Detroit Mercy Lacrosse Finds Home In NEC Conference

One of the hardest sports to earn an NCAA tournament bid to is lacrosse. Of course, we are excluding football who has an entirely different system than the rest of collegiate sports. When you look at teams advancing to the postseason to compete for the NCAA national championship in their respective sports, most of them are either winning their conference regular season and/or the conference playoff championship.

Those are considered to be automatic qualifiers (AQ) bids but not every conference fulfills the AQ requirements and there are also some schools who aren't competing in a conference. You need at least 6 teams in your conference to be considered eligible for an AQ bid, if not you must win against good teams and hope your record is good enough for the committee to award you a spot. Detroit Mercy has only played in 1 NCAA tournament game but that may change soon.

Get our free mobile app

Before this upcoming season the Detroit Mercy Titans were competing in the ASUN conference for lacrosse which has Mercer, Utah, Robert Morris, Queens, Lindenwood, Jacksonville, Air Force, Bellarmine, and Cleveland State. This provided a tough conference to compete in, adding to their troubles in reaching the NCAA tournament as the past few years have been dominated by Jacksonville, Air Force, and Utah.

This is good news for the titans as they will be moving into a conference that has multiple teams who have recently made the jump to Division I and other teams who have been playing Division I lacrosse but are closer to their skill level. Detroit Mercy has a legitimate shot over the next couple of years to scoop up the NEC's AQ bid and return to the NCAA tournament for only the second time in their program's history.