Second in a series of blog entries on TopOfTheCircle.com’s quarter-century of covering lacrosse.
When we first started this site, it was in the era of extraordinary, strong teams at the very top.
In the early days, for better or worse, the three teams to look to were Maryland in Division I, The College of New Jersey in Division III, and Ellicott City Mount Hebron (Md.) amongst the schools.
Each of these three programs wrote incredibly successful histories on the field and off.
Maryland, from 1995 to 2001, won seven consecutive national championships. They did so through an array of talented players as well as tactical and technical innovations.
Some of my favorite players to watch during this era included Kelly Amonte, Quinn Carney, Courtney Martinez, Alison Comito, and the greatest female lacrosse player who ever lived, Jen Adams.
As much as Maryland won on their talent, they also did a lot of things differently from everybody else. Primarily, they hired Gary Gait, fresh off an all-American career for the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team, to be an assistant coach. Gait would bring a number of wrinkles on offense to the Maryland program. He outfitted the team with yellow molded-head stick with yellow strings, all the better to hide the ball.
While Maryland dominated Division I, The College of New Jersey similarly dominated Division III. The Lions, under head coach Sharon Pfluger, won six national titles from 1991 to 1997, winning an astounding 102 games in a row. The team dominated the 1990s by recruiting a lot of Division I-level talent who, for one reason or another, chose to play D-3. I remember one phase in which Pfluger was able to successfully lure the entire front line of a championship-level high school team to Hillwood Lakes and that success continued.
Speaking of scholastic lacrosse, the team that was the dominant program in the early days of this site was Ellicott City Mount Hebron (Md.). The Vikings, from 1994 to 2007, won 14 state championships, including 11 in a row from 1997-07.
Hebron had some awesome teams, with players from Megan Bosica to Kristen Waagbo to Cathy Nelson pacing them. This site documented some great games that the Vikings had in a home-and-home series with Moorestown (N.J.) as well as the end of the school’s 103-game win streak in a loss to Camillus West Genesee (N.Y.).
As always, however, streaks and dominating eras wax and wane. Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the teams of the present.
