From his office in Baltimore near the campus of Johns Hopkins University, U.S. Lacrosse executive director Steve Stenersen can peek out of his window and catch a glimpse of Homewood Field, home to the Hopkins Blue Jays, defending NCAA men’s lacrosse champions, and something of a spiritual and physical home to the game itself.
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A children’s lacrosse team practices on a
field at Malibu High School in California. |
But Stenersen, whose organization exists to increase participation and awareness of a game that has literally been around for centuries, is casting his eyes and efforts much, much farther out than his hometown these days.
While Baltimore and other areas including Long Island and upstate New York have long been hotbeds for a sport created by American Indians and played primarily in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast for generations, lacrosse is enjoying a surge in popularity. The growth is being propelled by myriad factors including improved grassroots organization and communication efforts, new manufacturers and media outlets entering the fray, two growing professional leagues, more TV time, new college programs and an undeniable “cool factor” driven by the sport’s warriorlike look and feel.
“The question a lot of people ask me is, ‘What took you so long?’” said Stenersen, an All-American at the University of North Carolina during his playing career in the mid-1980s.
The answer, Stenersen said, boils down to money and everything that money brings to a sport, including access to fields and facilities, training for coaches, players and officials and ongoing support for grassroots development and awareness.
But, the sport appears to be turning a long-awaited corner, with youth and high school clubs gaining momentum in areas including Seattle, Denver, North Texas, South Carolina, Southern California and others. Last year, Northwestern won the women’s NCAA Division I championship, a signal that the power center of the game doesn’t necessarily have an East Coast address.
Reebok jumped into the game with a leaguewide sponsorship of the National Lacrosse League, a move many who follow the game have hailed as particularly important, given that Reebok is not among the game’s traditional equipment providers.
TV exposure is increasing slowly. This year, for example, cable network CSTV will televise 30-plus college games and air a significant amount of ancillary programming, such as a weekly lacrosse show and other original programs, said Tim Pernetti, a senior vice president with the network. “We are investing as much in lacrosse as we are in any other sport,” he said. “I think it’s the next big thing.”
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Professional leagues take an active role in
connecting to the sport’s young players. |
Still, from a participation and awareness standpoint, lacrosse has a long way to go.
According to U.S. Lacrosse, about 382,000 people nationwide participated in lacrosse at some level in 2005, an increase of about 30,000, or 9 percent, from 2004; and a 51 percent increase from 2001 total participation of about 254,000.
Stenersen acknowledged that lacrosse remains “tiny” compared with mass participation sports such as baseball, basketball and soccer, all of which boast participation numbers in the multiple millions.
“I think it’s growing slow and steady, but not at quite the clip that everyone believes,” said Jerry Scott, marketing director of Lax World, a lacrosse retailer with four locations in the Mid-Atlantic and one in Denver. “When you go from two to six teams in an area, that’s great percentage-wise, but it’s not substantial numbers.”
To a large degree, lacrosse has grown in pockets via the “Pied Piper” method as Stenersen calls it, driven by enthusiasm for the game by transplanted East Coasters. That’s pretty much the case with Kris Snider, head of the Seattle chapter of U.S. Lacrosse, who was an All-American for the University of Virginia in the late ’70s. Lacrosse was being played in the Seattle area at a few high schools when Snider and his wife arrived in 1983, but the programs were small and contained to a few communities.
So Snider and others with a background in the game “locked arms and decided to push the sport,” he said. Supported by U.S. Lacrosse, their efforts started to click in the late ’90s, Snider said, and the Seattle area boys youth program has grown from about 400 participants in 2000 to 1,400 today.
“I think kids are just enthralled because it’s so different from other sports and some aspect of it touches some aspect of every kid,” said Snider, a landscape architect by trade. “It sort of has the feel of soccer, but with more scoring, and it’s so much more kinetic than baseball. Plus, it has the hitting and aggressiveness … every kid could like something about lacrosse.”
In North Texas, U.S. Lacrosse chapter president Tom Fitzsimmons, a native upstate New Yorker who played for Army in the early ’70s, has seen the sport grow from about 50 to 180 teams in the last five years, and now includes 3,600 participants from youth through adult leagues. “In our area, the availability of coaches and officials is a limiting factor,” Fitzsimmons said, “but interest in the sport is just booming.”
Growth of the game has long been a driving passion for Gary and Paul Gait, twins whose aggressive and free-wheeling play led Syracuse to three consecutive national championships from 1988-90.
These days, Paul Gait is president of deBeer Lacrosse, an equipment manufacturer; and Gary has his hands on a multitude of lacrosse projects, from being the head coach of teams in both professional leagues, to running a company backed by Denver-based Kroenke Sports called NDP, which operates a series of tournaments and programs to match high school players with college coaches and programs.
“We’re at a point where lacrosse is poised to continue to grow rapidly and on a much larger level than we have in the past,” Gary Gait said.
To increase corporate support for the game, U.S. Lacrosse brought on sports marketing firm 361˚ Sports + Event Marketing in October 2004. 361˚ recently helped sign U.S. Bank to a new affinity credit card program and is shopping for a sponsor for a new event called LaxSkillz, a version of football’s Punt, Pass and Kick competition for lacrosse that will include five events in 2006.
“There’s a huge difference between now and three to four years ago,” said Bill Schoonmaker, a 361˚ vice president who manages the U.S. Lacrosse relationship and is a former college player at Penn State. “The growth at the youth level has been huge.”
Trends in lacrosse participation
The number of athletes playing on high school lacrosse teams has nearly tripled in the past 10 years, the biggest such growth among high school sports. Similar growth has occurred at the college level, where the sport’s 54.8 percent increase in participation is second only to soccer.
Greg Abel is a writer in Baltimore.
