The Rise of Lacrosse

The R I SE of Lacrosse

by Collin Benedict staff writer

Why North America’s oldest sport is seeing a spike in popularity

hile many sports in high school are popular and gather crowds’ and players’ attention, one sport often gets overlooked: lacrosse. Lacrosse is similar to many other sports, such as football and hockey because of the hitting and physical power required. Also to soccer because of the way the field is set up, and basketball by the way players position themselves to score points. Despite its lack of popularity in current sport culture, lacrosse is North America’s oldest sport. It was played as early as the 17th century by Native Americans, originally known as Stickball. Instead of just being played for fun, there were a variety of reasons these games were played: resolving intertribe disputes, festivals, bets, recreation, and strength training for young warriors. Up to 1,000 participants showed up to play at these events back in the day, unlike the modern number around 30 or 40. Jean de Brebeuf, a French Jesuit missionary working in St. Lawrence Valley in 1636, observed the game being played and gave the sport its modern name. Lacrosse increased in size and popularity in Canada throughout the 1800s and was observed by Queen Victoria of England in 1876. Lacrosse continued to grow, and leagues were formed around North America over the years. Making its way south from the Canadian border, lacrosse has recently entered the Traverse City area and brought Central and West students together. Because it is such a small sport, Traverse City has

Wadopted a lacrosse team composed of student athletes from Central and West. The name for this team is TC United. There is a JV and Varsity team, and their season is in the spring with practices after school. Spencer Gerber ‘24, a TC United JV player, like many others, enjoys playing the newly-trending game. “I like playing offense, and I really like it when you dodge a defender and then score a goal — it’s a really good feeling,” Gerber explains. Mason Clark ‘24, is also a JV TC United player who began playing last year. “I have a lot of friends that play lacrosse, and I kinda got bored of the current sports I was playing, like soccer. Lacrosse is probably my favorite sport I’ve played so far,” he says. Transitions to new things are never easy, but lacrosse is known for having a welcoming community. “It’s just fun. We do a lot of fun things, like last week most of the JV players went down to Thirlby, and we played touch football, passed around for a couple of hours, ran some drills. It’s just pretty fun to hang out,” Clark recalls. Even though lacrosse shares many of the same aspects as other sports, there are some differences. “It’s a lot more fast paced than other sports, it never really stops like football and baseball. It’s got some different rules than other sports like if a ball goes out of bounds it’s not who threw the ball out of bounds, it’s whoever’s closest to the ball gets the ball,” Gerber explains. Every sport has easy and difficult aspects to it, including lacrosse. “The hardest part for me is probably all the cardio that it involves. You

Graphic: M. Swope

have to be running a lot on the lacrosse field, and you always have to be giving it 100 percent, which is pretty hard,” Gerber notes. “Working on accuracy and being able to progress the ball down the field where you want it to go,” is the hardest part of lacrosse for Clark. Despite its challenges, Gerber enjoys the camaraderie aspect of the sport. “My favorite part about lacrosse is all my friends I have on the team. I’ve been playing on the same team for a while, so we all have really good chemistry, and we just have a fun team,” Gerber states. Jackson Dobreff ‘24, a TC United Varsity player, has loved the game of lacrosse all of his life. “I feel like it’s just a really good sport and I’ve been playing with my friends pretty much all of my life so it’s just been really fun to go and travel with my friends and play on the field,” Dobreff explains. Having played lacrosse for so long, Dobreff understands the dynamics very well: “I think it’s really similar to hockey. It’s more interesting [than other sports], honestly, because you can hold the ball in your stick which allows you to do more jukes and stuff and crazy plays.” On the other hand, Dobreff finds that “it’s definitely a different sport than a lot of sports, because there’s certain positions and they’re all different. Defenders even have different sticks than everyone else. It’s just a really complex game because it’s one of the first sports ever created.” Every team sport creates a bond with teammates, no matter what sport it is. “The bond last year was pretty crazy, it got tough to see the seniors leave because we were so heavily bonded. Obviously it might seem a little harder to bond because we were a united lacrosse team but we still loved the West guys as we loved the Central teammates,” Dobreff shares.

Lacrosse has playoffs at the end of each season to determine the best teams, and TC United “did go pretty far. We took a tough loss to Grandville by [a] goal or two and that was hard. But other than that, we were winning most of our games and we were competing with a lot of Grand Rapids schools and downstate schools,” Dobreff recalls. Lacrosse practices start off like most team practices, “ We get drills going as soon as we get there, [then] we get warmups started, and after that we get drills going almost like game drills, so they’re really fun. We pretty much run full speed. It’s great.” Even though a school like St. Francis (SF) is smaller than both West and Central, they have their own lacrosse team. Dobreff “I’ve been playing on the likes the fact that both schools same team for awhile, so share a team. “We could definitewe all have really good chemistry.” ly have our own lacrosse team for Central, but for some reason they feel like some classes might not produce enough lacrosse players to field a team. [With] a sport as small as lacrosse, it’s hard to keep consistent players coming out. So with both schools united, it’s a promising team, but we could definitely field one team per school.” While lacrosse may have long-lacked popularity, the spike is now coming. From its origin in the 17th century to being the most likely sport to get a scholarship in, lacrosse has come a long way. Now there are lacrosse clubs and leagues all over the country, and we have a community-driven lacrosse team of Central and West High School players. Lacrosse has also seen a rise in televised games, and has been steadily increasing in viewership. Even though sports like football and basketball remain more popular, lacrosse’s time has come. //

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