<p>Scholarships don’t really matter as much in lax. It’s not like lax programs have such huge budget to support full-tuition scholarship for everyone. </p>
<p>Nobody expected Northwestern to be competitive when the program was reinstated in the early 2000s. People weren’t thinking, “Northwestern is having a team now and it gives scholarships; it’s going to be better than any of the Ivies soon”. The best players in high schools are mostly in the east coast; NU is far from getting all the best HS players. </p>
<p>I think the major reason why Northwestern did such a nice job is the players train and work harder than those in other teams. If you’ve been watching the games, Northwestern is the only team that plays high pressure defense like the men’s teams do. Even “scholarship” teams like Virgina, Duke, or Maryland don’t do that.</p>