Florida lacrosse could be on the verge of crashing the NCAA’s party | Whitley

When Amanda O’Leary became Florida’s women’s lacrosse coach, one of the first things she did was have some material printed for the office.

There was just one problem when the order arrived. Lacrosse, the sport, was spelled “LaCrosse” as in the town of about 300 people 15 miles north of Gainesville.

“I appreciate the effort,” O’Leary told the printer, “but we’re not the town.”

Fast forward 17 years in Alachua County. Lacrosse the sport has grown a lot faster than LaCrosse the place, but it’s still relatively hard to find on the UF sports map.

Like, did you know the Gators are just two wins from rocking the entire lacrosse world?

They are in the NCAA Final Four, which begins Friday in Cary, N.C. Since lacrosse became an NCAA sport in 1982, no team south of North Carolina has won the championship.

To lacrosse connoisseurs, Florida taking home the title would feel like the University of Alaska winning the NCAA surfing championship. So if you like underdog stories, this is one worth paying attention to.

The problem is there’s so much else to pay attention to at UF. Just this week, the softball team is hosting a Super Regional. The men’s golf team is defending its NCAA title in California.

The baseball team is, well, never mind. To top it all off, the UF legal team has been invited to the World Series of NIL Lawsuits, hosted by Jaden Rashada.

All that makes it hard for lacrosse to get its proper due.

“As much as we do kind of get that un-recognition, we just focus our team and what we have to do,” senior Danielle Pavinelli said.

They’ve done it exceptionally well this year, taking a 20-match winning streak into the Final Four. In fact, UF lacrosse has been class of its many leagues since O’Leary started the program in 2009.

So I felt sort of ashamed this week. I’ve been in Gainesville three years, and it was the first time I’ve met O’Leary.

Her teams have won three conference championships in that time, which I believe is three more than the most popular team on campus. Of course, they weren’t SEC championships.

The conference’s league’s motto of “It Just Means More” does not apply to lacrosse. Vanderbilt is the only other SEC member that plays the sport.

That’s forced UF to bounce from league to league over the years. If nothing else, that’s allowed O’Leary to stock the most diverse trophy case on campus. Her teams have routinely won titles in the American Lacrosse Conference, the Big East and the AAC.

Next year, the Gators will be in the Big 12. Sounds weird, doesn’t it?

“Yeah, you want to be in the SEC,” O’Leary said. “Unfortunately, they don’t have it.”

Don’t take that as a Woe-Is-Us whine. O’Leary is a blonde ball of positivity and good humor, and that echoes throughout her team. Players don’t call her “Coach;” they call her “Mandy.”

Wherever they play, they celebrate wins by going to a local ice cream parlor. It’s hard to imagine UF’s entire football squad hitting the Baskin-Robbins after a game and yukking it up with “Billy.”

“The team chemistry is off the charts,” O’Leary said.

It’s been strengthened by a foxhole mentality. UF started 0-2 but hasn’t lost a match since. Despite that, the Gators were unseeded when the 32-team NCAA tournament bracket came out. They’ve won three road matches and are the first unseeded team to make the Final Four since 2017.

“There’s a little bit of a chip on our shoulder,” Pavinelli said.

They’ll play mighty Northwestern in the semifinal. Only in lacrosse could you type “mighty Northwestern.”

Lacrosse is in the water up North, which is where most of UF’s players are from. But youth leagues have been booming in the South, which bodes well for programs like Florida.

If the Gators get past the top-seeded will play the winner of the Syracuse-Boston College game.

“Not to sound cocky or anything; I don’t want to sound that way, but I am very confident in this group of girls,” said Maggi Hall, the Gators’ leading scorer.

Along with all that ACC, Big East and ALC hardware, she can picture adding the most cherished trophy in the sport:

NCAA Champion.

Nobody around here would ever again mistake lacrosse for LaCrosse.

David Whitley is The Gainesville Sun's sports columnist. Contact him at dwhitley@gannett.com. Follow him on X @DavidEWhitley

This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Florida's outsider women's lacrosse team might crash the NCAA party