There have been occasions when junior schools had been a main place for Division I schools to mine for expertise, the gamers who might have escaped the discover of faculty coaches due to both teachers or being unable to make it right into a first-choice faculty.
However with an array of showcase tournaments each weekend in lots of sports activities in America, coaches gather dossiers on dozens upon lots of of gamers within the participant pool. Too, lower than 5 p.c of most scholastic gamers wind up enjoying on the subsequent stage.
You don’t hear the phrases “junior-college switch” within the parlance of faculty sports activities anymore. As an alternative, it’s all concerning the switch portal, which has been the final word disruptor in collegiate athletics — not solely disrupting rosters, however teaching staffs who typically are requested about why gamers depart a program en masse.
In discipline hockey, junior-college participation dwindled within the Nineteen Nineties to the purpose when the final JuCo workforce in America was the Harford Owls, a workforce we visited when this website began.
And now, it seems to be like the identical drawdown is occurring in girls’s lacrosse. This previous season, solely seven two-year schools fielded a girls’s lacrosse workforce. Late final week, the Nationwide Junior Faculty Athletic Affiliation introduced that it might not be internet hosting a nationwide championship event.
For me, it’s a disgrace that this has occurred.
Nevertheless, you do want a perspective on why this occurred. The alternatives for girls’s lacrosse have greater than doubled since 1996. Bear in mind: that was an period wherein there have been solely six berths for the NCAA Event; this 12 months, the sphere was practically 30.
Gamers popping out of highschool who might need discovered themselves at a group faculty up to now at the moment are discovering themselves on four-year faculty rosters in all three NCAA divisions, from coast to coast.
And regrettably, it seems to be a zero-sum state of affairs, taking away gamers from two-year schools who might have benefitted from the educational preparation to spice up their credentials to switch right into a four-year establishment.