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Gauchos Release Fall Ball Schedule

Aug. 26, 2009

Santa Barbara, CA - The UCSB women's lacrosse fall ball schedule was released today and includes three play-days, a matchup with Cal Poly SLO on UCSB Family Weekend, the program's annual alumni game and the UCSB 3 v. 3 Tournament capping off six weeks of non-traditional season action. The Gauchos start off the fall competition schedule hosting the second annual Santa Barbara Fall Brawl on Sunday, October 18th. College programs attending include UCSB, the WDIA programs from UCLA, Cal Poly SLO and Oregon as well as NCAA DIII University of Redlands. The play-day also has divisions for middle school and high school travel clubs. The high school division includes BearLax (the UC Berkeley coaching staff's elite travel club team), Blue Dog Lax, S&D Lax and Team OC so far. The middle school division has BearLax and Team OC at the front end of the registration process and there's room for at least two more middle school teams.

UCSB takes to the road the next weekend to play at St. Mary's College and will scrimmage UC Berkeley and St. Mary's on Saturday, October 24th. The format includes the teams running some joint drills and controlled situations against each other as well as scrimmaging. UC Berkeley were the MPSF Championship Tournament runners-up in 2009, losing 18-13 to 13th ranked Stanford in the championship game. Following training and scrimmaging the teams and families will tailgate / picnic together. The next day the Gauchos will be at the Davis Play-Day at UC Davis. The schedule for that has yet to be released but UCSB should pick up three shortened scrimmages against NCAA opponents at the Davis Play-Day.

When the Gauchos get home from Davis they will take the entire week off from practicing and have a BYE weekend from games. "It's midterm week for most classes at UCSB and it's Halloween that weekend," comments head coach Paul Ramsey, "so it's a great time to take a week off." 

Following the BYE week UCSB takes on rival Cal Poly SLO in a double header at 11am and 1pm on Saturday, November 7th, during UCSB Family Weekend. It's the first fall matchup between these two programs in recent history. "Outcomes between us have been 1 or 2 goal decisions the last four times we've played over the last two years so this will be an intense set of games in front of all of our team family members," says Ramsey.

Fall Ball at UCSB always includes the annual alumni game the second Saturday of November and that's true this year too. The Gauchos will take on their alumni in a 2pm game on November 14th. Wrapping up the fall season at the end of the sixth week of action is the UCSB 3 v. 3 Tournament. All the UCSB players split up into teams of 5 or 6 players each to compete against each other and multiple teams from all over California in the Open Division. This event also has a High School division.

UCSB returns 10 starters and 15 players overall from it's 'A' Team. The Gauchos return 11 starters and 20 players overall from it's 'B' Team. They also have a class of 14 freshmen already declaring they're coming out for the team. It quite possibly could be the strongest UCSB team of this decade and now it has a fall schedule to match.

"We're testing ourselves this fall with scrimmages against the best teams we could find who will play us," says Ramsey. "With all these experienced players returning it's going to be beneficial for us to get all this early action against these top WDIA teams and NCAA teams."

Complete Fall Ball Schedule