Lacrosse is rolling now. Both sides of the ball, both genders, all three classes, with eight programs already through their first four or five games unbeaten. The early book on Maine lacrosse this spring is that the talent is spread wider than it has been in a while. The top of each class is dense, and the gap between top and middle is real. Let's run through it.
Falmouth has both top spots and they are not letting them go.
Falmouth girls are 5-0 in Class A with a state-leading 97.6 PIR. Falmouth boys are 4-0 in Class A with a 97.2 PIR. Same school, both teams sitting one and three on the statewide Power Rating board. The boys are scoring 13.8 a game with a +9 differential. The girls are scoring 11.4 with a +6.4 differential. Whatever the shared weight room and the shared turf and the shared coaching staff conversations look like in Falmouth right now, they are working.
Messalonskee is the other program with both teams in the top tier.
The Eagles boys are 5-0 in Class B with a 97.4 PIR, second in the state. The Eagles girls are also 5-0 in Class B with a 97.2 PIR. Same record, same class, same school, both top five. Messalonskee girls have allowed two goals a game across five tries. Messalonskee boys are scoring 9.8 and giving up 3.8. Class B is going to come down to a long bus trip somewhere, but Oakland has the early answer.
Maranacook/Winthrop is doing something nobody else in the state is doing.
The Maranacook/Winthrop co-op girls are 4-0 in Class C, scoring 19.2 a game with a 1.0 opponent goal average. Their margin per game is plus 18.2. They beat Erskine 22-3 on May 1 and beat Gardiner/Hall-Dale 19-0 on April 29. Class C girls lacrosse has had a top tier for a while. The Black Bears are at the top of it, and they are not playing tight games.
The boys side of that co-op is 2-2, including a 12-11 loss at home to Leavitt on May 1. The cap on the boys side is currently the same one most of Class C is wrestling with, which is whether you can keep up the offensive pace against the better Class B and A nonconference dates. Different season, same school crest, two different stories.
Class A keeps stacking up.
Kennebunk girls are 5-0 in Class A with a 92.9 PIR. Thornton Academy boys are 4-0 with a 91.7 PIR and a +13 differential. Add in the two Falmouth programs and you already have four undefeated A teams two weeks into the season. Bonny Eagle girls are 3-1 after dropping their first one. Yarmouth boys, Marshwood boys, and Westbrook girls are all hovering at three wins with one or zero losses.
If you want to see how this all sorts out, the rankings page runs every morning, with PIR sorted by class and gender. DSI grades how hard the schedule has actually been so far, which matters a lot in lacrosse where the cross-class scheduling is heavier than it is in baseball.
How GameIQ is doing.
GameIQ, our prediction engine, hit on 65 of its 75 lacrosse calls last week. That is 86.7 percent. Season to date the engine is sitting at 143 for 180, or 79.4 percent, with most of the misses being one-goal upsets that the engine had at 55 to 60 percent. All Access members get the projected line on every game on the Slate, along with win probability and the post-game grade. Lacrosse came online a little later than basketball did, but the early returns are clean.
The biggest GameIQ miss of the week was that Leavitt at Maranacook/Winthrop boys game we mentioned, where Maranacook had a 66 percent home edge and lost 12-11. The other notable upsets were Marshwood over Bonny Eagle 15-11, Greely over Gray-NG/Poland 16-7, and Cheverus over Yarmouth 8-6. None of those were blowout misses, all of them were one-possession games or close to it.
Big games this week, real fast.
Maranacook/Winthrop girls 22, Erskine 3. Marshwood boys 20, Biddeford 4. Deering boys 22, Portland 6. Wells boys 17, Fryeburg Academy 2. Camden Hills girls 16, Lincoln Academy 2. Fryeburg Academy boys 19, Traip 4. The shutout count was lower than baseball this week (only two on the lacrosse side), but the run differentials are bigger than anybody expected.
What we're watching this week.
Falmouth girls draw their first real Class A test. Messalonskee boys at Brewer is going to tell us a lot about the top of B North. Thornton Academy gets Scarborough. The Maranacook/Winthrop girls steamroller continues. And the Greely girls program, which has dominated Class B in recent springs, plays their second-toughest stretch of the early schedule.
If you are new to any of the metrics on the site, PIR is the Power Index Rating, our headline number. DSI is Depth of Schedule Index, the nine-layer schedule difficulty rating. Both update every morning.
Final note, and the one we say at the bottom of every recap. Maine lacrosse is a community sport that runs on bake sales, parent volunteers, and coaches who answer their email at 11pm. We track all of it because all of it matters.