JOSH HERWITT
Josh is CSTV.com's men's basketball editor and writes a weekly national column. E-mail here!
A day after the NCAA tournament selection committee left many college lacrosse fans stunned and confused with its No. 4 seed for undefeated Cornell in the men's playoffs, drama, for better or worse, didn't ensue on the women's side.
While the Big Red has every right to question the decision that was made, there was no question that Northwestern deserved to be the No. 1 seed in the women's NCAA tournament, and the committee made sure that notion rang true when the bracket was officially announced Monday night.
After all, the top-ranked Wildcats aren't two-time defending national champions for no reason. Kelly Amonte Hiller has her veteran team primed for a third straight national title having won 17 straight -- most recently an ALC Tournament championship over Johns Hopkins last weekend in Baltimore -- since dropping its season opener in double overtime to North Carolina.
And with the way the bracket lines up, you have to like her chances.
Northwestern (17-1) shouldn't have a problem getting around its first-round opponent in Patriot League champion Holy Cross, and the Wildcats' quarterfinal matchup against Big East champion Syracuse or eighth-seeded Vanderbilt won't be enough to slow down the Evanston school's quest to return to the championship game in Philadelphia.
It certainly doesn't bode well for the up-and-coming Commodores, who the Wildcats demolished back in February, posting a 20-2 win in Nashville that ignited their double-digit winning streak and fourth straight trip to the NCAA tournament.
That's also the case with unseeded Syracuse, who fell to Northwestern, 10-7, in a game that saw the Wildcats hold the Orange's potent offensive attack to its lowest output of the season.
So with the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament looking quite favorable for Northwestern, the semifinals could bring the Wildcats their first true test of the postseason.
That's where Amonte Hiller and her squad could potentially meet fourth-seeded Penn, a team that ran through the Ivy League untouched and suffered its only loss of the season -- a 12-4 drubbing back at the beginning of March -- to whom else but Northwestern.
And if it's not the Quakers in the semifinals, Northwestern could find itself taking on a familiar foe in fifth-seeded Maryland, a team that the Wildcats saw just three weeks ago at Lakeside Field. Northwestern had no problem taking care of business in its first meeting with the Terrapins, scoring a 12-7 victory at home with last year's Teewaraton Trophy winner Kristen Kjellman scoring two of her three goals in the second half to help NU pull away after halftime.
Getting to Philadelphia won't center squarely on the shoulders of Kjellman, however.
The senior midfielder from Westwood, Mass., is once again the favorite to win the Player of the Year award with a scoring line that reads 79 points on 57 goals and 22 assists, but Kjellman has a well-versed supporting cast that couldn't get much better with All-American candidates Hannah Nielsen, Aly Josephs, Hilary Bowen and Meredith Frank all in the fold.
Nielsen, in particular, has been just as impressive as Kjellman. The Australian native has really come on during her sophomore campaign, registering a team-high 106 points on 45 goals and 61 assists after managing to tally just 21 points as a freshman.
Meanwhile, the performances that Josephs, Bowen and Frank have exhibited this season haven't been that far off from what the Wildcats' explosive midfield tandem in Kjellman and Nielsen has already accomplished.
Bowen, a sophomore from Rochester, N.Y., has been dependable week in and week out after a solid freshman year, ranking second on the team with 80 points on 48 goals and 32 assists. Frank has also made quite an impression with her scoring ability in just her second year with Northwestern, and her 51 goals isn't something opponents can shy away from.
But just like the men's selection committee, the women's bracket made the same point of stating that the ACC is currently college lacrosse's most prominent and competitive conference in the country. That's certainly not hard to see after all four ACC teams in the NCAA tournament earned seeds and will each host their first round games this Sunday.
And that's a credit to the strength of the conference and the tough non-conference schedule that second-seeded Duke, third-seeded Virginia, Maryland and No. 6-seed North Carolina all endured over the course of the spring.
"We played an extremely difficult schedule and a 14-3 record is a great finish for us," Duke coach Kerstin Kimel said after the selection was announced. "I think that the NCAA tournament committee must have agreed and therefore gave us the No. 2 spot."
For a team like Penn, though, earning a No. 4 seed and being paired in the same bracket as Northwestern significantly hurts the Quakers' chances of making an appearance in the national championship game.
But teams across the board have started to learn over the past two years that as long as Kjellman and Northwestern's ring of scoring mates are on the field, the national championship must go through Evanston, Ill., before it hits anywhere else.
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