After helping their team win a world championship in a 12-10 decision over Canada, Max Seibald ’09 and Ryan McClay ’03 had the honor of being selected to the World Championships All-World Team. While Johns Hopkins had more representatives on the U.S. roster, Cornell and Georgetown were the only two schools to have two former players named to the All-World Team. Given the success of its players at the national and international level, it’s surprising that Georgetown has been so quiet in recent years.

Nagowski has a recent MetaEzra post on his fascination with the sport of lacrosse, which includes a discussion about lacrosse’s association with elitism and how this breeds a particular kind of sports culture. He writes:

But there’s a glimmer of truth behind every stereotype. And just as Hotel students might have lower analytical capabilities than their peers in the engineering school, a casual glimpse at a lacrosse roster will yield more prep school students than you would expect from an otherwise random sample.

I won’t take up this issue at length here, but I merely wanted to suggest a pedestrian explanation for this “prep school trend” in college lacrosse rosters.

If you take a glance at the ice hockey roster, you’ll notice that only two of the men’s ice hockey players came from high school teams. That’s because ice hockey has a unique development system called Junior hockey. Between the ages of 16-18, promising players often leave their AAA or high school squads to play for junior teams. Unlike basketball and football, very few players go directly from high school varsity squads to the college or professional ranks.

A similar dynamic is present in lacrosse development. The crucial difference is that there isn’t any extensive, school-unaffiliated development system like Junior hockey (the U.S. has 14 Junior development leagues, and you can only guess how many Junior players there are in Canada). Instead of playing one or two years for a Junior squad, lacrosse players sometimes opt for a postgraduate/development year at a prep school before beginning their NCAA careers.

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that a lot of lacrosse players come from prep school backgrounds, or any of the conclusions about the sports culture that these prep schools might breed. But if my analysis is correct– and I welcome any lacrosse experts’ corrections, since I’m not an expert on this sport– it at least suggests that the prep school trend in lacrosse rosters is not evidence that the sport of lacrosse is reserved for the wealthy New England elites.

Check out these links to get you up to speed on today’s matchup between Cornell at Notre Dame (4:00 PM on ESPN2).

- Video preview of the Final Four from espn.com.

- Comprehensive preview from cornellbigred.com, including an interview with Cornell coach Jeff Tambroni.

- Coverage of Notre Dame’s preparation for today’s game.

- Another game preview from bleacher report.

- Video preview from CBS.

Finally, punch in your prediction for this weekend’s games below.

This is hardly breaking news at this point, but for those of you who don’t closely follow Big Red sports, Army beat Syracuse 9-8 on Sunday (game recap). Cornell Lacrosse advanced in the tournament by pulling out a 11-10 (3OT ) victory over Loyola on Saturday, but we all thought the real challenge would come next week in a match against Syracuse, where the Big Red could try to avenge last year’s disastrous national championship game. Not the case anymore. The 7th seeded Cornell squad will play Army at 12pm on Sunday, May 23, on ESPNU. Go RED! Ticket info here.