Last Spring, men’s lacrosse looked to have a promising season with an experienced coach, Christopher Button, newly hired to rebuild the program. Except the men’s team ultimately faced the same fate the women’s lacrosse team faced a few months earlier: their program was canceled.
With a record of 0-12 by the end of last season, the CUC men’s lacrosse team did not look good for a fresh start under Coach Button. The administration finally decided to quit the sport.
“From the time I committed in the Spring of 2021 through the program dying, we had three different coaches,” said senior goalie Peter Borkowski. “The coaches would have to restart the recruiting process”
The lacrosse team would sometimes pull athletes from other sports, like football, to keep their numbers up. But for athletes who didn’t already play collegiate lacrosse, this meant teaching new players the sport, Borkowski said.
Women’s lacrosse was the first to go, as there were few recruits for the 23-24 season. Junior Ella Herbig was a freshman when women’s lacrosse had its last full season.
“Lacrosse is kind of new in the Midwest,” said Herbig. “Some of the recruits came from New York or California. Fran Meyer, our coach at the time, never recruited athletes. She had two recruits for the 23-24 season, and one had said no last minute.”
Herbig said there were only seven players on the roster and they needed at least 10 to compete. She wanted to have a season with a sport at CUC and moved to the dance team during her sophomore year.
“In my freshman year, we had seven seniors, which was almost the entire team, and no recruits replacing them,” said Herbig.
In a similar situation, men’s lacrosse was struggling to keep the program going last season.
It’s hard to win games when you are on a low roster size,” said Carter Jedras, a sophomore goalie at the time. “We all managed and adapted as much as we could, but at the end of the day growing the roster size came back down to coaching.”
The previous coach had not done much recruiting before he left, but when Button was hired he had a plan to keep the program going, said Jedras.
Button had experience in the sport coming over from Benedictine University following a winning season. While he was a lacrosse player at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York, Button won the 2013 NCAA Division II Championship.
“Last year was my favorite season to practice, because he was willing to acknowledge what we were as a team,” Borkowski said about Button.
With all these good things said about Christopher Button, he was still let go from the position.
“Admin was more focused on the past rather than on the future with us,” said Borkowski. “If they had given Button time, I think he would have turned it into something.”
“It is hard to say he was given a chance, because he was hired later than the ideal time you would want, therefore not having a chance to recruit as much as last year,” Jedras said.
Janet Wolbert, the CUC athletic director, said it wasn’t Button’s fault that the program was not reaching expectations for the school.
“We tried to do it for another year,” said Wolbert. “But while things were looking like they could be on the right path, it also became an institutional decision to just focus resources in other areas.”
Wolbert said that there are fewer people enrolling at CUC, which is a problem for sports like lacrosse that don’t necessarily have a lot of recruits and winning games.
An email was sent to the men’s lacrosse players and their families scheduling a Microsoft Teams meeting in August to explain the situation and answer any questions. After the meeting, a few former lacrosse players did leave the school, Wolbert said.
