Saturday’s men’s lacrosse championship game will pit UVa and Notre Dame, who met twice earlier this season, with UVa winning both games despite Notre Dame being ranked No. 1 in the country on both occasions. The winner will face off against the winner of Duke-Penn State on Monday.
Notre Dame’s 34-year head coach, Kevin Corrigan, is the longest tenured Division I men’s lacrosse coach.
Corrigan is a UVa graduate, having grown up in Charlottesville, while his father, Gene, was the athletic director at UVa and later the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Kevin Corrigan was an assistant under “Ace” Adams at UVa in the 1980s before his first head-coaching job at Randolph-Macon in 1985-86.
Portal switch
Cole Kastner, a premium defenseman for the Virginia men’s lacrosse team, has entered the transfer portal with thoughts of possibly playing Division I basketball.
Kastner, who is 6 foot 7, is from Palo Alto, Calif, where he averaged 17 points and 10 rebounds as a senior at Menlo School, not far from the Stanford campus.
Kastner was one of six UVa players named to the All-ACC lacrosse first team. One of those, midfielder Thomas McConvey, is a transfer from Vermont, where he had 60 goals and 22 assists in 2022 and had 172 points over two seasons.
More lacrosse
Six players from Washington and Lee men’s lacrosse team received mention on the Division III All-American team named by the U.S. Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association, including two who made the second team, seniors Harris Hubbard and Hudson Pokorny.
Hubbard is from a Texas lacrosse power, Highland Park, in Dallas. The current Highland Park coach is former Washington and Lee player and coach Mike Pressler, who also was the head coach at VMI, Duke and Bryant.
Portal in football
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Virginia coach Tony Elliott, who was an assistant at Clemson, has picked up a second Clemson player off the transfer portal, Malcolm Greene, a defensive back from Highland Springs who participated in the Clemson spring game.
Coming out of Highland Springs outside of Richmond, Greene was rated the No. 3 prospect in Virginia by rivals.com. Greene, a four-star prospect coming out of high school, has one remaining season of eligibility.
In December, Virginia welcomed former Clemson running back, Kobe Pace, to the team.
Transfer
Carole Miller, who played in 84 games with 67 starts in four years on the Virginia women’s basketball team, is transferring to James Madison. “She’s a perfect addition to what we have,” said Dukes’ coach Sean Regan, whose team was 26-8 this past season. The Cavaliers finished 15-15 after a 12-0 start under new coach Amaka “Mox” Agugua-Hamilton.
UVa defensive end Hunter Stewart from Alexandria has entered the transfer portal. He played in 25 games over three seasons. He has two seasons of remaining eligibility, having redshirted as a freshman. As a graduate student, players can enter the portal outside of the designated April 15-30 window.
Coaching
A victory in last weekend’s NCAA women’s golf championship was the first in that sport for Wake Forest, which has six programs with NCAA championships, the most recent in men’s tennis in 2018.
The Deacons’ women’s golf coach is Kim Lewellen, who took the job in 2018 after 10 years as the women’s golf coach at Virginia, including ACC championships in 2015 and 2016. In 2011, she was named LPGA national coach of the year while at UVa.
Scanning the globe
A recruiting class put together by VMI soccer coach Nick Regan includes players from Jamaica, Honduras, Colombia, and India, as well as recruits who completed high school in this country but had played abroad.