Sept. 28, 2017
By Leigh Torbin
NOTRE DAME, Ind. – As the 2018 Notre Dame women’s lacrosse team looks to extend its school-record streak of reaching the NCAA Championships to seven consecutive years, the Irish will be properly prepared for what lies ahead by a challenging fall schedule which features five games out of seven coming against 2017 NCAA participants.
The Irish will open up the slate on Saturday afternoon at Arlotta Stadium when they play host to Central Michigan at 12:30 p.m. This opening weekend of “fall ball” will include a doubleheader on Sunday as Notre Dame faces Michigan at 1 p.m. and Northwestern at 3:40 p.m. wrapped around a 2:20 p.m. contest pitting the Wildcats and Wolverines.
The Irish will get a taste of road life, and face two 2017 NCAA qualifiers in as a many days the following weekend. Notre Dame will face North Carolina at 10 a.m. on Oct. 7 at the Finley fields, just hours before the Irish football team takes on the Tar Heels right around the corner at Kenan Stadium. The team will stay in Chapel Hill to face Elon on Sunday at noon before heading back to campus.
The fall schedule concludes on Oct. 29 with an Evanston, Illinois doubleheader against Northwestern and Colorado, both of which were NCAA Championship selections this past spring.
Notre Dame is building upon a 2017 season that saw the team earn an NCAA Championship bid for the sixth time in six seasons under head coach Christine Halfpenny. The Irish tied for third place in the regular season ACC standings last season, buoyed by top 10 road wins at both Duke and Syracuse. The Irish have also added to their already-potent lineup by adding the nation’s fifth-ranked recruiting class this spring.
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Leigh Torbin, athletics communications assistant director at the University of Notre Dame, has been part of the Fighting Irish athletics communications team since 2013. A native of Framingham, Massachusetts, Torbin graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in sports management. He has previously worked full-time on the athletic communications staffs at Vanderbilt, Florida, Connecticut and UCF.