By Lindsay Carlton
The Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association (IWLCA) poll has no bearing on selection to the NCAA Championships. But as the CAA Championship games inch closer, Hofstra’s women’s lacrosse team knows that it has to give it all it has on May 5 if the team wants to compete on a national level.
The Pride is and has been a division I team since 1976, when the team played their first varsity season. Thirty years later, the Pride is still competing against the top schools in the top conference, and as of May 1, the IWLCA Poll has Hofstra at the No. 17 spot.
Constant switches in the polls are common. Last weeks poll included St.Bonaventure, the final undefeated team in Division I, who moved into the rankings for the first time in school history. Hofstra also moved back into the rankings after a two-week hiatus.
The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) features four teams in the poll, with all four ranked in the top six. The Ivy League also claims four schools with No. 10 Princeton and No. 11 Cornell leading the troupe. The Big East and the CAA both boast three schools, while the American Lacrosse Conference (ALC) and the Atlantic 10 each claim two schools.
The NCAA Division I women’s lacrosse Championship is a 16-team, single-elimination tournament. There are eight conferences that receive a berth via automatic qualification, and the remaining teams receive at large bids. The automatic conferences are the America East, ALC, Atlantic 10, Big East, CAA, Ivy and the Northeast Conference. It may seem like a lot of powerful conferences to compete against, but the Pride is ready and up for the challenge. However, first the team must win two games this weekend at the CAA Tournament if it wants to see any teams from those conferences later this month.
“We’re starting our conference games soon,” junior attacker Kimberly Hillier said. “As long as we just come out hard and keep playing the way we’ve been playing, we’ll be fine.”
In last year’s tournament that the Pride hosted, second-seeded Towson defeated top-seeded Hofstra, 18-15, in the highest scoring CAA women’s lacrosse championship game in league history.
The Pride was just three goals short of the conference title that would have earned the team the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, so the women are approaching this weekend as unfinished business.
Last year’s disappointment also had some remarkable Hofstra players competing. The contest was led by midfielder Becky Thorn and midfielder Heather Albro, each of whom scored four points for the Pride in the loss. Albro had a team-high four goals, while Thorn allotted three goals. Attack Catherine Guerriere, a senior on this year’s team, added a goal for the Pride.
But every year is a new beginning and the Pride is geared for a comeback. And although Hofstra got off to a bumpy start this season with an 0-4 start, its current 10-6 overall record shows signs of a winners mentality that wants to go all the way.
“We’ve put ourselves in a [good] position because of our schedule,” head coach Shelley Klaes-Bawcombe said. “It really challenged us early in the season to expose all of our strengths and weaknesses. Now we can make the adjustments come tournament time, and we’re trying to make sure that this team is still focused, everything happens for a reason and we’re just trying to stick together and continue to fight.”