A 2024 national championship topped off a perfect season for men’s lacrosse.
Hiking the steep path to the Y is hard enough, but every season after tryouts the BYU men’s lacrosse team takes the trail at a determined pace. “Typically we run to the bottom of the Y,” says J. Taylor Mason (BS ’24), an MBA student and team captain. “But this year, the team felt different.”
Back in 2021 the team celebrated its fifth national championship in the Men’s Collegiate Lacrosse Association, the highest arena for non-NCAA play, but fell just short of the title in 2022 and 2023.
“We wanted to go further. That’s the mentality we brought with us.”
Taylor Mason
Mason and his co-captains recognized the potential to go all the way with the 2023–24 team, led by 11 returning seniors. “We decided to run to the top of the Y,” Mason says. From campus, the distance between the bottom and top of the Y doesn’t look like much, “but it’s a long, steep climb at the end,” continues Mason. “We wanted to go farther. That’s the mentality we brought with us into the season.”
That mindset paid off in an unprecedented winning streak: BYU won every game in conference play before securing the conference title by 20 points. The wins kept coming during the national tournament in Round Rock, Texas, culminating in a final against Utah Valley University in which the Cougs reclaimed the national title—and completed the program’s first perfect, undefeated season.
“We didn’t just win all of our games,” says Coach Matthew F. Schneck (BA ’98). “Our average point differential was almost 10 goals a game. There really was an overall offensive and defensive dominance.”
The team won their national championship 13–5, with seven goals scored by senior Jake R. Halversen (BS ’24). “Our offense this past year was just so hard to guard,” Halversen says. “We had at least six guys on the field that could score. The other team couldn’t zone in on one person.” Mason and his teammates on defense kept to their season-long goal of allowing no more than seven points per game.
The matchup against the 14th-seeded hometown rival UVU was a surprise. “Utah Valley really overachieved throughout the tournament,” Schneck says. “There was almost this feeling of, ‘Wow, we came all the way to the national championship tournament to end up playing a team from three miles away.’”
The Cougars showed up at every game hungry and confident, says Halversen. “The mindset all season was to take every game as if it’s the last game. Nothing given, everything earned.”
