Legendary Midfielders One Step Away From Immortality

Boston College head coach Acacia Walker-Weinstein has built nearly every possible combination of championship-caliber rosters over the past decade. She was part of programs that won conference titles and national crowns while an assistant coach, and she hoisted trophies at the national and international level before finally building the Eagles into a constant presence atop the women's lacrosse elite. Her accomplishments extended from defunct lacrosse-specific conferences to the biggest power brands in college sports, and her gold medals were literal and figurative during the sport's national participation explosion.

Her accomplishments require little hyperbole, but sitting at the podium was individually incomparable to any other season or moment in her own personal history. Maybe it was because the joy from winning offered an unparalleled intoxication to a coach most visibly tied to success, or maybe it was because this year, for whatever reason, was supposed to break that streak.

Whatever reasons existed didn't matter. The virtue of a 10-7 win over Syracuse on Friday night qualified BC for the national championship game for the seventh consecutive season, and to the victor, for one night, went the spoils.

"These guys work really hard," Walker-Weinstein said after the win, "and they prepare really hard. They study. I can't say they work harder than anyone else because I don't know what anyone else does, but I do feel confident in the way these girls prepare. There's a lot of ownership behind what they do because they help out with the game plan and creating strategy…we played BC lacrosse. We played aggressively."

The NCAA Women's Lacrosse Championship is still young relative to some of the older and more entrenched college sports, but BC's success unquestionably lodged the Eagles into a pantheon occupied solely by the bluest blooded programs. The seventh straight trip to the national championship is one less than the eight consecutive appearances by both Maryland and Northwestern across two separate eras, but BC's advancements were in brackets featuring at least 10 more teams than either of those other programs. Neither team had to win a tournament that had more than the initial 16 teams, and neither contended with the autonomous power conference era surrounding the present form.

BC's first appearance in the 2017 Final Four featured approximately double the number of automatic bids as the brackets featuring Maryland and Northwestern, and the dozen-plus new teams over the last seven years rivals any explosive period of growth during the reigns of either the Terrapins or Wildcats. Various surveys pin the sport's overall growth at close to 40 percent over the past 20 years, and the advent of both Internet streaming and a professional lacrosse league opened doors previously unseen.

Those reasons make BC's overall success unprecedented, and they collectively forced Walker-Weinstein to continually reinvent her program as the sport shifted its style of play. The team that shut down the Orange on Friday night, for example, looked different from the team that defeated Syracuse in the 2021 national championship game, but the reimaged Eagles that advanced to this year's national title game might ultimately offer one of the most complete team games in lacrosse history.

"We have the best midfielders in the country," Walker-Weinstein said after the team's national quarterfinal win over Michigan. "We have traditional two-way middies, which are a dying breed and the thing that I'm most proud [of our team]. Those girls grind; they're on the field doing incredible things over the course of a season, and they've been doing it over the course of their career."

Much is written about the team's overall attack or the defensive unit that held Syracuse's lightning offense to a paltry output around goalie Shea Dolce, but BC's true dominance is a commitment to playing a style built around Swiss Army Knife-type players who occupy position space normally reserved for specialized recruits in the more modern style of lacrosse. Being able to limit substitutions between the "offensive middies" and "defensive middies" makes teams even more susceptible to fast-strike attacks, but the Eagles are dually capable of counterattacking situations normally tilted against a team because their midfield unit never recedes its minutes.

Syracuse, for example, likely should have had a better offensive night against BC because Kate Mashewske was the premier draw control specialist in the nation. Her 14 wins against the Eagles were six less than her Syracuse single-game record, but the 350-win draw control midfielder was neutralized because BC's midfielders created and won 21 different ground balls. The Eagles simultaneously avoided committing fouls to a plus-8 advantage, but the ground ball pickups allowed them to bend without breaking against an attack capable of holding possession.

"It sort of evened out over the course of the game," Walker-Weinstein said. "Going against Kate, we had to figure out how to gain possessions when we couldn't win draws, so any 50-50 battle inside the eight-meter, we had to consider those equal to, or of more importance, to a draw control. We had to find ways to gain possession within those eight-meters, and we did a nice job of it while swarming ground balls for inline runouts."

Working around those positions allowed players like Ryan Smith and Andrea Reynolds to maintain their effectiveness by doing things away from winning the actual controls. Belle Smith collected three ground balls while tallying an assist on two shots, and Shea Baker indiscriminately held 70-goal scorer Emma Tyrell to nothing more than one assist on five shots after she scored 12 goals against Stony Brook and Yale in the Orange's first two tournament games.

"We have players like [Cassidy Weeks] and Belle, who have been playing every minute of every game their whole life," Walker-Weinstein said, "but our two-way middies give us some depth and really make us a little bit more dynamic. I'm so proud of them because they don't get the credit they deserve, but when you look closely and follow our team, our midfielders are the stabilizers. I'm just so proud of them."

The number of miles logged on a midfielder's legs approach numbers otherwise unseen by players restricted by restraining lines, but the physicality associated with their role now positions BC for a run at its second-ever national championship. Major differences exist between this year's team and the previous run associated with the COVID-era team from 2021, but as top-ranked Northwestern looms in a Sunday rematch for the national crown, one more performance could mean the difference between changing how players and coaches approach team-building and the immortality associated with ending the year with a win.

"I think they're the glue of our team," Walker-Weinstein said. "They're brilliant lacrosse players and really good leaders, and they're constantly giving [advice] to other people. It's just really unbelievable what our midfielders have done for us."

No. 2 Boston College and top-ranked Northwestern conclude the 2024 women's lacrosse season with the NCAA Division I Women's Lacrosse National Championship on Sunday afternoon at 12 p.m. from WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolian. The game can be seen on ESPN with online streaming available through the network's platform of Internet and mobile device apps.

Legendary Midfielders One Step Away From Immortality

Players Mentioned

Shea Baker

Shea Dolce

Andrea Reynolds

Belle Smith

Ryan Smith

Cassidy Weeks

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