Waiting for EA

Each time my friends and I sit down to watch the movie Wedding Crashers, we can’t help but feel a little bit angry at the line, “Crab cakes and football! That’s what Maryland does!” I’ve lived most of my life in the small Maryland town where that movie was filmed, a place where culture revolves not around football, but the sport of lacrosse.

In my neighborhood, every kid had at least one stick, and even if he didn’t play in a league, there was a good chance he knew how to use it well enough for a backyard toss and catch. My friends and I bought Inside Lacrosse magazines, we watched Blue Jays (Johns Hopkins) and Terrapins (University of Maryland) contests, we played pick-up games in back lots until the sun went down. We dreamed of playing for the high school team and when we did, we felt like gods.

What attracted me to the sport of lacrosse was the speed. It’s the only sport I know where a team can be down by four goals with less than a minute left to play and the game’s not over. A quick face-off and a well-executed fast break can change the momentum of a game in a matter of seconds. It’s a sport where each moment counts. There’s almost no stalling, no running the clock. Players are on the field for 60 minutes and each second is crucial.

Lacrosse is also one of the most violent games the world of sports has to offer. It’s rugby with weapons. A player ducks his head to scoop up a loose ball and he knows he’s going to catch the shoulder tackle of a sprinting behemoth defenseman. Offensive players bear the slashes and beatings of aluminum poles. Goalies stand between the pipes, wearing little protective padding, waiting for shots that can exceed 100 miles per hour.

The brutality of the game is something that continually leaves me baffled when I hear stereotypical comments describing lacrosse as a “preppie” sport. When I think of the physical violence of lacrosse, images of spoiled country club kids do not come to mind. The lacrosse players I know are built hard; they’re quick, muscular, and athletic. They can deal out heavy hits, and they can take them.

The stereotype as a sport for the affluent does, however, hold water, considering the types of universities who have found success in the game. The top Division I lacrosse schools in the country tend to be generally wealthy, upper-class institutions (Duke, Johns Hopkins, Princeton.)

The sport in itself is expensive to play. Good lacrosse shafts can sell for as much as $200, not including heads, which usually run around $80. Then there are stringing kits, shoulder pads, arm guards, gloves, and helmets. Even the cheapest equipment adds up to a sum that can exclude lower-class kids from playing the game.

The stereotype is also a result of the extremely small population of lacrosse followers and players in recent years. Although the sport is growing, there are still only two colleges west of the Mississippi that field Division I lacrosse teams, both of which are located in Colorado (Air Force, Denver). It is largely an eastern sport, and of the 58 teams in DI, several happen to be fielded by the “rich” schools. The modern form of the sport originated in these colleges and is thus often associated with them.

This is changing. In the past few years, Division III schools across the country have put together competitive lacrosse teams, soon to join the ranks of the DI giants that dominate the sport today. The number of high school programs has shot up significantly through the decade, with states as far as California making their way to the national rankings.

The sport is growing significantly each year. Attendance at NCAA games is skyrocketing. With the advent of ESPNU, games are nationally televised each week. Major League Lacrosse, where players once were required to wear advertisements on their uniforms and were paid $7000 per season, is starting to see an increased cash flow. This year, the NCAA National Championship, usually held in the lacrosse Mecca of Baltimore, will move north to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and the lacrosse fan base will inevitably expand.

But despite lacrosse’s massive growth over the past few years, it is still dwarfed on the national scale by the major sports of football, baseball, basketball and hockey. The organization that will help the game cross this obstacle will not be the NCAA; it will be EA Sports, the video game franchise.

Lacrosse is still one of the only sports that doesn’t have its own video game, mostly since its eastern popularity has not fully reached the state of California where the Electronic Arts company is located. This has been a point of frustration for many lacrosse fans, especially since the company has produced games centered on several sports even less popular in America such as rugby and cricket.

I’ve watched several of my friends become die-hard soccer fans from playing the FIFA games, and I believe that those games are one of the major factors accelerating soccer’s growth in America. It may sound silly, but the future of lacrosse rests not on the field or the television cameras, but on the joysticks.

I hope that some day lacrosse can become as popular nationwide as it is in the east. I’d love to see National Championship parties and May Madness brackets. With such an exciting sport that combines lightning speed and breakneck brutality, I don’t think lacrosse has very far to go.