A Lacrosse Life Revisited

My first Lacrosse team in the ninth grade went 0-7, but the lack of a winning moment hardly mattered because I had found my sport. Now I had played many years of soccer and a few of baseball, but both had failed to keep my interest as I ascended into High School. All of my friends chided me about soccer, calling it a sport for wimps, and as for baseball my skills permitted me no more than sunning myself in the outfield. While I have reconciled and defiantly love soccer in a very non-soccer country, America to be precise, at the moment I needed something more aggressive and, well, cool to American boys. Football was out of the question because the thought of a spiral failed to exist in my vocabulary, and an inability to stop on ice-skates kept me from hockey. What did that leave me? A sport that the schools wouldn't fund, nobody west of the Mississippi could understand, the sport of Lacrosse.

Half a decade later, not having touched a Lacrosse stick in over a year, I feel back in love with the sport that I had latched on to when no other would fit. I was watching the Colorado Mammoth professional Indoor Lacrosse team play in Denver after having been given free tickets. Right at the start I was smiling after looking around at a 20,000 seat arena nearly full, and not even for a playoff game. This brought me back to memories of empty stands at away games, and nearly empty stands at home games. The people who did go, and I am eternally indebted to these people, generally had little idea of what was going on and found it hard to stay involved. This would seem to be a major deterrent to a ninth grader in his first year of a new sport, yet my team latched on to our perennial underdog status, and we seemed to have enjoyed the game more even after a loss. Additionally, while with other sports each school had their own team, our three high schools could only produce enough people for a city team. In this way the Lacrosse players kept a much wider range of friends. By the end of the first year I loved bringing my stick to school along with the other players, all of us being asked constantly what it was we were doing.

I look out at all the people in the stands, so many wearing official Mammoth Lacrosse jerseys, and even middle aged mothers screaming like banshees when a bad foul occurred. While playing I always felt that we were disadvantaged by our small fan base, and the incredible lack of observers on the other side as well. But I preferred this sense of mystery among peers to being one of the football stars everyone watched. What I felt was that I was riding the tip of an oncoming wave, that soon Lacrosse would be big, but that I had stuck it through before that had happened. Now it has happened, now the sport is big and that is very exciting to me. I don't have a jersey and no much less about the players than a lot of the fans in the stadium. Yet by having been there when no one knew what to say, when rewards were made for inviting new players rather than tryouts, for that I feel good, that I rejected the mainstream, and now get to watch what I had hoped for come true.