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*To my knowledge, has not yet committed to DIII
Winners:
Harding – Obviously, they can’t really go up from first, but after handily beating many decent DI teams at Huck Finn, I think they have successfully secured the number 1 seed at DIII Championships (assuming they go undefeated at DIII conference championships and regionals).
St John’s: – They played really well at High Tide, convincingly beating a solid DIII team in Lehigh, and, most impressively, beating Vermont on day 2. They would be first except that, from what I am told, their loss to Vermont on day 3 was due to fatigue. At the DIII championships they cannot let fatigue affect them so much if they want to make it to semis and finals
Bowdoin – It’s very hard for me to compare the results of north eastern teams to the rest of the country, because they do so little play outside their region. However, Bowdoin has made the case at D-1337 that they are the best that the Metro East and New England has to offer. For now they can take Wake Forest’s spot at 10, but we won’t truly know until DIII Championships arrive.
Puget Sound – They won the PLU BBQ pretty handily but didn’t see any major competition. Still a wildcard in this bunch.
Losers:
None of the top 10 has really played poorly since the last ranking set, so I can’t call out any specific losers.
What to Watch:
This coming weekend is the last weekend of the regular season, but there are still a few tournaments that will help determine strength bids and seedings at nationals:
- At the New England Open, we will get to see Bentley (who put up a strong showing at D-1337) and Wesleyan (a relative unknown) play against some good DI teams, and hopefully each other. Because we have a much better understanding of the New England D1 teams, this will better allow to calibrate NE and ME teams with the rest of the teams in our list.
- At Roll Call, we’ll see Catholic, Colgate, Lehigh, Swarthmore, WPI, RPI and SUNY – Fredonia all compete. This should also be pretty helpful in that we get to see some more inter region play.
- At Garden State Open II, we’ll see Vassar, Bowdoin and several other DIII teams play.
- We’ll see St John’s and North Park (2 of our top 10) compete at the Chicago Invite, as well as a whole host of DIII teams in Wheaton, Truman State, Xavier, Rose-Hulman, Valparaiso, Kalamazoo, Olviet Nazarene.
Feature photo by Christina Schmidt (UltiPhotos.com)
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