Johns Hopkins makes Big Ten, lacrosse history

BALTIMORE If you shot a lacrosse ball downhill from the home of the sport's most decorated family, within a mile it would pass the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and then reach the nation's oldest lacrosse stadium where the eight Stanwick kids who lived up the street would go to practice and spare their house's sunroom windows.

If one of the Stanwicks shot the ball with the accuracy that has produced more than 1,000 Division I goals over nearly two decades, it likely would wind up in an appropriate place: Johns Hopkins University's Cordish Lacrosse Center (what other university has a lacrosse center?), where nine NCAA lacrosse championship trophies are displayed in a two-story-high case, with the Blue Jays' 35 other national titles carved into a stair wall.

The windows atop the staircase provide a panoramic view of 8,500-seat Homewood Field, built in 1906 for a lacrosse program started in 1883. That was 13 years before the founding of the college conference whose logo has been displayed on the Homewood turf since the start of this season, marking one of the most dramatic changes ever in the sport's history.

"When we heard we were joining the Big Ten, it was kind of crazy, because when you hear Big Ten, you think of football and basketball," said Wells Stanwick, a Hopkins senior attackman. "To be in a big-time conference like this is something pretty special."

It also is a bit incongruous: a university with Division III status in every other sport not only going up against the Monsters of the Midwest but becoming the preseason pick to win the title in the inaugural season of Big Ten lacrosse. Fittingly, the league scheduled Saturday's meeting at Homewood Field against another Big Ten debutant, Rutgers, as the conference's first men's lacrosse game.

That it happened reflects the seismic changes in the landscape of big-time college sports, with conferences like the Big Ten spreading far beyond their natural geographic base.

In this case, it was the 2012 addition to the Big Ten of Maryland, partner to Johns Hopkins in lacrosse's oldest and fiercest rivalry, that motivated Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany to call JHU athletic director Tom Calder about two years ago.

"It came out of the blue, so I initially was thinking maybe this is a joke," Calder said. "Then I realized it really was Jim Delany, and he said, 'What are your thoughts about joining a conference in lacrosse? Why don't you consider us?'''

The conference switching involving men's lacrosse powers like Syracuse (11 NCAA titles) and Maryland (two) had Johns Hopkins concerned about how long it could continue as an independent.

Johns Hopkins' seemingly natural lacrosse home, the Atlantic Coast Conference, expressed no interest in adding the Blue Jays.

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Johns Hopkins makes Big Ten, lacrosse history