with their own hungry brand and passionate game. They forced the Eagles to shoo away a would-be upset bid with a slight shiver down BC's collective spine in the second half, but the more-intimate gathering at Newton Campus still ended its night by celebrating its home side's advancement to the neutral site national semifinal over Memorial Day Weekend.
The script followed wins over unseeded teams over the past two years, but Michigan still found itself relegated to history books with the same path as Penn's two-goal loss or Denver's five-goal loss in 2022 by sending teams with less-heralded resumes into their offseason. It wasn't quite like the 2021 win over Fairfield, but the bracket-based footnotes only threaded the common noodle between years where the high-powered Eagles quested for a national championship by building a seven-year odyssey that included one title banner.
"There's a different feel," said goalie Shea Dolce. "We have such a special group this year, and I think we're really cherishing that we have each other. Knowing that we earned another day, it's something that we've focused on all playoffs. That feeling is amazing, and now we're just going to get even more fired up for what's coming."
BC is a different team, and every intonation from the team's clinching moments stamped those individualistic idiosyncrasies into the clinching moments. It might have had something to do with the conversation that enveloped the Eagles after the previous losses to Notre Dame and Virginia, but the conversation from the past four months turned BC into a vincible ex-icon instead of the megalith that advanced to the previous six national championship games.
The Eagles were an underdog despite finishing the season as Atlantic Coast Conference champions and the No. 2 overall seed, and their status reflected how college lacrosse realigned and changed since their first trip to the national championship game in 2017. The sheer volume of teams sponsoring Division I lacrosse and the depth of each team's overall talent placed power programs throughout the country, and leagues like the Big Ten finally joined the ACC among Power Five leagues with automatic bids to the NCAA bracket.
Michigan was barely three years old when BC advanced to its first Final Four, but the Eagles filled the void atop the ACC that Maryland's departure for the Big Ten created. Capitalizing on the recruitment of eastern talent by placing roots into the Long Island and general New York-New Jersey area, BC was able to create superstars by building systems around the game's brightest and most talented players.
The best-kept secret, though, was that the Eagles were always shifting and identifying ways to change their identity in life after those superstars, and Walker-Weinstein's staff found ways to keep the team atop its game in life after Sam Apuzzo and Charlotte North by building around the sum of its talent. Instead of relying on one goal scorer, the team built an offense that harnessed ultra-talented players into a system.
Four different players broke 70 points this year, but none are entering the national semifinal with the 90-plus goals or 100-plus points of either North or Apuzzo. Leading scorer Rachel Clark's 71 goals lead a team that's scored 348 different times this year, but the 174 goals allowed are a full-quarter stingier than numbers produced during North's final year atop the BC score sheets.
Both Emma LoPinto and McKenna Davis join Clark's 80-plus points, but neither have the pure finish of Kayla Martello's 62 goals. Three other scorers, meanwhile, have over 20 goals, but the numbers are largely from possession-based attacks and not from the free-position opportunities that produced 80 goals in 2022.
"We've got seven girls that can score," Walker-Weinstein said, "and I think that a really dynamic office is tough for people to stop. Over the years, having the top scorers in the country has toughened and hardened our defense, which is why we now have the best defender in the country. Having those high caliber scorers strengthened our offense, which made us more dynamic on offense, which made us more dynamic on defense. It's all connected, and all of it is tied together because [having that defense to challenge our offense] made us a more complete team."
No. 2 Boston College plays No. 3 Syracuse on Friday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. from the WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina. The game can be seen on ESPNU with top-seeded Northwestern's game against Florida scheduled for 3 p.m. Each game is also available via ESPN's online family of Internet and mobile device apps.
The conclusion of the school year closed campus for the summer, but BC wasn't quite ready to end a year-long party that started with its move-in days ahead of Labor Day weekend. Buildings were awash in tradition, but the surface structures hid the basic fact that the Eagles storrowed the end of the year with the lacrosse program's now-annual tradition of advancing to the national semifinals.Â
For BC, the story rang the same as it did over each of the last seven years, but like the graduation exercises themselves, this year's class of Eagles grabbed the spotlight with their own individual story.
"I definitely feel different," said head coach Acacia Walker-Weinstein. "The teams are different every year, the stories are different, the personalities are different. I think we just have to figure out [the team] from top to bottom and what we need to do better and differently from last year. Past success doesn't guarantee future success, and past failure doesn't guarantee future failure. So I think we just have to stay focused on the next week and figure out how to get better."
Last Thursday's win over Michigan felt typical after the upstart Wolverines battled and challenged BC with their own hungry brand and passionate game. They forced the Eagles to shoo away a would-be upset bid with a slight shiver down BC's collective spine in the second half, but the more-intimate gathering at Newton Campus still ended its night by celebrating its home side's advancement to the neutral site national semifinal over Memorial Day Weekend.
The script followed wins over unseeded teams over the past two years, but Michigan still found itself relegated to history books with the same path as Penn's two-goal loss or Denver's five-goal loss in 2022 by sending teams with less-heralded resumes into their offseason. It wasn't quite like the 2021 win over Fairfield, but the bracket-based footnotes only threaded the common noodle between years where the high-powered Eagles quested for a national championship by building a seven-year odyssey that included one title banner.
"There's a different feel," said goalie Shea Dolce. "We have such a special group this year, and I think we're really cherishing that we have each other. Knowing that we earned another day, it's something that we've focused on all playoffs. That feeling is amazing, and now we're just going to get even more fired up for what's coming."
BC is a different team, and every intonation from the team's clinching moments stamped those individualistic idiosyncrasies into the clinching moments. It might have had something to do with the conversation that enveloped the Eagles after the previous losses to Notre Dame and Virginia, but the conversation from the past four months turned BC into a vincible ex-icon instead of the megalith that advanced to the previous six national championship games.
The Eagles were an underdog despite finishing the season as Atlantic Coast Conference champions and the No. 2 overall seed, and their status reflected how college lacrosse realigned and changed since their first trip to the national championship game in 2017. The sheer volume of teams sponsoring Division I lacrosse and the depth of each team's overall talent placed power programs throughout the country, and leagues like the Big Ten finally joined the ACC among Power Five leagues with automatic bids to the NCAA bracket.
Michigan was barely three years old when BC advanced to its first Final Four, but the Eagles filled the void atop the ACC that Maryland's departure for the Big Ten created. Capitalizing on the recruitment of eastern talent by placing roots into the Long Island and general New York-New Jersey area, BC was able to create superstars by building systems around the game's brightest and most talented players.
The best-kept secret, though, was that the Eagles were always shifting and identifying ways to change their identity in life after those superstars, and Walker-Weinstein's staff found ways to keep the team atop its game in life after Sam Apuzzo and Charlotte North by building around the sum of its talent. Instead of relying on one goal scorer, the team built an offense that harnessed ultra-talented players into a system.
Four different players broke 70 points this year, but none are entering the national semifinal with the 90-plus goals or 100-plus points of either North or Apuzzo. Leading scorer Rachel Clark's 71 goals lead a team that's scored 348 different times this year, but the 174 goals allowed are a full-quarter stingier than numbers produced during North's final year atop the BC score sheets.
Both Emma LoPinto and McKenna Davis join Clark's 80-plus points, but neither have the pure finish of Kayla Martello's 62 goals. Three other scorers, meanwhile, have over 20 goals, but the numbers are largely from possession-based attacks and not from the free-position opportunities that produced 80 goals in 2022.
"We've got seven girls that can score," Walker-Weinstein said, "and I think that a really dynamic office is tough for people to stop. Over the years, having the top scorers in the country has toughened and hardened our defense, which is why we now have the best defender in the country. Having those high caliber scorers strengthened our offense, which made us more dynamic on offense, which made us more dynamic on defense. It's all connected, and all of it is tied together because [having that defense to challenge our offense] made us a more complete team."
No. 2 Boston College plays No. 3 Syracuse on Friday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. from the WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina. The game can be seen on ESPNU with top-seeded Northwestern's game against Florida scheduled for 3 p.m. Each game is also available via ESPN's online family of Internet and mobile device apps.
Players Mentioned
Wednesday, October 28
Tuesday, October 27
Tuesday, October 27
Tuesday, October 27
