The NCAA lacrosse championships: Princeton and Northwestern in 2026, and the finals since 2022.

Status on 23 October 2026

The 2026 NCAA lacrosse championships are finished. In Division I, Princeton beat Notre Dame 16-9 in the men's final on 25 May 2026, and Northwestern beat North Carolina 14-11 in the women's final on 24 May 2026. The Division II and III results below rest on search summaries of pages we could not open, and the 2026 Division III women's champion was not found. Dates and hosts for the 2027 championships were not part of our research.

A note on sources: NCAA.com's own pages returned no readable content to our research, so these results come from conference, school, Associated Press and USA Lacrosse reports, and we say where a fact rests only on a search summary or on Wikipedia.

Division I men

2026. Princeton beat Notre Dame 16-9 on Monday 25 May 2026 at Scott Stadium, Charlottesville, Virginia; the NCAA had named the University of Virginia as host. Goalkeeper Ryan Croddick was Most Outstanding Player (Ivy League, 26 May 2026). The Associated Press called it Princeton's first title since 2001, and Wikipedia counts it as the school's seventh. The Ivy League said it was the league's 12th national championship and its second in a row, after Cornell in 2025. In an AP report seen as a search summary, top seed Princeton (17-2) fell behind 3-0 and then scored the last 11 goals of the first half against No. 2 seed Notre Dame (13-3), which was playing its third final in four years.

2023 and 2024 from the ACC's reports; 2026 from the Ivy League. The 2022 and 2025 finals rest on search summaries of school, press and AP reports, with the score and venue also given by Wikipedia.

• 2025: Cornell's fourth title and its first since 1977; CJ Kirst scored six goals in the final.
• 2024: Notre Dame's second title in a row, finishing 16-1, in front of 31,479 (ACC).
• 2023: Notre Dame's first title; Liam Entenmann made 18 saves, and 30,462 attended (ACC).
• 2022: Maryland finished 18-0 for its fourth NCAA title, after 1973, 1975 and 2017. How rare that unbeaten season was is described two ways, both only in search summaries: a Big Ten release as the first team to go 18-0, and Maryland's own account as the fourth unbeaten NCAA champion and the first since Virginia in 2006. Both can be true at once, but neither is confirmed from the full text.

Wikipedia, a secondary source, gives the field as 18 teams in 2022 and 2025 and 17 in 2023 and 2024, and lists Syracuse (10 titles), Johns Hopkins (9), Princeton (7) and Virginia (7) as the leading title winners of the NCAA era. A search summary of the NCAA's history page says Syracuse's 1990 title was vacated. We could not check these counts against the NCAA.

Division I women

2026. Northwestern beat North Carolina 14-11 on 24 May 2026 on its home field in Evanston, Illinois, for its ninth title (AP). The AP said Northwestern was the first team to win a national championship on its own field since 1986, that coach Kelly Amonte Hiller became the winningest coach in Division I championship games, and that North Carolina's Chloe Humphrey tied the Division I single-season record of 109 goals. Search summaries of NCAA.com and Wikipedia name the venue as Martin Stadium and Humphrey as Most Outstanding Player; we could not confirm either from a page we read.

In 2022 North Carolina finished 22-0 for its third title, after 2013 and 2016, before a sellout crowd of 8,500, and Sam Geiersbach was Most Outstanding Player (ACC). The 2025 title was North Carolina's fourth. USA Lacrosse's timeline records a record crowd of 14,423 at the 2025 women's final at Gillette Stadium.

Divisions II and III in 2026

The NCAA runs Division II and III championships for men and for women. The 2026 results we found rest on search summaries and headlines, not on pages we read, so treat each as unconfirmed:

• Division II men: Tampa beat two-time defending champion Adelphi 12-11 in overtime, a rematch of the 2025 final, from an 18-team field (NCAA.com search summary).
• Division III men: Tufts beat RIT 17-11 for a third title in a row and its fifth in all, with the final set for Scott Stadium, Charlottesville (NCAA.com search summary; USA Lacrosse headline of 29 May 2026).
• Division II women: Florida Southern beat Maryville (Missouri) in the final at Rochester, New York, its first title since 2016 (NCAA.com headline and search summary). The score was not found.
• Division III women: the champion was not found. Search summaries describe a 47-team field led by Middlebury, which was seeking a fifth title in a row, with the final set for 24 May 2026 at Rochester, New York.

Where the NCAA record begins

• Men, 1971. The USILA says the NCAA held its first national men's tournament in 1971. Cornell won it, beating Maryland 12-6 on 5 June 1971 under coach Richie Moran (Cornell Athletics). Before that, the USILA chose an annual champion, the Wingate Memorial Trophy winner, from 1934 to 1970; the trophy went to the first two NCAA champions and was then retired (USILA).
• Women, 1982. The NCAA says its first women's lacrosse championship was a single title game on 16 May 1982, in which Massachusetts beat Trenton State, now The College of New Jersey, 9-6.

For the longer story of the college game, see college lacrosse. How the NCAA and high school rule codes differ from World Lacrosse's is on college and high school rules, and the 2026 television plan is on watching lacrosse.