Lacrosse enjoying U.S. college boom

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — At spring break, Joe Ernst took his college athletes on a memorable road trip to compete in their thriving sport.

Basketball? Nope. Baseball? Guess again. The Southwestern University team headed north from Texas to play lacrosse in Michigan.

What was once a niche sport in the Mid-Atlantic and New England states is now one of the fastest-growing games in America.

The Associated Press asked all 95 of the NCAA's multisport conferences to list the sports being added in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons, and lacrosse topped them all, far outpacing golf.

In the three NCAA divisions, 20 women's lacrosse teams and 12 men's teams have debuted this year, most of them in Division III. At least two dozen more teams are scheduled to come on board next year.

The reasons are simple. The game has an exhilarating pace and high scoring. It's not too expensive to put a team together. And in an atmosphere where colleges want to add sports to increase revenue, it's a good fit. Several schools that are expanding their athletic programs cited the need to boost enrollment and thereby generate more tuition, particularly in Divisions II and III, where athletes often don't receive scholarships.

"It is just blowing up at the Division III level, particularly moving westward," said Ernst, Southwestern's coach. "There's really no expenditure on our part. It's equipment and travel."

Four of this year's new NCAA teams are outside the Eastern time zone, including a women's team at Carthage (Wis.) College and a men's team at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. For some, playing is an unexpected bonus.

"I definitely didn't come to school expecting to turn into a Division III lacrosse player," said Milwaukee goalkeeper Ian Wilson, who had last played lacrosse as a freshman in high school in Illinois. "It's the exact opposite of what I thought I would be doing my senior year."

The debut of the first NCAA men's lacrosse program in Texas — at Southwestern — comes nearly four decades after Navy and Johns Hopkins played the first varsity college game in the state at the Houston Astrodome, according to US Lacrosse, the Baltimore-based national governing body.

Division III Southwestern, located about 25 miles north of Austin, had success as a club team and lacrosse was seen as a way to boost male and out-of-state enrollment, Ernst said.

"They wanted to be the first," he said. "We're the only one in Texas."