Not. Done. Yet.
Propelled by its best-ever showing at the Western Women's Lacrosse League Playoffs this past weekend, the
Grand Canyon University Women's Lacrosse team has earned an at-large bid to be part of the four-day, 16-team, 2024 USA Lacrosse Women's Collegiate Lacrosse Associates National Championship. It's the second time in the 11-year history of the program that the Lopes have earned a trip to nationals – having
finished in 3rd place at the WCLA Division II National Championships in 2017 – but it's the first time the team is representing GCU on the D1 level. The tournament will be held beginning May 7 in Wichita, Kansas, with the 2024 champion to be crowned on Friday, May 10.
The Lopes are seeded 15
th in the 16-team field and are one of three teams heading to Kansas to represent the WWLL. The Lopes finished the WWLL Playoffs behind league champion UCLA, who is seeded 3
rd in the national tourney, and WWLL runnerup Arizona State University, who is considered the nation's 12
th-best team heading to Wichita. The Lopes put themselves in position for the trip to Kansas by virtue of their upsets of San Diego State University and the University of California-Berkeley in the WWLL tourney –
the latter win clinching 3rd place in the tournament, which was the Lopes' best finish in the history of the event.
The Lopes are officially battle-tested for the tournament, having played a total of five games against four other teams in the tournament: #3 UCLA, #4 University of Pittsburgh, the 12
th-seeded Sun Devils (both in the regular season and in the WWLL Playoffs) and 16
th-seeded Utah Valley University. The Lopes were 0-5 in those matchups, but three of those games were on the road.
"Honestly, I wasn't expecting this," said Lopes' Head Coach Tracy Ramirez. "I knew they were enough to make this jump - beating some top teams this year - but didn't know if that would be good enough. We got this by playing the teams in the Cactus Classic (including Pitt and BYU in late February in Tempe) and beating San Diego State in the tournament. The people that saw us play against those teams really thought we were tournament-worthy because of that."
USA Lacrosse will formally announce the schedules, matchups and brackets at a later date.
The full list of tournament seeds is below:
| Seed |
Team |
Overall Record |
| 1 |
Florida |
14-1 |
| 2 |
Georgia |
14-1 |
| 3 |
UCLA |
13-1 |
| 4 |
Pittsburgh |
9-1 |
| 5 |
Northeastern (MA) |
9-3 |
| 6 |
Utah |
8-2 |
| 7 |
Florida State |
11-3 |
| 8 |
Boston College (Club) |
7-5 |
| 9 |
Virginia Tech |
7-5 |
| 10 |
Michigan (Club) |
8-4 |
| 11 |
Clemson (SC) |
9-5 |
| 12 |
Arizona State |
8-8 |
| 13 |
Texas A&M |
11-3 |
| 14 |
Washington |
8-2-1 |
| 15 |
Grand Canyon |
8-8 |
| 16 |
Utah Valley |
6-3 |
