The defining moments from the last week of Division I women's lacrosse have been the upsets. Of eight teams seeded in the NCAA championship bracket, six lost their final game before the tournament.
Loyola Maryland and Johns Hopkins would like to keep that trend going.
The Greyhounds and the Blue Jays – neither of which is seeded in the bracket – scored two of those upsets over the weekend.
On Saturday, the Greyhounds surprised fourth-seeded Syracuse, 9-8, after the Orange had slipped by three of the top five seeds in the NCAA tournament — Boston College, Duke, and North Carolina — to win the Atlantic Coast Conference title. On Sunday, Johns Hopkins upended Duke, 9-8.
With so many upsets this season, including Ohio State knocking off defending national champion Maryland in the Big Ten semifinals, parity finally seems to be reaching the upper echelon of Division I.
"It's really cool because everybody has to be paying attention," said Johns Hopkins coach Janine Tucker, whose Blue Jays dealt sixth-seeded Stony Brook its only loss of the season.
"No one can take anything for granted. Every single opponent that you play, you have to really be on your A game. I think it's neat for the growth of the sport. I think it's neat for young women out there all over the place that there are a lot of different schools all over Twitter and all over Instagram and in the news. I think it's great for our sport."
The Blue Jays and the Greyhounds have often been in that second tier of teams, although Loyola has been a No. 1 team and made it to the national final in 1997. Still, since 1991, only five programs have won national championships – Maryland (10), Northwestern (seven), Virginia (three), Princeton (three) and North Carolina (one).
This year, Loyola (15-4) and Johns Hopkins (14-3) made it into the tournament from much different angles.
The Greyhounds, a senior-laden team, automatically won a berth with their Patriot League championship. The Blue Jays, a young team, had to build a strong body of work because they played an independent schedule and didn't have the tournament safety net to fall back on.
Capped by their final-impression wins, each had a strong finishing kick with Loyola riding Division I's longest winning streak of 14 games and Johns Hopkins winning 13 of its last 14 with its only loss coming to Maryland.
"As a coach when you approach tournament time, you always want to be playing your best lacrosse," Loyola coach Jen Adams said. "That's a conversation we had with this group at the very beginning of the year. In hindsight, I think things worked out nicely for us in terms of playing such tough competition early on and letting us expose some of those weaknesses that we did have and giving us time to fill them in."
The Greyhounds lost to Princeton, Florida and Penn State, all tournament teams, in the first four games before a 13-12 overtime win at Virginia, also a tournament team, set off the 14-game winning streak.
In the NCAA tournament, Loyola will play a team it has never met — Bryant, the automatic qualifier from the Northeast Conference — on Friday at 4 p.m. in Boston. The winner advances to meet fifth-seeded and host Boston College on Sunday. The Eagles knocked the Greyhounds out in the same round last year, 8-3.
With 11 seniors on the roster and nine starting, the Greyhounds are playing with a sense of urgency.
"There's no novelty factor about the tournament for them anymore," Adams said. "They know they need to go in and take care of it. They've seen in their time here that we've been cut short and I think that's a big reason why in this latter part of the season, this group has really stepped up. They don't want this to end."
The Blue Jays may just be getting started with 12 freshmen or sophomores on the roster and only three seniors. Most important for them was winning big games throughout the season to compensate for not having a tournament at the end. They had no bad losses, falling only to Boston College, Loyola and Maryland.
"All we've talked to the girls about is how important every single game is," Tucker said. "That's what's been a huge motivator for us and they really embraced that. Sometimes having a conference championship and an automatic qualifier, the focus can be more on the conference games versus the rest of your season and if you have a bad loss because you were not respecting every game as a critical game, that can really come back and bite you and that has happened to us."
Johns Hopkins will open tournament play at Virginia, where they meet Penn State, a former Blue Jays foe in the now-disbanded American Lacrosse Conference. The Nittany Lions, the Big Ten tournament champions, have won 11 of 16 meetings, but the Blue Jays won the last one, 13-10, in last year's ALC quarterfinals.
If the Blue Jays get past Penn State on Friday, they would meet the winner of the Virginia-Winthrop game on Sunday at 4 p.m.
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