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State Lacrosse Field gave the men's and women's programs their :rst dedicated facility, and while it still awaits a full com- plement of bleacher seating – as Tambroni told BWI last year, "It's a :eld that needs to become a stadium" – it's a step up from the past. So too was the announcement last summer of the new Big Ten lacrosse conference, which will include Maryland, Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State, new league member Rutgers, and a=liate mem- ber (and nine-time national champ) Johns Hopkins. "There's a lot of buzz about BCS football schools :elding lacrosse pro- grams," Lee said. "Those kinds of schools have things you can't replicate at a lot of other programs." Big Ten lacrosse play kicks o< in 2014- 15, one more mile marker on a path that sets up awfully well for the Lions' attempts to claim a place among the nation's best. For now, they're playing out their :nal season in the Colonial Athletic Association, and for all the looking ahead, there would be more than a little irony if this Penn State team were to reach the Final Four. What looks like Tambroni's best team to date – and maybe the best team in program history – is being carried by a senior class recruited by his predecessor. Tambroni is or Penn State men's lacrosse, the future is soon. In early March, the Nittany Lions reached the program's highest-ever ranking, sitting seventh in the major na- tional polls. Granted, they had played only four games at the time, but coming o< a program-record 12 victories in 2013, and boasting a senior-laden squad this spring, Penn State seemed worthy of a place among the national elite. Just don't tell Je< Tambroni. "I think we're getting closer, but how close? That's a question I :ght all the time," said Tambroni, the Lions' fourth- year head coach. "I think every time you 'feel' like you're getting close, you take a step or two back. So I try not to think in those terms." The man who turned a pretty good Cor- nell program into an Ivy League power and three-time NCAA semi:nalist, Tam- broni is not easily impressed with his own success. His immediate impact at Penn State – the Lions, 2-11 in the season before his arrival, went 7-7, 9-6 and 12-5 in his :rst three years on the job – is undeniable, but the coach expects more. And he's not the only one. If there's a message in those early polls, it's that the coaches and writers who vote in the national polls see Penn State as a program on the verge. Kind of like the sport itself. Put simply, lacrosse is booming. Long a regional pastime centered in Canada, the U.S. Northeast and the Bal- timore/Washington, D.C., area, it is adding participants at a staggering rate and spreading nationwide. US Lacrosse, the sport's national governing body, notes that while the four most popular team sports (basketball, football, baseball and soccer) saw a 4 percent drop in youth participation from 2008 to 2012, partic- ipation in lacrosse went up 158 percent in that same period. That growth is re- ;ected at the NCAA level, where 30 new varsity programs were added in 2012, in- cluding the men's program at Michigan, which according to US Lacrosse marks the :rst new lax program at a BCS school in more than 30 years. For a lot of reasons, Penn State appears well positioned to ride that wave of pop- ularity further than most. It starts with Tambroni, who has already shown that his remarkably successful decade at Cornell was no ;uke. "People have known for a long time about Je<'s reputation, and when he made the move to Penn State, a lot of people felt he would do the exact same thing there," said Ed Lee, who covers college lacrosse for the Baltimore Sun. "I don't think it's much of a sur- prise to see the level they're at now." That the Lions have reached this level with players recruited before Tambroni's arrival speaks to the value of the coach's system. "I always make the analogy to Brad Stevens at Butler basketball," said Terry Foy, managing editor of Inside Lacrosse magazine. "They're young guys, both really sharp, and for the most part, both got close to winning a nation- al championship without a lot of star players. For Penn State, there's no question his hiring served notice to the lacrosse community at large." Other moves have delivered a similar message. The opening in 2012 of Penn | F GROWTH STRATEGY Penn State invested in its lacrosse program by building a lax-specific facility and by hiring Tambroni away from Cornell, where he guided the Big Red to three appear- ances in the NCAA semifinals. WAVE RIDERS Lacrosse is on the rise – and so is PSU's program Penn State Athletic Communications V A R S I T Y V I E W S

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