A week ago, Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon mentioned during a sit-down interview with AnnArbor.com that part of his first year on the job was spent investigating the possible addition of men's and women's lacrosse as varsity sports.

While he said at the time that it wasn't official yet, Brandon indicated it was likely the school would add the spring sport in the near future.

That time may be at noon Wednesday, at a press conference scheduled by the school.

MGoBlog.com and Inside Lacrosse are reporting sources confirmed that men's and women's lacrosse will be added as varsity sports at the press conference.

When asked during the interview if Michigan would add programs other than lacrosse, Brandon stayed focused on the one sport.

"Right now, that's enough," Brandon said last week in Chicago. "Those are two very large head-count sports with significant scholarship opportunities available, so from both from a financial perspective as well as an operational activation perspective, if we get to the point to where we feel comfortable committing to those two sports, it'll be a couple-of-years journey to get us to the point where we have them established and fully funded in terms of talent and coaches and players and obviously there will be facility needs.

"That's a big project, a huge project."

While adding women's lacrosse is a big deal, the addition of the men's counterpart is even larger because of Title IX requirements. Few schools have added men's lacrosse in the past few years. This season, 61 schools played Division I men's lacrosse and 91 played Division I women's lacrosse.

Michigan will have an advantage other startup programs do not have. Its club lacrosse program has been dominant over the past few seasons, winning national championships in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The team was eliminated in a national semifinal on Friday.

Michigan will be the third Big Ten school to add men's lacrosse, joining Ohio State and Penn State.

It'll also be the fourth league school to add women's lacrosse, joining Penn State, Ohio State and national powerhouse Northwestern. The Wildcats have played in the last six national title games and won five in a row before losing to Maryland last year.

Michigan will also be the second school in the state to add lacrosse, joining the University of Detroit.

"It's a large head-count sport and clearly we're not going to add a men's sport unless we add a women's sport to complement it," Brandon said. "So we're still working on that, haven't made any official announcements yet, but it is a significant initiative."

Besides Ohio State, longtime Michigan rival Notre Dame also plays both men's and women's lacrosse. It's a sport with three distinct pockets of interest — Long Island, N.Y.; Baltimore/Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia and upstate New York — that is also a strong draw for out-of-state students that attend Michigan.

While women's lacrosse has been dominated by Northwestern over the past half decade, the men's game has had four schools rule the sport since the mid-1970's: Syracuse, Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Virginia.

The past few years, though, more schools have broken through. Duke won the national championship a year ago and Denver will be the first team west of the Mississippi River to play in the Final Four this year. When the Blue Devils won last year, it marked the first time since 1991 a team other than 'Cuse, Princeton, Virginia or Hopkins had won the national championship.

The timing of the announcement comes as the sport has its biggest weekend — the Final Four — in Baltimore starting Saturday. The Final Four is a spring tradition in the northeast and typically draws between 40,000 to 50,000 people.

Michael Rothstein covers Michigan sports for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by email at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein.