Princeton head coach Bill Tierney remembers thinking how crazy Tony Seaman sounded more than two decades ago.

‘Tony Seaman, who’s the coach at Towson and a good friend of mine, 25 years ago, said, ‘Hey, we should have the final four at Giants Stadium,’ and everybody laughed at him,’ Tierney said.

Sounded crazy then. Sounds prescient now.

Tierney revisited Seaman’s remarks in light of this weekend’s Big City Classic. Organized by Inside Lacrosse magazine, the Classic serves as a three-game showcase at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., with matchups between six of the college game’s biggest programs: Princeton vs. Syracuse, Virginia vs. North Carolina and Delaware vs. Hofstra.

So far, roughly 20,000 tickets have been sold.

The event is this year’s third mainstream barnstorming effort by IL to help promote the game of lacrosse, following the Faceoff Classic and the Day of Rivals. Both other events take place at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore.

Though for some coaches the event serves as a focal point for how far lacrosse has risen in the national spectrum over the years, others feel the traditions fading away, sacrificed for an increase in media attention.

‘It’s really a mixed feeling,’ Tierney said. ‘For old-timers like me, you liked the way it was. Part of me, as a selfish Division I coach that’s been around the block a couple of times, I really liked the way it was.’

Virginia head coach Dom Starsia coached at Brown from 1983-1992. He would hear about big crowds for the Maryland vs. Johns Hopkins games, but he didn’t feel a connection to the lacrosse scene. Fan attention was strictly geographic.

‘Those kinds of things were very provincial,’ Starsia said. ‘It was as if those crowds and those big games were limited to those schools, and the people at Brown didn’t care about what was happening in Maryland. There wasn’t really a relationship.’

Those days are long gone.

Division I lacrosse now features 57 teams in eight different conferences, excluding three independent schools (Syracuse, Johns Hopkins and Presbyterian). By 2010, there will be two more conferences – the Big East and Northeast conferences. There are two budding professional leagues, one indoor and one outdoor.

On television, a market once foreign to lacrosse, the sport enjoys its most visibility ever, with a full slate of games on the ESPN family of networks, including complete coverage of the NCAA tournament.

‘We’re seeing more of it. We’re seeing 50,000 people at the national championship and the final four, so lacrosse is growing like crazy,’ Syracuse head coach John Desko said. ‘I’m seeing the potential, if it’s marketed properly, and you get the right games, a lot of people will show up.’

Though Desko has witnessed massive crowds in the past – seeing an average of 12,500 fans per game during the era of superstars like Gary and Paul Gait – the attendance is on the rise in non-traditional lacrosse hotbeds, too.

Denver, a lacrosse trailblazer in the western United States, drew nearly 10,000 fans last year at home. Next weekend, the Pioneers will host No. 3 Notre Dame at Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium, the home field of the NFL’s Denver Broncos.

And the biggest example of the game’s explosion? A recent NCAA study found that attendance at the national lacrosse championship has outnumbered attendance at the men’s basketball championship twice since 2005.

‘It’s an exciting time for the sport,’ Desko said. ‘We’ll see where lacrosse is 20 years down the road from now. The more people at the games, the more people that are going to come out and watch it.’

Others feel less optimistic.

For Tierney, uncertainty reigns above all. From his playing days at Cortland in the 1970s to his program’s dominance of the early 1990s, it was a quaint, but enjoyable run that he sees potentially coming to an end soon with events like the Big City Classic.

The times are changing for lacrosse traditionalists like Tierney. Last year’s final four at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., for example, broke from convention.

It was the first time ever that the event wasn’t held at one of the sport’s ancestral grounds like New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore and upstate New York. Instead, the NCAA opted for the glitzy confines of Gillette, much to the chagrin of some of the sport’s most influential players.

‘Having the final four in Foxborough, excuse my French, is a pain in my ass,’ Starsia said. ‘Probably, a lot of teams might feel the same way.’

Although Starsia admits he’s excited about the sport’s growth and heightening visibility, he thinks there needs to be a limit. ‘I don’t think we take the final four to Dallas just because it would be neat to put it in Cowboy Stadium,’ Starsia said.

Another possibility discussed by Tierney was that traditional lacrosse programs may soon feel more and more teams breathing down their necks. Events like the Big City Classic and a televised final four will bring more solid programs, more great players and more parity in lacrosse.

Not a welcome thought for a coach whose team is one of seven to win a national title in the championship’s 38-year existence.

‘I’m going to be disappointed, personally, when Southern California starts dominating the national championship of lacrosse,’ Tierney laughed. ‘But you just have to live it and love the fact that it’s growing, and in a positive way.’

ctorr@syr.edu

Published on April 1, 2009 at 12:00 pm