Meet The Crease. The lacrosse storyline page that updates while you sleep. Every night, The Crease redraws itself. Headline storylines, brackets to watch, streaks worth tracking, the goal differential leaders, the seven day calendar. All from the data. Don't worry about us, we will be hunched over a laptop at 11 pm hoping to file before deadline.
If you are a baseball or softball person, you have already met our pages called The Dugout. The Crease is the lacrosse equivalent. Same anatomy, lacrosse flavor. Goalies replace catchers. Goals replace runs. Co ops are still co ops, except in lacrosse they outnumber single school teams in many classes. The Maine lacrosse season is short, the schedule is dense, the storylines pile up fast. The Crease keeps up.
What you actually see when you open it.
Top of the page: this week's storylines. Auto picked from streaks, blowouts, top of class matchups, and bracket bubble teams. Below that: a quick scan across the brackets, who is leading each class. Then streaks worth watching, both directions (hot teams and cold teams, two or more games). Then the by the numbers section with this season's macro stats. Then goal differential leaders, the teams that are not just winning, but winning by a margin. Then a seven day calendar of who plays whom in the next week.
Real example from this week: Falmouth boys sitting at PIR 81.49, top of the entire sport. Kennebunk girls 3-0, all wins by 5+ goals, top of the girls field at PIR 76.09. Wells girls riding a W3 streak with the Heal Points rank lead. Maranacook/Winthrop girls putting up an absurd 18.0 goals scored, 0.5 allowed per game in Class C. The County's Northern Maine Moose carrying the flag for everybody north of Bangor.
Why The Crease and not just The Slate.
The Slate is a list of games. Every team, every score, every result. The Slate answers 'what happened.' The Crease answers 'what does what happened MEAN.' Different questions. Both useful. Different pages.
If you only have ninety seconds of phone time on a bus to the next field, The Crease is the page. The Slate is the page when you actually have time to scroll game by game. The Crease is the headline newsletter. The Slate is the box score appendix.
The Crease is honest. If there is a 12 player Class C team riding a six game streak, they are on the page tonight. If a Class A program is 0-3 and looking like it is going to miss the bracket, The Crease will not soften that for you. The streaks list does not lie. Neither does the goal differential leaderboard. We just put it on the screen and let it be loud.
Why this is sticky.
Lacrosse season is short. April 16 to mid June. Eight to fourteen games per team. There is no time to wait until the playoffs to know who is actually good. The Crease compresses the answer to that question into a single page that you can refresh every morning and learn something new. By the third week of the season, you should be able to call the regional finalists by reading this page consistently. By the fifth week, you can predict half the bubble. By the sixth week, you are arguing with your friend about it.
Now go open the page.