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Message: [QUOTE="Newhouse_83, post: 3017793, member: 7139"] I'm sorry you found my point about age "ridiculous:" You seem to have missed the key elements. First, EVERYBODY on SU's staff -- even the volunteer assistant -- is 50-plus. NO kid being recruited now has ever seen those guys play; for most recruits, SU's entire coaching staff has always been guys who are older than their parents. That's not the case with the schools the board seems to agree SU recruits against -- Hopkins, Duke, UVa, Yale: etc. My pitch if I'm hard-core recruiting the next Prendergast or other upstate standout to choose Duke over SU: "Come here and win national championships for guys you watch on TV, guys whose posters you had on your walls as a kid. Or go to Syracuse, play for your grandpa and his buddies, see lots of trophies in the Dome and miss Championship Weekend." Again, I'm NOT saying older coach = bad coach. I'm saying that when your three paid coaches and your operations director all are eligible for AARP, you're gonna have a much harder time than your rivals making a connection with today's recruits ... ESPECIALLY when said rivals have academic reputations that are as good or better than yours, and aren't in places where winter can run from Halloween to finals week. The larger point you missed is the overall lack of diversity on that staff. Four of the five coaches learned the game from Mike Messere ... who, as we know, taught and coached the game one way, "the right way." That worked for a long time until it didn't. If you watched the last couple years, you saw he couldn't connect with today's teens, and results suffered. The four SU coaches (all but Rogers, who grew up one county away) also are from the RS Jr. coaching tree. Dude was a wizard as a coach, but when everyone's thinking the same way, it doesn't encourage innovation and quality adaptation as the college game changes. The attempt at an "expensive schools" argument ignores SU's significant disadvantage: endowment size and the cost-of-attendance question. Because my mother is a Brown alumna, I know that school has made it that many middle-class kids who qualify academically can go to the school and pay very little -- at most, what they'd pay to attend a state school. Harvard has a similar deal, and they're likely not the only Ivies or selective schools to do so. Duke and UVa have endowments that far surpass SU's. I grew up in a middle-class household; the aid I got to attend SU was zippo. That appears to have changed little, and the "please donate money" pitches I get tend to be more along the lines of "donate money so we can make Newhouse bigger." Finally, the "parity" idea. I think people are using that to mean that high school lacrosse players have more college choices now than they used to, whether they want to compete for a title, or just want to keep playing the game. Nobody's using like it's the NFL and an ideal season would be to have everyone go 8-8. [/QUOTE]

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