ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Randy Mearns isn’t so much joining the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference as he is returning home wearing some new colors.
Mearns coached men’s lacrosse at Canisius for 19 seasons, all of them in the MAAC. Last week, his new school, St. Bonaventure, which he joined in June 2017 to plan the Bonnies’ first Division I men’s lacrosse program for 2018-19, officially joined, giving the conference an eighth member in the sport.
Mearns and athletic director Tim Kenney explained the the Bonnies’ request to join the MAAC in a wide-ranging interview with the Times Herald last week. Unlike women’s lacrosse, which the Bonnies started playing in 2000, the Atlantic 10 doesn’t sponsor men’s lacrosse.
“When you look at the geographic region,” Kenney said, “obviously with the A-10 not having lacrosse as a conference sport, we said, ‘What’s the right fit? Where can we look, where do we fit in the footprint of these leagues?’ Also, competitiveness, because we’re new.
“All of that put together, plus the school’s demographics within the MAAC fit well with us. It’s a great home for us and they were very open too, filling out with eight teams and making scheduling a little bit easier, putting that all together, all of that kind of came into play at the end.”
This school year, Bona and Utah will mark the 72nd and 73rd Division I teams in men’s lacrosse. Several recent D-I programs remain independent in the sport, including NJIT (2015), Hampton (2016), Cleveland State (2017) and Utah.
Mearns didn’t want to start his new program without a conference, and thus without a path to a conference championship and NCAA Tournament bid.
“For me personally, first and foremost it’s the right fit in terms of the school population, the school dynamics,” Mearns said. “It was very important for us to get into a conference because there’s still some programs out there, NJIT, Cleveland State, Hampton, Utah. Utah’s coming in and they’re starting as an independent school and what that means is unless they get an at-large bid, which means you have to be a top-10 program, you’re not going to the NCAAs. There’s no real ladder for you to get there.”
Kenney agreed, but first he wanted the Bonnies to settle into a “home” before considering tournament bids.
“I think it’s more just having a home that you could create rivalry games within that footprint,” Kenney said. “(An) at-large is always nice, but from a conference standpoint (an automatic bid) does help us. But it’s going to take some time for us to get up to speed. We’ve got a lot of young pups coming in right now.”
He hopes to build on existing rivalries with MAAC schools like with Canisius and Siena in basketball.
“We’ve always had a good relationship with the MAAC, whether it comes to Rich Ensor, the commissioner, or the teams within it,” Kenney said. “I’ve been lucky enough to know a lot of the athletic directors. There might be something in the future that we can put together as a challenge thing, like we’re doing right now with Siena with the Franciscan Cup (in basketball), but can you do that and incorporate more with it? Those are some fun avenues we’ll look at as this keeps evolving. At this point, it’s more from a lacrosse perspective making sure all our i’s are dotted and our t’s are crossed heading into the year because we want to make sure we have everything set to give us the best opportunity to have success right out of the gate.”
Bona joins Canisius, Detroit Mercy, Manhattan, Marist, Monmouth, Quinnipiac and Siena in the conference.
What can it expect?
Given his nearly two decades in the MAAC, Mearns described it as a slowly improving conference.
“Being in the MAAC when it started to where last year left off and myself deciding to come here, it’s grown,” he said. “It continues to grow every year. It gets a little bit better, little bit better, little bit better, where you look at many of the institutions of how they’re funding the sport of men’s and women’s lacrosse, especially in the Northeast and now within the MAAC, it’s very, very enticing.”
Mearns thinks the Bonnies fit within the MAAC, giving it an even number of teams. He has big plans for the program, which Bona plans to fully fund, and eventually contend for conference titles (he won two at Canisius, 2008 and 2012) and tourney bids.
“At the end of the day, they could have just sat there and said, ‘We don’t need another team,’” Mearns said of the MAAC. “But we’re a right fit for that institution, it allows more of an even structure in terms of scheduling so nobody has a bye week. Plus, there were some advantages, I believe, with the MAAC continuing to evolve with a higher-conference RPI, they know that we’re a right fit with the resources that we’re going to put into men’s and women’s lacrosse.
“Specific to men’s lacrosse, the question is how competitive can we be, how quickly? That’s going to be the challenge for us. We’re super, super excited to be in the MAAC and have a home and I don’t know if it’s an advantage or not, it’s just I know Quinnipiac and Monmouth because I played them for 19 years for the most part. I think we’ll be able to hit the ground running as opposed to going into a different conference and not being familiar with those institutions and coaching styles and that type of thing.”
(Salamanca Press sports editor Sam Wilson may be contacted at samwilsonsp@gmail.com)
