Marquette Lacrosse claims first Big East Championship
With the win the team also secures an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament
In May of 2015 Marquette was cleaning out their lockers and getting ready for summer. Their Big East foe Denver was preparing for a shot at a national championship in Philadelphia.
The expectations coming into 2015 weren’t huge, they wanted to contend in the Big East, and if all went well, have a game in the NCAA tournament. The team knew they would be returning 19 seniors for the following year. Fast forward to early May of 2016. Marquette is considered a bubble team for the NCAA tournament, they don’t have the impressive win that the selection committee is looking for, but they had a chance to win the Big East tournament and get an automatic bid.
However, Denver is in the Big East, and Denver is one of the best programs in college lacrosse, holding the number 1 ranking and looking to repeat as National champions. They have never lost a game in the Big East and have not lost at home in the last three seasons. That is, until they faced Marquette. The team came back from a 7–3 halftime deficit to take the game 11–10.
When coach Joe Amplo was asked if he truly thought beating Denver was a possibility he has this to say about it “I knew they were in the conference and I thought they would be simply more athletic than us. And that’s all right to say. It is ok for me to respect what [Coach] Bill Tierney has done down in Denver, and accept that when we got here they were simply a better team than us.”
Last April Marquette found out that they were the 6 seed for the NCAA tournament, the highest seed of any of the eight new division 1 programs that were added in the 2013 season.
The Golden Eagles took on the soon to be National Champions North Carolina in May and came up last a goal short. Marquette now a year later looks to do what it has done every season since its birth, improve upon the season before.