Sunday Selection Serves Reminders

This weekend brought women's lacrosse to the end of its regular season after the large bulk of mid-major conferences ended their championship tournaments. Four leagues remained undecided as of Sunday morning, but the clearer picture surrounding the bubble and teams earning at-large bids drew into focus well before the sun set on Saturday afternoon. Logical questions remained for teams potentially sweating their postseason destinations, but none of those impacted a Boston College team still sitting idle in the wake of its trip to the Atlantic Coast Conference's final game.

The ACC was unlike the rest of the nation in that regard. Its men's tournament led American Legion Memorial Stadium into Sunday's championship round after the women played their tournament over the previous weekend, so the No. 2 Eagles possessed extra rest after last week's conference championship loss to top-seeded North Carolina.

Selection Sunday's impending arrival naturally altered that tenor towards a sense of urgency for a BC program devoid of conference hardware for the first time in three years. Little mattered about how the razor-thin margin of error placed the Eagles on the wrong side of a championship double. All that mattered was the transition into the highest stress environment and the rite of passage that drew the Eagles to Chestnut Hill in the first place.

"It's kind of a day-by-day process," admitted Shea Dolce in an interview with The Podcast for Boston. "We're really only focused at the task at hand. When the last regular season games came, we were focused on that. When the ACC tournament came, we were focused on the games at hand. Obviously, now we're in the NCAA Tournament stretch, so it's exciting. It's what we've been waiting for all year."

Women's lacrosse first crowned a national champion when the United States Women's Lacrosse Association sponsored a tournament in 1978. Absorption by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women followed in 1981, after which the NCAA founded its own championship game in 1982 when it invited UMass to compete against Trenton State in a game hosted by the Division III-based institution. An expansion to 12 teams in 1983 included programs from any level ahead of a split in 1985, which resulted in Division I's contraction to four teams.

The nascent sport eventually switched to six teams before settling into a decade-long period of stability, but its lack of truly powerful programs made it difficult to host a traditional tournament with automatic bids awarded to leagues and conferences until the ACC and Colonial Athletic Association were granted championship entry into the 1998 tournament. An expansion to 12 teams allowed the Ivy League to join them, and America East followed with an auto-bid to the 2000 tournament.

The current format is therefore unrecognizable to those early years. A 29-team field featuring 15 conference champions - there are three more automatic bids than the entire field of the tournaments at the turn of the century - is a sign of a sport considerably larger and more national than those halcyon days, and approaching signs aren't stopping young girls from watching games turn bigger and more national.

Boston College's seven consecutive trips to the national championship is more than exposing the Eagles to that growth. The program featured five trips to the NCAA Tournament but never advanced to a Final Four before the 2017 team won its way to Gillette Stadium as an unseeded at-large team. Elevation to ACC regular season championships followed, and the program remained intact to win its first national championship amidst a global pandemic threatening localized infrastructures with necessary restrictions around training, travel and game operations.

Two straight postseason conference championships gave Boston College its first-ever ACC titles at a time when college realignment's original program - the Eagles moved from the Big East to the ACC as the last piece of expansion's inaugural movement campaign during the early 2000s - found itself in a new shuffle of lacrosse programs. Charlotte North - arguably the game's greatest player - joined Sam Apuzzo - arguably the game's greatest player - as Tewaaraton Award winners before claiming a second consecutive crown in 2022, and a bevy of All-Americans and all-conference players merged the program's homegrown roots into the new era of recruiting and developing winners through the transfer portal.

"One of the first things that I think about is how we have new people on our team every year," said Dolce. "The ability for us to mesh as one unit right away is really, really impressive because having grad students enter a program or having transfers enter a program, sometimes it doesn't mesh as well as it used to. That's what's special about our team; we came together as one as soon as someone stepped on campus. They're immediately our sister, and the emotional connections that we have, the chemistry that we share off the field, is something that automatically translates to on-field success."

Sunday's selection should stamp that point home for the BC team projected to enter the tournament as the No. 2 team in the nation. The Eagles won't jump North Carolina despite finishing with a better Ratings Performance Index after the Tar Heels went undefeated with two head-to-head wins over BC, but BC will still host a three-team bracket at its home stadium before possibly hosting a quarterfinal matchup the following weekend.

Initial projections sent repeat opponents to Newton in the form of a first round matchup between Loyola and Brown, but the Greyhounds' loss to Navy in the Patriot League championship throws that prediction into muddier waters because the Midshipwomen could potentially vault over their conference rival. If that's the case, Navy is a potential opponent for Brown, an Ivy League school projecting into the third spot in Newton despite losing a nailbiter to Princeton in their conference semifinal matchup.

The remaining piece of the bracket aligns BC on a track that includes seventh-seeded Maryland after the Terrapins battled Northwestern in the Big Ten championship. Fairfield's 12-7 win in the MAAC won't change that four-team projection after Penn was eliminated by Yale in the Ivy League semifinals and Liberty won the Atlantic Sun Conference.

Either way, the likelihood of seven ACC teams projects BC onto potential collision course tracks with the rest of its league. Fifth-ranked Virginia would run into UNC in the national semfiinal, and Stanford projects to a spot against Denver in No. 4 Florida's bracket. Unseeded Duke and Syracuse would draw matchups in brackets that include Michigan, Northwestern, Stony Brook and sixth-ranked Princeton, which plays Yale for the Ivy League's championship on Sunday.

"In September, we had the goal of playing at the end of May," Dolce said. "The goals are still there, and now it's [here]. It's more of a moment that we're back in this again, and we're back in a moment that we wanted to [get back to]. As the season went on, we weren't about looking too far ahead. It was king of taking the task at hand, week-by-week, and proving why we should be playing at the end of May."

The 2025 NCAA Division I Women's Lacrosse Championship will set its field on Sunday night at 9 p.m. Television coverage is set for ESPNU.

Players Mentioned

Shea Dolce

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