The ADB Mailbag: Should UConn Add Lacrosse? - A Dime Back
First link is the Peter Werth press conference after he donated 22 million dollars. While he was speaking he said Benedict needs to get a D1 mens lacrosse team at UConn. I firmly believe that if we ever got a team we would win a national title within five years of being D1. You can compare it to recruiting in the old big east days. Getting the best players to stay close to home. Anyone else agree? Picture a Saturday night in April in Storrs at the new Morrone Stadium against Cuse. Place could be awesome sight. An additional note the NCAA final four will be in East Hartford in 2021 and 2022. I go to the final four every year, I try my best to rep UConn when I can. Thoughts and or criticisms about this subject?
Sounds great. I'm sure lot's of fans and people who are a part of UConn athletics would love to see men's lacrosse get added to the sports mix. I'm certainly one of them.
Of course, the big problem is money. UConn athletics has never exactly been swimming in cash. There are certainly money woes in being a member of the AAC when compared to a P5 conference. Skipping over that little matter, UConn has spent the last 15 years or so struggling to get new facilities added for soccer, baseball, and softball so that the teams involved don't have to play in badly antiquated facilities. Then there is ice hockey, where the men's team joined Hockey East with a proviso that new facilities would be built on campus while UConn played at the XL Center in Hartford. Well, now there is the very real possibility of the antiquated XL Center closing its doors sometime in the very near future, leaving the men's hockey team up the creek in the Freitas ice rink, a facility that doesn't come close to meeting Hockey East standards. If UConn wants to keep men's ice hockey in Hockey East, funding will needed to upgrade to an acceptable on campus ice hockey facility. A proposed men's lacrosse team would have to get in the money line behind all those sports.
One of two things need to happen for UConn to eventually get a D1 men's lacrosse team. One would be for UConn to join a P5 conference, something we've all been waiting for over the last several years. And waiting, and waiting. The other would be for someone with deep pockets (Peter Werth?) to fund all the costs associated with upgrading to D1 lacrosse, including the money needed to take care of women's sports scholarships need for Title IX purposes. A commitment like this would not for one year, it would have to be for every year. UConn athletics has been waiting for a money savior like that for a long time.