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SportsRecruits Interest Score™ Rankings: Top 5 Most Popular Collegiate Women’s Lacrosse Programs
Through analyzing our proprietary information, we were able to identify which college women’s lacrosse programs garnered the greatest interest from athletes on the SportsRecruits platform, as well as which programs showed the largest increase in interest from 2015 to 2016.
- Villanova University ranked as the most coveted university for women’s lacrosse, settling in at the top of the SportsRecruits Interest Scores™ list with a perfect score of 100. Dartmouth and Georgetown came in close second with scores in the high 80s and low 90s.
- The SportsRecruits Interest Scores™ rankings reflect the fact that Duke remains one of the strongest schools in the country for women’s lacrosse. Duke has consistently ranked highly among student-athletes, which is unsurprising considering that Duke has made the NCAA quarterfinals every year since 1999. The Blue Devils have seven NCAA semifinals under their belt. 2017 was the first year that Duke did not make it to the NCAA tournament since 1998.
- Coming in after Maryland, Virginia enjoyed the second most NCAA Championship round appearances in all of DI women’s lacrosse. Virginia made it to the second round of the NCAA’s this year.
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SportsRecruits Interest Score™ Rankings: Greatest Interest Growth
We also found large shifts in student-athletes’ interest in women’s college lacrosse programs from 2015 to 2016. Arizona State experienced the greatest surge in popularity with a 29.1 point increase in their SportsRecruits Interest Score™. They were followed by Syracuse University, which saw their scores increase by 20.9 points.
- Cornell made impressive strides this year with hosting their first Ivy League tournament and beating Notre Dame in the first round of the NCAA Championship.
- Wesleyan University is the only Division III school to make the list of schools with the highest SportsRecruits Interest Scores™ growth. This is likely due the team’s best ever finish, which culminated in their first ever NCAA tournament bid.
- Columbia Head Coach Andrea Cofrin is turning around the Columbia program. Columbia’s lacrosse program has become significantly more competitive under her leadership.
- Arizona State University launched a new program in the spring of 2018, becoming the twelfth Division I program in the Mountain or Pacific time zones. This broadens opportunities for lacrosse athletes in Colorado and California to play lacrosse at the collegiate level, right in their backyard. ASU has exhibited the highest growth of any school as they plan to field their first Division I team in the 2017-2018 season. ASU became the sixth team in the Pac-12 to compete in DI women’s lacrosse, joining the ranks of Cal, Colorado, Oregon, Stanford and USC.
- Boston College made a historic run in their fifth year as a program. They went all the way to the National Championship, eventually falling 16-13 to the Terrapins.
To see how other schools fared, click here to download our comprehensive list.
Methodology
SportsRecruits Interest Scores™ for women’s lacrosse are calculated from the activity of over 25,000 high school women’s lacrosse athletes on the SportsRecruits platform. Schools are scored on a 0 to 100 scale based on two, equally weighted metrics: the number of messages sent to the school and the number of active prospects with the school on their target list. A benchmark is determined by the highest ranked school for each metric, and a normalized score is calculated based on each school’s distance from the benchmark.
