Yesterday’s matches in the ACC and Big Ten women’s lacrosse tournaments highlight the week for women’s lacrosse tournament play.
But it’s not even the only women’s lacrosse tournament that starts this week. This weekend, while the two superconferences choose their champions, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference starts play tomorrow with a bracket that looks a bit like what you might find in the Sun Belt Conference, which used an ersatz stepladder format involving seven matchdates in order to whittle down a field of 16 to a champion.
In the women’s lacrosse world. the MAAC has designated eight teams to play off for one berth in the NCAA Tournament (the league is unlikely to have an at-large bid). But instead of a balanced eight-team bracket, the MAAC has scheduled two regionals at Iona and Siena. The winner of tomorrow’s game between Niagara and Rider will take on Iona, and the winner of Sacred Heart and Quinnipiac will meet Siena on Sunday. The winner of Sunday’s second-round games will move to the conference’s semifinal round, where the top two seeds, Mount St. Mary’s and Fairfield, await next weekend.
Fortunately, it looks like the MAAC is the only conference to adopt this format; everyone else that is playing next week is either in a six-team or four-team bracket; the six-team brackets, as found in the Patriot, Atlantic 10, and the Big South, have two first-round matches that qualify two teams to make the semifinal round.
Interestingly, the Patriot League has four days between the first-round matches and the semifinal round a week from today. In the A-10, there are less than 24 hours between the play-in games and the semifinals.
I leave it to conference commissioners to explain the logic of differing designs and scheduling of conference tournaments in women’s lacrosse; I can’t figure it out.