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TAMPA, Fla. – What started as nothing more than a vision nearly four years ago has officially come into focus for the USF women’s lacrosse team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“When you can’t see, feel or touch something, you need a lot of people that can put a lot of trust and belief in the vision,” said Bulls head coach Mindy McCord.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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When Mindy McCord stepped onto the campus of South Florida back in 2022, she began the two-year task of building the school’s new women’s lacrosse<\/a> program from scratch.<\/p>\n “We all came here with nothing,” said junior attacker Sofia Chepenik.<\/p>\n “We couldn’t see anything but the belief that we had in each other, this program and our coaches.”\u00a0<\/p>\n The backstory:<\/p>\n Before the Bulls’ inaugural season in 2025, players spent more than a year practicing and scrimmaging other teams only.\u00a0<\/p>\n But nearly two years of practice and preparation have paid off for the Bulls<\/a> in just their second season.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I said, ‘One team, I’ll be standing in front of one team where we get to create program history and get the first championship. And I hope it’s you.’ And it was,” McCord recalls.\u00a0<\/p>\n By the numbers:<\/p>\n The Bulls finished the regular season with an (11-4) record while going undefeated (6-0) in conference to capture an outright American conference regular season title.\u00a0<\/p>\n They join Florida<\/a> as the only Division I women’s lacrosse programs to win a conference crown within their first two years of existence.<\/p>\n What they’re saying:<\/p>\n “It’s pretty incredible that we’re so new, and we’re still building,” said sophomore goalkeeper Nat Eastwood.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, with the program’s first conference title secured, this batch of Bulls has set the bar for future generations of the team.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We finally set the standard of ‘You come here to win championships,'” Chepenik said. “Every team after has that same expectation.”<\/p>\n What may have started out as a dream four years ago has now become reality for the Bulls.<\/p>\n “This is one part of that dream. There’s still so much more we can accomplish,” McCord said.\u00a0<\/p>\n What’s next:<\/p>\n The Bulls begin play in the American Conference tournament Thursday in Nashville as they look to secure an NCAA<\/a> Tournament bid for the first time ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Source: The information in the story below was gathered by FOX 13’s Sean Barie while covering a USF women’s lacrosse practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Tampa<\/a>NCAA Sports<\/a>University of South Florida<\/a>Sports<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. – What started as nothing more than a vision nearly four years ago has officially come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[47,629,67359,1536,110,135,137,136,628,1537],"class_list":["post-249158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-fl","tag-hillsborough","tag-ncaa-sports","tag-organization","tag-sports","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-us","tag-usf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/vlcsnap-2026-04-27-20h50m00s185.png\")
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