Has Whitaker’s Time Come to Pass?

Unacceptable only begins to describe it.

With one game left on the schedule, the women’s lacrosse team is 0-6 in the Ivy League. Not that it isn’t entitled to a bad year, but last year was a bad year, too. Just like the year before that. And the one before that, too. Going back to the program’s inception in 1997, the women’s lacrosse team has only ever won one Ivy game.

Let’s pause for a moment—one Ivy game. Columbia’s all-time record against conference opposition: 1-69.

The Lions have been playing Ivy competition since 1998, and in nine of the last 10 seasons, they have posted 0-7 records. In 2005, they had that magical run that started in Cambridge, Mass. They rode it all the way to a 1-6 record.

Athletics Director M. Dianne Murphy has made a point of breaking Columbia’s culture of sporting futility. And in recent years, she’s had some success. From the women’s soccer team’s Ivy championship in 2006 to a pair of golf titles and a seriously competitive tennis program—not to mention the fencing team—many of Columbia’s non-marquee sports have earned real respect in the Ivy League and, at times, in the whole Northeast.

As for the marquee sports, the men’s basketball team just posted its second .500
season in an age, the women’s basketball team had some truly positive spells this season, and baseball currently sits atop the Gehrig Division. (We’ll just gloss over football for now—that’s an entirely separate column.)

But now, something must be done about lacrosse.

Its near-comic futility is a harsh reminder of a time when Columbia athletics was an all-round laughing stock, the Ancient Eight’s Washington Generals.

Head coach Kerri Whitaker has been in place for six years and has the Lions’ solo Ivy win to her credit. And her teams have not performed badly in nonconference games, where she is 34-12. But it’s the collapses in close Ivy games that leave a doubt over her ability to change the culture of this program.

The contests against Brown spring to mind. In each of the last four seasons, the Bears have come from behind and fought off a Lions’ assault to win by a single goal in the dying seconds of the game.

To be fair, lacrosse is one of the few sports in which the Ivy League is an elite conference. With teams routinely ranked in the top 10 nationally and making the last eight of the NCAA tournament, cracking the win column is a daunting task. That said, Princeton and Dartmouth can’t recruit everyone who knows their way around a lacrosse stick, can they? Surely there are players just below that caliber just dying to play Ivy lacrosse?

The answer is yes. And what is worrying for the Columbia lacrosse program is that it has some of those players. Remarkably, a team with such a pitiful record isn’t lacking in individual talent. In the last three years Columbia has had its first all-Ivy player (Carrie Anderer, CC ’06), its first four-time all-Ivy honoree (Kate Lombard, CC ’07) and a player on pace to become the most successful offensive contributor in the program’s history (senior Marisa Marcellino).

In fact, Marcellino has set the school assists record every year since her first. It was enough to earn her a spot working out with the U.S. national team. But now she only has one game left in her college career. And it’s against the only Ivy team Columbia has ever beaten: Harvard.

Should the Lions win, it will be seen as another successful step in the snail-paced building of a program. If they don’t, it will be interesting to see if Murphy’s patience with Whitaker has run out.

Either way, things (or people) have to change before someone asks: “Should we even bother with a women’s lacrosse program at all?”