Note: I will be appearing on Sports Talk 1050 WTKA’s morning show tomorrow to talk lacrosse. Tune in at wtka.com to hear the interview (or 1050 AM on your radio dial in Southeast Michigan). I will also be liveblogging tomorrow’s press conference. Look for a post to go up around 10:30.
Though nothing is officially official until the media walks into the Junge Family Champions Center tomorrow and and David Brandon makes an announcement, it’s no well-kept secret that the University of Michigan will add men’s and women’s varsity lacrosse in a noon press conference tomorrow. The Michigan Daily even has him on the record as saying the Athletic Department will add two sports.
AnnArbor.com‘s Mike Rothstein sat down with Brandon last week, and the AD indicated lacrosse was in the cards for the near future:
“Those are two very large head-count sports with significant scholarship opportunities available, so from both from a financial perspective as well as an operational activation perspective, if we get to the point to where we feel comfortable committing to those two sports, it’ll be a couple-of-years journey to get us to the point where we have them established and fully funded in terms of talent and coaches and players and obviously there will be facility needs. That’s a big project, a huge project.”
That follows from what Coach John Paul told John Niyo of the Detroit News this spring:
“And it was our plan as soon as a new AD came in to have a proposal ready, which we did,” said Paul, who sat down with Brandon less than two weeks after he’d settled into his new office last March. “Dave came into the meeting saying right away, ‘I really want to explore this, and if it’s possible, let’s see what we can do.'”
You can also see some reactions from the lacrosse world that came out when InsideLacrosse originally broke the story. Bill Tierney of Denver and something Myers of Ohio State here.
412 Lax claims that Michigan has home-and-homes already scheduled with Johns Hopkins and Navy. Hopkins would certainly fit in with my idle speculation, and I wouldn’t really be surprised to see a team like Navy as well.
Don’t forget to catch me on WTKA at 8:40AM.
Welcome to the party! The Duke lax family is looking forward to seeing y’all at Koskinen sometime soon.
And please tell us you’re going to play Ohio State at the Big House on the day of the spring football game. 80,000 people for college lax would be epic!
Ohio State has been doing the football stadium thing for a few years, and they have yet to breach 35k – so 80K is probably a ways off. Of course, everything is a bit better up here, right?