Last weekend, the lacrosse world descended upon Philadelphia, as both the NCAA men’s and women’s Final Four contests were played just miles away from one another. The women took the field at Villanova while the men played at Lincoln Financial Field.
Just under 10,000 people showed up for the women’s game on Sunday night, while 28,000 fans made their way down Broad Street to take in the men’s final on Monday afternoon.
For me, coming from a high school without football and a college where, admittedly, sports are not a top priority, I was stunned.
In the first half of the women’s final between North Carolina and Maryland, I sat in the stands, attempting to get a better understanding of who exactly it is that comes to lacrosse matches.
One piece of that answer is deceptively simple. If your school has a lacrosse team, your coach gets you all together to head to the game.
In the stands on Sunday night, I didn’t just see high schoolers though. There were players from numerous colleges who had come out to see the finals of their sport.
In this age of the commercialization of football, basketball and baseball, those sports have lost that ability, that camaraderie.
Lacrosse is in an in-between area, where enough people play the game to get a respectable turnout, but also where the sport isn’t so large that it becomes inaccessible.
But that’s not only what made the environments I saw strike a cord somewhere in that part of me that loves sports of all shapes and sizes.
I don’t love lacrosse, but I loved that these people did. The biggest piece of that, for me, was the cheering sections from each of the four respective schools that played in the two championship games.
It’d be easy to think that fans of Duke and Syracuse, Maryland and North Carolina, would shrug lacrosse off. After all, those schools have basketball programs that compete on the nation’s highest collegiate plain.
But that’s not the case.
The amount of orange in the crowd at the Linc was almost overwhelming, despite Syracuse being four hours from Philadelphia.
I doubt that Penn would ever be able to match the cheering sections that a Syracuse or a Duke could provide, to no fault of its own.
In the same way that being a small school stacks the odds against Penn in some sports, it can also do the same to cheering contingents.
My hope, however, is that Penn fans would respond the same way to lacrosse reaching a national championship as they would to basketball making the NCAAs.
This last weekend, I saw the allegiances that these fans felt toward their colleges.
They weren’t cheering on lacrosse, per say, but they were rooting for their colors, for their school.
No matter what your feelings on lacrosse, or soccer, your school is like your family. It stays with you for life.
