NCAA Men's Lacrosse Championship - Division I

Division I

The first Division I Championship tournament held in 1971 replaced the USILA and Wingate Memorial Trophy national title awards. Since then, 42 NCAA tournaments have been held. In that span nine teams — Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Princeton, North Carolina, Virginia, Cornell, Duke, Maryland, and Loyola — have won the national title, with Syracuse leading with ten titles (plus one vacated by the NCAA). In all, 41 teams have participated in the NCAA tournament since its inception. Only six unseeded teams — the 1988 Cornell Big Red, the 1991 Towson Tigers, the 2006 Massachusetts Minutemen, the 2010 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the 2011 Maryland Terrapins and the 2012 Maryland Terrapins — have made it to the championship game, and only eight unseeded teams have made it to the tournament semi-finals, the most recent being Maryland in 2012. Johns Hopkins has appeared in every tournament, except for 1971. The Number One seed in the tournament has won the title 17 times.

Originally consisting of eight teams, the tournament field has been expanded three times, to 10 in 1986, 12 in 1987 and the current 16 in 2003. The two semifinal games and the final have been played on the same weekend at the same stadium since 1986. All three matches have always been scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, with the semifinals doubleheader on Saturday afternoon and the final held on the holiday itself.

The sport has historically been focused in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states; the sport's heartland expanded into North Carolina beginning in the 1970s. Only six schools from outside the heartland have played in the NCAA tournament—one each from Ohio and Michigan, and two each from Colorado and Indiana.