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How Many NCAA Lacrosse Teams Are There?

We thought it would be a fun exercise to take a look at just how many NCAA lacrosse teams there are out there for both the men’s and women’s sport to see just how much the game has grown over the years.

It’s safe to say that the women’s sport is exploding across the country. Yes, Title IX does make it much easier to add a women’s program to an NCAA’s school athletic department, which has certainly helped the growth of the sport for the women’s game.

But, make no mistake, women’s lacrosse is actually the faster growing sport compared to the men’s game across the country. In fact, lacrosse is the tenth-most played sport at the high school level among girls in the country, according to the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations. I’m not 100 percent on this, but since the NFHS only gathers data from state athletic associations, I assume that means that data for club sports at high schools, as is common in lacrosse across a significant portion of the country, I would bet that number is even higher.

According to US Lacrosse’s 2017 participation survey, the number of schools sponsoring the sport at the high school level grew 28.3 percent for the girls in comparison with 24 percent for the boys from 2012 to 2017. The number of boys participating in lacrosse at the high school level grew roughly 10 percent from 2012 to 2017, while number of girls participating in lacrosse grew roughly 18 percent.

This growth at the high school level has reflected on the growth of the NCAA lacrosse world as well.

Since 1980, the NCAA has added 40 new Men’s Division I programs, with 17 of those programs joining the NCAA since the new decade in 2010.

Likewise, since 1980, the NCAA has added 89 new Women’s Division I programs, with 31 or those programs joining the NCAA since 2010.

So, just exactly which schools are playing NCAA lacrosse? Here’s a complete table of all of the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Division I, Division II and Division III schools, so we can see just how many NCAA lacrosse teams there are.

Note: We took data from Wikipedia and created a table with the associated information. As there was no list of Division III lacrosse teams, we compared last year’s Division III teams that competed against the list of Division III schools.

NCAA Lacrosse Schools

Men’s

Women’s

So, how many NCAA lacrosse teams are there?

Well, there is 391 on the men’s side, and 497 on the women’s side.

That’s a lot of lacrosse teams.