I have seen the future of American sports, and its name is lacrosse. Football, baseball, basketball, and soccer will, sooner or later, be forced to step aside. They all have their fatal flaws anyway. Football stresses physical size, which is fine for Reggie White but not for the rest of us. Baseball, unless you’re the pitcher or the catcher, consists mostly of standing around. For basketball, you’d better be very tall. Soccer has none of these drawbacks — it’s for average-sized people who like to run — but it has the dumbest rule of any sport: no hands. Thus, it’s doomed, too.
That leaves lacrosse. It’s fast, it’s rough, it puts great emphasis on skill with your hands, and you don’t have to be big or tall to be a star. Its only problem is the field is large, often a football field, and the ball is small. This makes it hard for spectators to see when goals are scored.
Of course, if you live west of the Appalachians and south of Virginia, you’ve probably never had a chance to see a lacrosse game in the first place. Trust me, lacrosse is coming to your town. It’s growing the way soccer did in the 1980s, partly because soccer is fading in popularity. Lacrosse has something else besides the use of hands that soccer doesn’t — lots of scoring. The average soccer score is 0-0. In lacrosse, it’s 12-10.
Not that I’ve ever played lacrosse competitively (or non-competitively, for that matter). In fact, until my daughter Grace and son Freddy started playing the sport a half-dozen years ago, I’d seen only one game, and that was in college (I left the game early). Ah, but now I’ve seen dozens of games, and though I haven’t figured out all of the rules, especially in girls’ lacrosse, I consider myself a reasonably knowledgeable fan. In time, I’ll become an expert. I actually practice with my kids, tossing the ball around in the backyard. They use lacrosse sticks. I use my baseball glove.
How, you ask, can I be so sure that lacrosse is the hottest trend in sports? Number one, kids like it. I’ve conducted a survey among kids in my neighborhood, and, yes, they prefer lacrosse. I’m talking about boys and girls. My son isn’t ready to give up basketball, but he’s abandoned soccer for lacrosse. He plays year-round. My daughter suffered from soccer burnout and also dropped out. Now, she has a special scoring play designed for her called “Surge Barnes” on her school team — and she’s a defensive player, not an attacker. Her boyfriend now limits his sports activity to basketball in season and lacrosse all year. And so on.
Number two, boys like to hit each other with sticks. It’s in the genes. And lacrosse gives them the opportunity to whack away at their opponents, so long as they don’t hit them on the head, face, or back. They’re allowed to jab with their sticks as well. Naturally, this leads to some unintended consequences. Young boys often carry their lacrosse sticks around the house and poke and swat their parents and siblings. My attitude is, if this is the worst thing that happens, I can live with it.
Number three, Title IX — you know, that federal regulation that’s killing off so many boys’ sports because schools are required to equalize their athletic programs between girls’ and boys’ teams. One way to help comply with Title IX is to add girls’ lacrosse, and many, many schools are doing just that. Bad reason, good result. Again, I can live with it.
Girls’ lacrosse has its anomalies. Girls play the game differently from boys: no helmets or shoulder and arm pads, no whacking with the stick, 12 players on a side to 10 for males. The strangest rule involves “shooting space,” which bars a defender from getting between her opponent and the goal. The idea is to avoid being hit by the ball, which is hard and smaller than a baseball. This antique of a rule is bound to be repealed. Girls don’t need it anymore. They’re tough. The best girls’ teams play with the mercilessness of boys.
At least the girls’ team I see the most does. That’s the squad at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Va., coached by my next-door neighbor, Kathy Jenkins. Her players are as well conditioned as Scottie Pippen, as aggressive as Karl Malone. That’s why they’re perennially top-ranked in the nation and Kathy is regarded as the best coach of girls’ high-school lacrosse in America.
Kathy is a lacrosse professional. One of her fellow coaches, Craig Shirley, is a lacrosse zealot. He coaches the boys’ j.v. team. He’s moonlighting actually, since, full-time, he’s a Washington publicist. Craig is crusading for lacrosse to become an Olympic sport. It soon will, I’m sure. The only question in my mind is how it supplants NFL foot ball on Sunday-afternoon TV.
FRED BARNES
