Major milestones for Lions Lacrosse

Nestled just below the lead story on the front page of Monday’s paper was a recap of the women’s lacrosse team’s win over Yale. It’s rare that a sports article runs on the front page of Spectator, but not completely unheard of during football and basketball season. Baseball will occasionally get a spot above the fold, too, if they make the Ivy playoffs or something. Never in my time at Columbia, though, have I seen women’s lacrosse on the front page, and there’s a good reason for that.

In the program’s 13-year history, it has only won three Ivy League games, last weekend’s 10-3 victory over Yale included. To be fair, the team didn’t compete against other Ancient Eight squads in its first year. Even taking that into account, though, there’s no denying that the program has struggled, to put it kindly. Before the Light Blue defeated the Bulldogs, its only two conference victories had been against Harvard—one in 2005 and the other in 2009.

Those victories both came before current head coach Liz Kittleman took over the program after last season. Kittleman’s predecessor, Kerri Whitaker, stood at the helm of the program for eight seasons, guiding the Light Blue to a 2-54 record in the Ivy League. Now, the fact that Whitaker was allowed to hang around for eight seasons seems to imply that the athletic department was fine with not just mediocrity, but utter futility. In fact, sports editor emeritus Jonathan Tayler wrote a column less than a month before the team’s 2009 victory over Harvard calling for Whitaker to be fired (“Why isn’t Whitaker on the hot seat?,” March 26, 2009). When the Lions managed to pull out a 11-10 win over the Crimson later that season, he was furious, asking why the team didn’t “just roll over and take it” so that Whitaker would certainly lose her job. While I don’t think he was serious about the team intentionally losing, that victory did buy Whitaker one more season. It appears that M. Dianne Murphy finally got fed up with the program after it went winless in 2010, though, as Whitaker “resigned” at the end of the season.

When Whitaker left, it finally seemed like the athletic department was committed to building a decent women’s lacrosse program. It spent about a month looking for her replacement and landed on Kittleman, a former assistant at Penn, where the Quakers won four straight Ivy titles and made it to the 2008 NCAA championship during her tenure. Not too shabby, right?

Still, the team has continued to struggle this season. The Lions won only one of their first nine games, defeating nonconference foe Iona but falling to Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn. If hopes were high at the beginning of the season, they certainly weren’t anymore when the Light Blue lost to Quinnipiac 13-12 in overtime on April 6.

Something seemed to click after that loss, though, as the Lions have won three consecutive games since then. Two were against out-of-league opponents Lafayette and Bucknell, but sandwiched between those two wins over Patriot League squads was the 10-3 victory over Yale.

One victory might not seem like a lot, and to be fair, it might not be. Who knows how long it’ll be before the next one? Still, there was something very different about this win. For one, it wasn’t against Harvard—the only Ancient Eight squad the Lions had been able to defeat up until last weekend. Also, the team didn’t just win. It dominated. In their two victories over Harvard, the Lions only won by margins of 11-9 and 11-10. Of course, the Bulldogs are dead last in the league with an 0-5 record, but it’s still impressive that the Light Blue was able to completely own another Ivy League team like that.

Despite all of that, though, one win is still just one win. If the Light Blue want to prove that this is a turning point for the program, it’ll have to win at least one more conference game this season—preferably against a team that has actually won another conference game itself. While the program isn’t going to turn around overnight and start winning Ancient Eight titles anytime soon, it has to start somewhere.

Two wins in one season may not seem like a lot, but it would be a starting point, and it might be enough to make the front page again.

Michele Cleary is a Columbia College junior majoring in history. She is Spectator’s managing editor.
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