Lacrosse Myths: Debunking the size difference between Division 1 and Division 3

Overview

If you play lacrosse, you have an excuse why you didn’t go Division 1 (D1). It’s one of my favorite games in the locker room the, “Yeah, I could have gone D1, BUT” game. For me, it was because I was too small. Unlike other players who might stand out on film, a 5’10 150 pounds (of pure muscle that I might add) attack man was not making any coaches drool over getting me. Therefore, instead of trying to go D1 I went the Division 3 route (D3).

My decision to play D3 was only enhanced when multiple coaches told me that the difference between a D1 and D3 lacrosse player was “2 inches, 20 pounds, and 2 tenths of a second.” They said that on a whole the average D3 player had the same stick skills as a (D1) player; however they D1 players were bigger, faster, and stronger. There are always going to be anomalies and exceptions to this rule no matter what sport you are playing and this holds true in lacrosse as well (see Joey Sankey, who holds UNC’s all-time point record (229) despite standing only 5’5 tall and weighing 160 pounds), however this size rule was the general consensus around the lacrosse community. Being the good lacrosse player that I was, I blindly followed the advice and information my coach gave me and never questioned them. Now that I have left the game I’ve decided to fact check and see if my coaches were telling the truth or providing alternative facts.

Parameters

I would like to preface this article by saying this is going to become very numbers centric. I apologize but this is also what you get for reading an paper from a strategy and analytics consultant, our job is to throw so many numbers at you until you have no choice but to blindly follow our advice.

In order to determine test this theory, I analyzed height and weight of 59/70 D1 lacrosse programs, and 63/227 D3 programs from the 2016 season. The reason why I used 2016 as a reference point was because many of the 2017 rosters still do not include the height and weight of the freshman. If a roster, did not still display the 2016 roster, I would use the most up to date version the team had on file. Now you might be wondering, why did I exclude 11 D1 programs and 164 D3 programs?

As explained above there are currently 70 D1 lacrosse programs in the United States. Out of those 70 teams, all but 2 were aligned to a conference (NJIT & Hampton). Since both of them finished, 68th and 70th in total end of the year ranking (based off laxpower – more to come on that later), I excluded them as they did not follow the typical mold of a D1 lacrosse program (Hampton also didn’t even play a full lacrosse season). That brings us to 68 teams to analyze in D1. 9 Teams (Stony Brook, Penn St., UMass, Drexel, Vermont, Providence, BU, Colgate, and Mercer) either do not publicize their size online or have a list that is easily exportable into excel. This brings me to my next point…

Part of the reason, I only used the top teams in D3 is three fold. First, it takes a long time to go to the teams website, copy the text, special paste the text in as “text” font in excel, deliminate the height, convert the height into inches by creating an excel formula, delete deliminated column, and format the text. Thus, just the sheer amount of time it took me to paste the 122 (D1 and D3 combined) teams took me over 12+ hours. Second, D3 lacrosse has a wide variety of talent. Some of the programs are very well established (see Tufts playing Harvard or other top D1 programs evenly in the preseason), and other teams are up and coming and are still building their program from a “club” team. Third, in order to keep it consistent between D1 and D3, I tried to take the same amount of teams and thus limited it to the top 70 teams. Just like D1, there were 6 teams (Clarkson, Colorado College, Eastern, Ohio Wesleyan, Cabrini, and Ithaca) that did not publicize or have an easily exportable list. In addition, another 5 teams did not include their weights (Dickinson, Keene State, Haverford, Stockton, and Roger Williams). If the team had data available such as height but not weight, I kept the team in for the study to see if there was still a height correlation.

Assumptions

I already know that there are some lax purists out there screaming that laxpower is not a perfect representation of top teams. I could not agree more. However, I have not found a better website that can power index all teams. Furthermore, if you look at the top 70 teams most of them are the more well established programs. Just for references the following graph breaks down how many teams were included in the study per conference for D3.

(** 4 Miscellaneous Top 70 Teams) (**Worth noting that some numbers are slightly deflated too, the Empire 8, Liberty, and NCAC all have one more team in Top 70, however not included in study because I could not find their height and weight.)

You might be wondering what about the CSAC, Great Northeast, Little East, MIAA, MAC Freedom, Midwest, NEAC, NECC, North Atlantic, OAC, Ohio River, SEILC, and Southern conference. If the conference did not have more than 2 teams in the top 70 then I did not include them in the study. Another thing that is interesting to note with the D3 conferences is how uneven the skill level is in most of the conferences are (but that’s a study for another day).

Other very broad assumptions that helped me break down the roster. I categorized each player into one of four positional buckets, Attack (A) , Midfield (M) , Defense (D) , and Goalie (G). If you play Long Stick Midfield (LSM) I consider you as a defenseman. If you played short stick defense midfield (SSDM) or face off (FO), I categorized you as a midfielder (M). If you had two positions assigned to you (most commonly it was Attack / Midfield), I steered on the side of the more radical position. By radical position I mean I would say you were either an attack man if your position said attack / midfield because let’s be honest if you were on the defensive side of the field your team was most likely trying to get you off as soon as possible (same goes with a midfield / defense player, I said you were defense).

Results

After 20+ hours of nerding out...I mean analyzing the data, I’ve come to the conclusion that while there is a slight difference, there is no concerning data to back up the coaches assertion (I knew I should have checked my coaches work when he would write our line up showing our three starting “polls”).

Total Averages

The average D1 lacrosse player is 71.76 inches (5’11) and 185.95 pounds. The average size of a D3 athlete is 71.28 inches (5’11) and 184.49 pounds. Thus the difference between D1 and D3 players is ½ an inch and 3.5 pounds.

Power Ranking Groups

Next, I broke down the teams into different buckets based on their end of the year standings (1-10, 11-25, 26-50, 51-70).

Once again, the height is a non-issue as every level is around 5’11. Moreover, the difference in weight is only about 4 pounds. Surprisingly if you take the same buckets from each division (for instance the top 10 teams from D1 and top 10 teams from D3), there is that same 4 pound difference.

While I don’t know other sports, lacrosse is one of the few sports that most summer leagues contain players all the way from lowly D3 to top D1 programs. It now makes sense why these leagues can contain players from all different skill levels. Unlike football, where if I lined up across from a D1 defensive tackle, I don’t have to worry about all of my bones getting broke on a play because the players on the other team are basically the same size as me (fine a little bit bigger than me but same general point).

Conference

This next got me to thinking, alright well if the average size is about the same, and there is a correlation between standing and size, are there other correlations with similar teams. Thus, I broke down the height and weight of all of the conferences.

While there is no height difference still, this is where you can start to see that there is a difference per conference. On average, an ACC lacrosse player is almost 10 pounds more than a colonial player. This makes sense when you consider the quality of lacrosse being played in the ACC (4/5 teams in the ACC last year finished in the top 10 in the country). However if you look at the ACC they are the anomaly.

(**y axis is the average weight of the conferee, x axis is the average laxpower ranking of the conference – see chart below for power rankings)

In fact, besides the ACC and Colonial, all other teams fall within one standard deviation (in this case 2.72 lbs) of the mean. Moreover that the American East has the second largest teams on average, however when you look at the average standings ranking they finish 7th (this is even more strange considering I couldn’t pull the statistics of the American East’s best team last year Stony Brook (10th in country), who you would assume would be slightly larger than the rest of the teams based on the “standings” bucket). This is also true vice versa, as you see the Big East is one of the top 3 conferences statistically yet one of the smaller conferences. The last outlier is the Colonial conference which contains the smallest teams despite being one of the stronger conferences.

If we look at the D3 data, we also see a similar outlier with the NESCAC.

As you can see the fluctuation is about the same as the D1 level. The total range for D1 is 5.88 pounds between the strongest and weakest conference, while the same range for D3 is 4.59. You could make the argument that about 30% more fluctuation is a significant difference, however when you consider that the difference of 1.29 pounds of an average of 184 pounds (average of D1 and D3 lacrosse players) that equates to less than 1%. Therefore, once again, the only general difference between the D1 and D3 game is about 4 pounds in weight (unless you want to go to the ACC).

Position

After looking at the conferences, I started to wonder, does this mean that every player in the ACC has to be around 192 pounds? In fact it does not, when you break down the height and weight of the players into their positions, you can see a difference per position. Now, before I display the height and weight, I need to preface by saying that the mean height and weight for all conferences are slightly different than when I combined all of the teams together. The reason is I took the height and weight of all teams, and averaged them per conference. I then took the conferences height and weight and averaged to create an overall average and compared that to the mean I found by averaging all of the teams individually. Thus, since some conference have more teams than other conferences their weight in the formula was more significant. Thus, when you take the height and weight of all conferences and average them they come out to be 71.8 (same height – yay!), and 186.55 pounds (.6 pounds heavier than the other average). Since the numbers were nearly, identical I concluded that it was safe to use the averages of all conferences to create a generic total for heights and weights of all positions and found the following.

As I expected, an average attack man in D1 lacrosse is nearly 5 pounds lighter than the average player, while defenders are nearly 6 pounds heavier! That means that on average an attack man is about 10 pounds lighter than the given defenseman that is covering him. I found nearly identical results in the D3 game as well. While the players are slightly smaller (5 pounds when you take the average of conferences), attack man as a whole are roughly 5 pounds lighter and defensemen are 7 pounds heavier.

While we have not talked about height as much in this report (since the difference was less than an inch), it is worth mentioning through this analysis that on a whole attack man are .5 inch smaller than the average height (5’11), while defenseman are almost a full inch taller. Thus, to go back to our original hypothesis, a better assertion would have been that to play defense in college you need to be about was that defense man in college lacrosse is about 2’ and 20 pounds bigger than attack man.

Class Year

My last thought was does this mean that coming into college lacrosse on average you have to be around 180-185 pounds? Yes and no. The average freshman come in about 3 pounds lighter than the average lacrosse player, thus no you don’t need to be 180 pounds but most aren’t very far from it. Most college programs put their teams on an intense training regimen which makes sense than that on average seniors are about 4 pounds heavier than the team average. Thus, throughout their college experience a typical lacrosse player will put on about 7-8 pounds of muscle (or beer weight no mathematical way for me to check).

Total Variances

Now to tie it all back to D1 and D3 if you look at the variance between them you start to recognize some other discrepancies.

We already knew that the average height and weight was about ½ and inch and 5 pounds (based on the conferences average). The biggest discrepancy was with midfielders where the average D1 midfielder was 7 pounds bigger than a D3 player. What is interesting is that while there is a height and weight discrepancy for field players there is almost no differentiator in height and weight for goalies. Thus, while height and weight might have a slight effect in the field in net, there is virtually no difference in body build.

Conclusion

Lacrosse is a great sport your size does not matter. I’ll give a quick shout out to my dad who saw I was born in the 40th percentile in height and signed me up for lacrosse then and there and pretty much refused to let me play basketball. While the game is changing lacrosse is still predicated on how good your stick skills are not build. Thus, “if you can play, you can play [no matter your size].”