Brand News: LSA Division 2 Shakeup
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Unfortunately as mentioned earlier Trinity has folded their season citing lack of numbers. St Ed’s also had some financial issues but due to a school error they are back and playing a conference only schedule.
Right now the LSA Division 2 has only 6 teams competing for the 2010 season. Next year Sam Houston is planning on making the jump to LSA D1 leaving the conference at 5 teams and no AQ.
The possibilities of an at-large bid to nationals are very slim considering the strength of the conference as a whole, the lack of quality OOC competition and consecutively losing the best team in the conference 2 years in a row.
As president of the conference, I will be making a concerted effort to diagnose these problems, determine the reasons behind the instability, and look for solutions to keep the conference afloat.
The main problem I see is the lack of relationships between the coaches and the institution. I hear it every year how schools have little or no support/guidance from the school they play at, even in the LSA D1 conference. There are two ways to battle this; find a coach who is willing to be administrative heavy ie. paperwork, scheduling, recruiting, financial and coordination with the school, or to tirelessly bang on doors in the administration building until they see your vision or are simply tired of hearing about it that they are forced to support.
Ways to effectively accomplish either of those options are to make your team visible in a positive manner. Schedule double headers with local high school teams. They see your school and your team and the admins at the school are getting free publicity.
No local high school lacrosse? Go play in the nearest place that does have it. Simple things like wearing jerseys to a basketball or football game, publicly fundraising at varsity sporting events and on campus. I could list a thousand different tactics to help clubs but we all know they look great on paper and are easier said than done. Simply put if the members on your team don’t care about the health of the team and are only using lacrosse as chick bait you won’t survive.
Secondly, the power has to be put in the right place. If the coach is just a guy who shows up and shouts during games and then leaves it’s unhealthy. At this point in our conference’s history, a coach’s lacrosse pedigree is not nearly as important as his ability to run a program. The best players don’t always make the best coaches (I myself being neither). If the coach simply passes the buck of all responsibility to the president then he may not be there for the right reasons. The hand’s off attitude can only promote dissent and create entitlement to the players. If you run them too much or they don’t like your personality they can pull the plug.
On a much larger scale, the same scenarios are happening in pro sports. Gilbert Arenas was set to make 16 million this year and his coach aka his boss Flip Saunders makes 4.5. We all know what happened to Agent 0. What I’m getting at is that as hard as the kids work for their teams they feel entitled to make decisions. We all know that this is a conflict of interest and the coach must have the power at all cost. What needs to happen is the coach has to be held accountable by either the AD, the head of sports and rec, or the head of student activities.
Lastly, we as a conference need to explore and recruit new schools to get on board. Before blindly accepting them there must be criteria they have to meet. Do they have a dedicated coach willing to do admin work? Will the school support them and dictate guidelines to them? If those answers are no then it would be foolish to accept them.
I was looking to write about a paragraph then I got a little carried away. I would love to hear other peoples take on this. As everyone in the conference knows, at my school we get more support than I could ever ask for and I am full time and report directly to the Athletic Director. We are also actively pursuing varsity lacrosse, which will be another unfortunate blow to the LSA D2. I am grateful for the situation I have and I know it’s unique, but I would love to hear from the schools who claim they get no support.
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Michael J. Brand was appointed as Centenary Head Coach on October, 2008 and is building a MCLA program in his second year in Shreveport, Louisiana. A former player at Buffalo State, he coached at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania and Grand Island High School in New York. Michael will be blogging about his program on CollegeLAX from time to time. He supports the Buffalo Bills and the New York Knicks in his free time and laments the fact that the only Buffalo representative in the NFL Pro Bowl was the Bills Mascot.
