Winter Sports - Lacrosse
“Despite the amount of padding and protective equipment that is worn, the average footballer would run screaming for the hills if they were expected to endure the amount of physicality that there is at club level, never mind international”
I
t is true to say that, in the past, it has been the private sector schools which have been the main domain of the sport of lacrosse, but this is fading now. However, the primary school system is looking to redress this by taking the fun level of the sport - Pop Lacrosse - into their sports curriculum, which could hopefully move back into secondary schools as these youngsters grow. In the meantime, the main field version remains strong in the universities and clubs. In the female version, the game is officially a non contact sport, to a fashion, as you can still knock the ball out of the opponent’s stick, you just cannot knock your opponent over, at least not while the ref is looking, and bear in mind there are two of them! Talk to most ladies and they will tell you that the women’s game is more skillful than the men’s. This is probably both true and false in equal measures. As mentioned, the physical element is substantially toned down, the sticks themselves are more difficult to catch and throw with, and there are more rules that you have to adhere to. The men’s game is, well, for men. Despite the amount of padding and protective equipment that is worn, the average footballer would run screaming
for the hills if they were expected to endure the amount of physicality that there is at club level, never mind international. This does not mean that this game is simply brute force, the stick may make it easier to catch, but to do this with the speed and the physicality takes some doing. However, the basis of the game is the same; teams are divided into attack, midfield and defence, all have a stick of varying lengths, with a netted plastic head used to throw, catch and carry a solid rubber ball, with the eventual aim of scoring past the goalkeeper, stood in his six feet square net, protected by a nine feet radius called a crease where no other player may enter. Lacrosse dates back many hundreds of years when it was a game played by Native American tribes and originally known as stickball.
The Native American games were seen as major events, which took place over several days. Ground work for these events would have been a nightmare as they were played over huge open areas between villages without boundaries. The ‘goals’, which would have been a natural feature such as trees or rocks, were anything from 500 yards to several miles apart. Any number of players were
involved, with estimates of between 100 and 100,000 players participating in a game at any one time. The rules were very simple, the games started by the ball (originally made from wood, but later fur filled deerskin) being thrown into the air with opponents vying to catch the ball in the netted stick (deer important again here as sinews were used to fashion the net). You scored by hitting the ‘goal’ with the ball, but at no point was it to be touched by a player’s hand. Games were played for a number of
reasons - as a sport that toughened up young warriors for war, but also simply for recreation as well as religious reasons. It was not unusual for bets to be placed on the outcome of games. It was French Jesuit missionaries, working in the St. Lawrence Valley in the 1630s, who were the first Europeans to see the game and one, writing about what he had seen, first coined the name ‘lacrosse’.
A couple of hundred years later, a demonstration of lacrosse was given by the Caughnawaga Indians in Montreal. As a result of this, interest in the game began to develop in Canada, with the Montreal Lacrosse Club being founded in 1856. A decade later, rules were drawn up which included reducing the number of
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014 PC 53
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