There were times when junior colleges were a prime place for Division I colleges to mine for talent, the players who may have escaped the notice of college coaches because of either academics or being unable to make it into a first-choice college.
But with an array of showcase tournaments every weekend in many sports in America, coaches collect dossiers on dozens upon hundreds of players in the player pool. Too, less than five percent of most scholastic players wind up playing at the next level.
You do not hear the words “junior-college transfer” in the parlance of college sports anymore. Instead, it’s all about the transfer portal, which has been the ultimate disruptor in collegiate athletics — not only disrupting rosters, but coaching staffs who often are asked about why players leave a program en masse.
In field hockey, junior-college participation dwindled in the 1990s to the point when the last JuCo team in America was the Harford Owls, a team we visited when this site started.
And now, it looks like the same drawdown is happening in women’s lacrosse. This past season, only seven two-year colleges fielded a women’s lacrosse team. Late last week, the National Junior College Athletic Association announced that it would no longer be hosting a national championship tournament.
For me, it’s a shame that this has happened.
However, you do need a perspective on why this happened. The opportunities for women’s lacrosse have more than doubled since 1996. Remember: that was an era in which there were only six berths for the NCAA Tournament; this year, the field was nearly 30.
Players coming out of high school who might have found themselves at a community college in the past are now finding themselves on four-year college rosters in all three NCAA divisions, from coast to coast.
And regrettably, it appears to be a zero-sum situation, taking away players from two-year colleges who may have benefitted from the academic preparation to boost their credentials to transfer into a four-year institution.
