Women’s Lacrosse has started off their season with six wins and only one loss. Women’s Lacrosse head coach Meredith Newman is ready for her team to set themselves as the best in the Midwest.
“We’re basically playing the top three teams in the Midwest Women’s lacrosse conference through our next three games.” Said Newman, “It’s an opportunity to assert ourselves as dominating, yet again, in the Midwest.”
Junior Anne Hopkins said the team has bonded over the difficult games early on in the season.
“Some of the strengths of our team are the family dynamic we have and the determination and dedication we have as a team.” Said Hopkins. “Augie lax is not only a lacrosse team, but a family. We pride ourselves on the values we have and the environment we created. The determination and dedication our team has is unbelievable.” Being the underdog, we want to prove to other division 3 schools that we deserve to be in the NCAA tournament and to showcase what we have. Every day, even on our days off, our team is putting in hard work to get better as a player and a teammate. The dedication and hard work I see from my teammates pushes me to be a better player.”
Many seniors of Augustana who actively played lacrosse graduated last year, so the team has had to adapt to the changes brought on by less experienced athletes.
“The team has changed from last season to now because we graduated ten starting seniors.” Said Hopkins, “These seniors played a key role in our season last year, so it was a big change this year. Although we had a new coach last year, there wasn’t much change because we had all our returning starters. This year the upperclassmen had to definitely step up and help the incoming class adjust to the new dynamic of our team. The freshman class have been doing a great job adjusting to the collegiate level of lacrosse and are improving every day.”
Women’s Lacrosse has a few new athletes to add to the numbers and take part in the tournaments.
“We have six [freshman] and they’re all working hard and really have improved a lot from the beginning.” Said Newman. “There’s a big difference between high school lacrosse and college lacrosse. There’s more contact that’s allowed in college lacrosse and the skill set is higher. It’s always a little bit of an adjustment period, but they’ve really handled it well and put in a lot of extra time so the future looks bright.”
Newman and the team has high expectations for this new season.
“It’s[the season has] been off to a great start, [it’s been the] toughest schedule of the last four years.” Said Newman. “We want to repeat as conference champions, get to the NCAA tournament for the fourth year in a row, and [we]want to push through the sweet sixteen, we’ve been in the sweet sixteen for three years in a row.”
Not only has Newman been proud of the performance of the team, she is happy for her team’s academic standing as well. “We came out of the winter term with the highest cumulative team G.P.A. that we’ve had since the beginning of the program.” Said Newman. “If we stay on track with that we should be looking at some good academic honors this year. We’ve been an Academic Honor Roll team for the last four years so we should be repeating again for a fifth.”
Newman continues with the opportunity to have several athletes become Academic All Americans.
“ [We’re] Hoping to get our first Academic All American, that’s a big selling point and a big accolade that Augustana proudly holds between seventh and sixth of the nation out of all divisions and third out of division three.” Said Newman. “We’re looking at getting some Academic All Americans off our team, they’ve been working hard in the classroom and on the field…Every week we’ve played a game we’ve had at least one player be conference player of the week.”
Hopkins is ready to help her team make it to the NCAA tournament with her teammates.
“Being the underdog, we want to prove to other division three schools that we deserve to be in the NCAA tournament and to showcase what we have.” Said Hopkins. “Every day, even on our days off, our team is putting in hard work to get better as a player and a teammate. The dedication and hard work I see from my teammates pushes me to be a better player.”