The return to the NCAA Tournament will have to wait until at least 2025 for the Colorado women’s lacrosse team.
Despite being ranked for the bulk of the season before reaching the final Pac-12 Conference championship game, the Buffaloes were left out of the 29-team field for the NCAA Tournament when the matchups were announced on Sunday night.
CU (13-6) hasn’t reached the NCAA Tournament since a run of three consecutive bids concluded in 2019.
Certainly the Buffs had some commendable marks on their resume. CU went 6-3 on the road and finished third in the Pac-12, winning two conference tournament games to advance to the Pac-12 championship game for the fifth time.
In the end, however, the Buffs suffered from recording too few quality wins. The Buffs finished at No. 24 in the RPI and went 1-5 against teams ranked ahead of them in the RPI (CU did defeat USC in the Pac-12 semifinals when the Trojans were just ahead of the Buffs in the RPI, but Trojans dropped behind CU following that decision.) The lone win was a 10-9 victory against Penn State in the second game of the season on Feb. 16.
CU went 1-3 against Stanford and USC, the teams that finished ahead of the Buffs in the Pac-12. CU lost at USC on April 21 before defeating the Trojans in the Pac-12 semifinals on Thursday. The Buffs were swept by Stanford, losing at home on March 15 before losing against the Cardinal again on Saturday in the conference title game. CU fell to 0-5 in the Pac-12 championship game.
Senior Madeline Pisani finishes the season with 67 goals, the second-highest total in program history behind Darby Kiernan’s 70 goals in 2018. Pisani’s 80 points tied Miranda Stinson’s 2019 total for the third-most in team history. Pisani set a team record with an average of 3.53 goals per game.
Stanford was the only Pac-12 team named to the tournament field.
Next year, CU will be a charter member of the first Big 12 women’s lacrosse conference alongside Arizona State and Cincinnati. Florida, San Diego State and UC Davis will be affiliate members of the conference.
