Photos by John Nation
“Why aren’t we playing lacrosse?”
Scott Howe’s children posed that question to him in 1997. They were in College Park, Md., for the 25th reunion of his NCAA champion lacrosse team at the University of Virginia, and all the kids there knew the game better than the Howe children. Their question stuck with him. Indeed, he thought later, why not?
Now, nearly a decade has passed and kids in Kentucky are playing lacrosse, and though it’s still a niche sport, it’s positioned to break out in a big way. Eight years ago, interest in the game was marginal. “I had 16 boys come out in ’98 and they were mostly hockey players,” explains Howe, the lacrosse coach at St.XavierHigh School. “We practiced two or three times a week in a goat pasture filled with mole holes and sinkholes.”
Field conditions are still spotty for certain schools today, but participation in the game, commonly known as “lax,” has far outgrown those first hockey-on-grass roots. Caught up in a tr/files/storyimages/that has blown through America, and especially the Southeast in recent years, lacrosse is played competitively by boys and girls middle school and up — in Louisville, Lexington, OldhamCounty and even Glasgow.
Howe, a Baltimore native, wasn’t alone on Louisville lacrosse’s ground floor. He is, however, along with fellow Baltimoreans Stu Bailey and Mike Petty, one of the godfathers of the local game. Bailey played in high school and explains that the impetus for getting kids involved in the game began with a group of dads. “We’re a bunch of misplaced Easterners and we loved to get together and play, but we’re getting older,” says Bailey.
Like Howe, he wanted his child, a daughter, to enjoy the game he played, so he called the sport’s governing body, US Lacrosse, and created the Kentucky Lacrosse Association. The KLA, formed in 1998, oversees boys and girls games at both the middle and high school levels. Bailey took tapes to BallardHigh School and talked to kids during their lunch period about signing up for leagues at E.P.“Tom”SawyerPark. Quickly, what began as boys and girls club teams, made up of kids from different schools, has now ballooned into a high school boys league with 18 teams in two divisions and a high school girls league with 11 teams. “The kids do the real recruiting,” says Bailey. “They tell their friends that they have to play.”
At this point, technical difficulties may be the only thing that could stymie lacrosse’s progress in the region. Howe describes difficulties finding enough fields and getting enough coaches. Bailey echoes this concern, saying, “We don’t have the coaches to start training kids younger than fourth grade, and most of the coaches are already volunteers.” That means that the first crop of lacrosse players — the hockey guys and football guys who are college-age or older — will be relied upon to teach the game to younger kids.
“I enjoy it because lacrosse is so new to the younger kids,” says Russ Davenport. “It’s nice to teach true fundamentals — unlike basketball, where even young kids already have bad habits.” Davenport played on Ballard’s first official team in 2002, coached a mixed Meyzeek/St. Francis squad as a college freshman, coached Manual last year and would coach this year were he not a walk-on at Bellarmine University, which is in its second season fielding a Division I men’s squad.
Davenport’s enthusiasm for lacrosse resounds with almost every person who picks up a stick and plays. Kimberly Offutt, Kentucky Country Day’s girls-team coach, began playing while she was in high school in Colorado Springs and loves how the action flows, particularly under rules for female contests that stress less contact. “Appropriately played, the game is graceful and beautiful. It’s pass, pass, pass, shoot,” says Offutt with an appreciative lilt in her voice. “When you see the girls learn something new, it’s thrilling,” she adds, “but the hardest part about coaching is not playing.”
For Steve Auden, Manual’s girls coach, lacrosse provides tremendous lessons for the girls who play. “Girls have something to gain,” he says. “They’re allowed to fail, mess up and go forward,” which is something young girls aren’t necessarily taught by a vapid MTV culture that focuses on appearances. “Because lacrosse is so new here, girls who haven’t played other sports see that it’s new to everyone and they think, ‘I can
try this.’”
As for the boys, the game’s physicality is vastly appealing. St. X goalie Creighton Benoit used to play soccer and baseball, but now he focuses on lacrosse. “This is the sport I want to play,” says Creighton, “It’s the adrenaline rush and I love hitting people.”
For the uninitiated, Bailey explains that lacrosse is “basketball on a 110-by-60-yard field, with a few more players and a much smaller ball.” Like basketball, lacrosse involves fast breaks, passing, spacing and screening, and it maintains a fairly quick pace that allows for rapid scoring and buzzer-beaters. “You’re fully engaged as soon as you walk on the field,” says Bailey.
The number of players on the field differs for men (10) and women (12), with the men’s game having three attackers on offense, three midfielders, three defenders and a goalie. Other basic facts can be summarized as follows: Male players, who wear shoulder pads and helmets, are allowed to hit their opponents and use nets on their sticks with about a two-inch-deep pocket; females, who wear eye protection and a mouthguard but no helmet or pads, are not allowed body contact and have shallower pockets on their stick-heads. Because shallow stick-head pockets make the ball more difficult to hold, women players pass the ball more frequently; men are more likely to carry it for longer periods of time.
The atmosphere resembles other school sports. During an early season Ballard-St. X boy’s game, Ballard’s public school hecklers shouted to the players from private, all-male St. X, “Real men don’t wear yellow gloves! Real men go to school with girls!” The crowd also gets riled up and excited at big hits, but unlike football, there isn’t as much trash-talking or animosity on the field. “This is a gentleman’s game,” explains Howe. “After the game, everybody gets along.”
Like field hockey, lacrosse shares the distinction of not being recognized by the Kentucky High School Athletic Association, but unlike the exclusively girl’s game, lacrosse still isn’t on the map with the Jefferson County Public Schools either. Local public-school teams therefore typically compete under club, rather than varsity, status. According to KLA Secretary Doug Hamilton, there must be six public high schools fielding boys and girls’ teams before the sport is acknowledged by JCPS, and currently lacrosse is one girls and two boys teams short of that number. The KLA, however, sponsors its own state tournament, the finals of which will be played May 19, most likely at either Trinity or Ballard.
At Manual, where the girls have won the last two state championships, coach Auden is frustrated that his girls aren’t allowed to display their championship trophies at school. The cost of equipment and the scarcity of fields make it hard for many public schools to start new teams, so the KLA is trying to attain corporate partnerships to help promote the game in areas of Louisville that wouldn’t otherwise gain exposure to the sport. “There’s a big push from US Lacrosse and the KLA to get kids involved in non-affluent areas,” Bailey says. “The area around Pleasure Ridge Park, Doss, Shawnee — that’s where we want to go.”
If the KLA’s program is successful, lacrosse could be a sanctioned sport in Jefferson County within a few years. Additionally, with the emergence of a Division I men’s team at Bellarmine and the addition of women’s lacrosse at the University of Louisville (it was launched this year as a club sport and will become a varsity sport in 2008), the game has a synergy going for it that could catapult it to widespread acceptance. At last year’s state finals at Ballard, approximately 1,000 people showed up to see the girls play and 4,000 came to see the boys.
More often these days the question in Louisville isn’t, “Why can’t we play lacrosse?” It’s, “How long before we get to?”