GatorBait.net - Florida to add women's lacrosse

June 14, 2006

Guerry Smith
GatorBait.net Associate Editor

Florida already has a team for every Southeastern Conference sport, but the Gators won't let the league's limits keep them from expanding. Athletic director Jeremy Foley announced Wednesday UF will begin competing in women's lacrosse in 2010.

Under a four-year timetable, UF will look for a lacrosse conference, plan a facility and build offices for the coaches in 2006-07, hire the staff in 2007-08 and complete the facility and sign players in 2008-09. The Gators will play up to five exhibition matches the fall of 2009 and a full 17-game schedule in the spring of 2010.

"Any time you add a sport, it's exciting," Foley said. "We have an opportunity to start a program from scratch and build it and hopefully achieve a great deal of success down the road. We take a tremendous amount of pride in our women's athletic programs. It's going to be a great addition to our program and our community."

Lacrosse is the third women's sport UF has added in Foley's tenure, joining soccer (1995) and softball (1997). The Gators won an NCAA championship in soccer in their fourth year of competition and won the SEC softball title in their second season.

They will have to look elsewhere for any championship in lacrosse, which has 80 Division I programs, primarily on the East coast and in the South. Vanderbilt, the only other SEC school with a team, competes in the American Lacrosse Conference along with Northwestern, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, Ohio, Ohio State and Davidson.

Northwestern, which started playing lacrosse in 2002 after a 10-year hiatus, recently won its second consecutive NCAA championship.

Geographically, the closest league to UF is the ACC, which has six lacrosse teams, including North Carolina and Duke. No school south of North Carolina had a lacrosse program.

"There was no slam dunk in terms of numbers," Foley said. "When we added soccer and softball, 400-plus high schools in the state sponsored those teams. Forty-three sponsor lacrosse. This decision is being made on where we think lacrosse will be 10 years from now. Other teams (in the SEC) may follow Florida's lead here because it is a great game. We hope that there will be enough teams because we love competing for SEC titles. We'll find another league and compete for championships there."

University Athletic Association Associate Director Lynda Tealer will oversee UF's lacrosse development. When she was at Santa Clara, she built the women's water polo program from scratch.

Women's lacrosse has 12 players on the field ? a goalie, five attackers and six defenders. Games consist of two thirty-minute halves, and the field size ranges from 116 to 140 yards with a width of 60 to 70 yards. The distance between the goals is 90 to 100 yards.

Lacrosse has been in the news lately for the wrong reason, with two members of the Duke men's lacrosse team being charged with rape this spring. Duke canceled the rest of the season but will have a team next spring.

Tealer said the negative publicity did not enter in UF's discussions when choosing a new sport. Foley, who played lacrosse at Hobart College, attended the 2006 NCAA women's lacrosse Final Four, and both he and Tealer pointed out the sport's rapid growth.

"From what I saw at the Final Four, lacrosse is a sport that will catch on very quickly because of the athleticism and the scoring," Foley said. "I anticipate this program is going to be competitive fairly quickly, and that type of success will draw fans here."

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