I know that a lot of the traffic on here over the next day or two is going to be about Howard Porter, and in the morning I'll stick a post at the top that refers to everything you need to know about it. But in the meantime, the coaches of the four teams in the women's lacrosse final four held a teleconference today, and there were some good anecdotes in it, including one about my favorite subject...
This Final Four is going to have a distinct Philadelphia flavor to it not only because of its location, but because of the players involved. You would expect Penn to have a bunch of local kids, and they do, but Duke also has three and Virginia has four. In a blatant attempt to get a few more hits from the suburbs, those players are:
Duke
-- Christie Barnes (Freshman, Wayne, Pa./Radnor)
-- Sara Giedgowd (Freshman, Wayne, Pa./Conestoga)
-- Michelle Menser (Senior, Wayne, Pa./Radnor)
Virginia
-- Megan Havrilla (Senior, Devon, Pa./Conestoga)
-- Megan O’Malley (Junior, Moorestown, N.J./Moorestown)
-- Katie Shannon (Sophomore, Downingtown, Pa./Downingtown West)
-- Jess Wasilewski (Senior, Paoli, Pa./Conestoga)
Both coaches are also from the Philadelphia region -- Duke's Kerstin Kimel is from Havertown, Pa., and Virginia's Julie Myers is from Bryn Mawr. Two of Kimel's uncles, Ed Kimel and Chris Manning, played basketball at Villanova and what was then Philadelphia Textile, respectively.
"The opportunity to play at Franklin Field is a really special one," Kimel said."I think going there a lot as a kid, whether it was for Penn football games or the Penn Relays, to go back there and have the opportunity to compete for a national championship in that venue is really, really exciting."
There's a joke in there somewhere about people actually going to Penn football games... but we move on to the most important quote that came out of the teleconference. Yes, I buried the lede. So be it.
In what must surely be a blatant attempt to win the affection of this writer, who has historically not rooted for Duke sports teams (to put it nicely), Kimel relayed the following anecdote about how her team got ready for its second-round game against Johns Hopkins.
With classes over for the year, the senior class "made homemade soft pretzels and gave them to all the kids on Friday night before our Hopkins game, with a note on them saying, ‘This is from the seniors, and we promise we’ll buy you the real thing next week.’"
Now, I've been to Durham before. I know there isn't all that much to do in the town, and I know that Duke kids are pretty smart. But that's impressive. And I guarantee they'll find real good ones right in the stadium over the weekend.
The other blatant angle in all of this is the success of both the men's and women's teams at Duke this season a year after their worlds were turned upside down by the rape scandal and the circus that came with it.
"In the last year, a lot of different things have happened for the good and for the better here at Duke," Kimel said. "I think that there’s definitely been a real connection made between our teams in the support that both teams give each other both on and off the field."
As an example of that bond, Kimel said that her team got quite the luxurious view of the men's team's second-round game.
"We kind of came in and made ourselves at home in his office this weekend, with his big screen TV, to watch them beat Carolina," she said.
I couldn't help noting the use of the word "his," but then again, Kimel hasn't left to take a job elsewhere the way women's basketball coach Gail Goestenkors did back in March when she left Duke to take over at Texas.
To say that Northwestern coach Kelly Amonte Hiller knows a lot about Penn's team would have to be an understatement. Hiller saw the Quakers at the beginning of this season, and witnessed firsthand the beginnings of the program's rise to prominence as an assistant at Brown University from 1997 to 1998.
Penn coach Karin Brower has "just done a phenomenal job, really energizing the program," Hiller said. "She’s done a great job recruiting, getting the right kids in, and having them buy into the system that she uses.”
As for this year's edition, Hiller believes that "Penn has gotten better every single day of the season, and I think as a team they’ve gelled and they obviously showed this past weekend against Maryland that they can overcome deficits, they can win in any way.“
We'll see, though, if the Quakers' improvement leads to a better score than the 13-4 trouncing they suffered in Evanston back in March.
Furthering the close ties between the various programs is the fact that Hiller was a freshman at Maryland in 1993, which was Kimel's senior year in College Park.
"Kelly was my recruit, she stayed with me on her recruiting visit," said Kimel. "1993 was the first year while I was at Maryland that we didn’t make it to a championship game, and I think that sat with Kelly and [her teammates], and it really motivated them throughout their careers.”
And finally, no matter how much you or I care about lacrosse, Hannah Nielsen's mother must care about it a whole lot. She's flying in for the weekend from Adelaide, Australia.
I wonder if she knows that the Australian national rugby league team once played at Franklin Field.
