Item: The last year in the Big East Conference was the university’s most successful in all sports.
For the first time ever, Syracuse athletics has reached the Top-25 in the NACDA Directors’ Cup standings, joining Stanford (1st), Duke (8th), and Southern California (14th) as the only private, non-state or land-grant institutions on the Top 25 list. That’s pretty impressive.
Four teams advanced to their sport’s Final Four, women’s field hockey, men’s basketball, and men’s and women’s lacrosse; while men’s soccer, men’s cross country, and women’s basketball all earned NCAA invitations, and, of course, the football team won the Pinstripe Bowl.
» Related: Lacrosse final fours cap great year for SU sports
“Reaching the Top-25 is a credit to our coaches, student-athletes and fans who are ‘all in’ in helping us build a broad-based athletics program at Syracuse University that pursues excellence across all sports,” said Daryl Gross about one of the more notable accomplishments in now his eighth year leading the charge.
“We have been climbing steadily for several years, and we are thrilled to reach the top 25 at this point in the year. Our challenge now as we move to the ACC is to continue to achieve and score even higher.”
Besides Duke, the other ACC schools in the Top 25 were North Carolina (4th), Florida State (15th), and Virginia (17th).
Accordingly, we have a feeling that the team the ‘Cuse really starts to develop a multi-sport rivalry with moving forward is fellow private school Duke. Not only the obvious basketball matchup, but now with three-straight years and counting of lacrosse meetings guaranteed, along with the fact the Blue Devils are a Top 10 NACDA school, it will only fuel the competitiveness.
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